Thursday, 3 January 2019
If you export armaments. Don't complain about importing refugees!
Following Home Secretary publicly casting doubts on whether migrants were "genuine" asylum seekers, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn warned the government to treat refugees crossing the English channel in a "humanitarian" way, reminding us that the refugees are "the product of wars, they are the product of human rights abuses,they are the product of environmental disasters.
Lets not forget the UK nearly doubled the value of arms sales to countries on the government’s list of human rights abusers in the past year, these arms sales don’t just provide dictatorships and human rights abusers with the means to kill, they also give them a huge degree of political support.
Migrants are escaping countries where our Government is complicit in dropping bombs, selling arms, supporting dictators or otherwise contributing to instability and repression. If we're serious about supporting refugees, we need to be serious about ending the wars and policies that create them. We need to take responsibility for our part in causing the tremendous problems driving people from their homes, and the continuous flow of arms from the UK to the Middle East and North Africa that keeps on fuelling the chaos in this region.
The majority of people arriving in the UK come from the war-torn countries of Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, where European and broader western interventions and policies, including the arms trade, have added to violence and chaos. Arms exports to the Middle East and North Africa in the last decade, are fuelling war (Yemen, Syria), armed conflicts (Iraq, Turkey, Libya) and human rights violations (Egypt, Saudi Arabia),maaassive increase in weapons to Israel to keep ethnic cleansing the Palestinian population and murder their protestors.The UK Government is quietly fuelling conflict and exacerbating humanitarian crises potentially in breach of both domestic and international laws on the sales of arms.These laws prohibit arms deals where there is a clear risk that they might be used to commit war crimes or human rights abuses.So many rogue regimes snd militia armed to the teeth by UK arms companies. Then we have the cheek to complain when the victims of these horrors try and escae the hell thesse weapons hep bring about.
We need to change course and put the lives and fundamental rights of refugees first.Reducing conflict and its crushing human consequences would be a good step forward and putting more energy into resolving conflicts than is currently being poured into fighting them with bombs that fuel and escalate the problems. We also need a new arms policy that curbs shipments to human rights abusers and war zones — not through lip service, but by stopping sales completely, including the establishment of an embargo on arms sales to the Middle East and North Africa. Heartless Sajid Javid the son of a refugee needs reminding that his Governments policies are helping create instability across the globe, and simply put if you keep bombing refugees countries, they will keep arriving on our shores, he and his Tory chums would do well if they stopped pouring gas on the fires.
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The world is awash with arms, reversing gun laws in the US will never happen, neither will the arms manufacturing nations of the world ever cease to produce more weapons. It is a sad fact that if the UK were to stop tomorrow, someone else will step in and fill the void just take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_industry it is appalling.
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