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Darfur Crisis

I did not hear the whole of that comment. The official Opposition have had a lot of experience recently. On the permanence of the camps, we might find—it has certainly been the case in the camps around Khartoum—that some people choose to stay where they are living. That will have to be worked through. When I spoke to people in the camps in Khartoum a couple of years ago it was clear that the younger generation did not fancy going back—they had been there for a long time because of the length of the north-south conflict and it was the only life they knew—whereas members of the older generation were keen to return to the homes that they had lost. On arms imports, the hon. Member for Edinburgh, West is right. That is why we want an arms embargo. My final point brings us back to where the hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield started, and to the powerful points made by the hon. Member for Buckingham and others. We should reflect on Kosovo, Iraq, Pol Pot and Rwanda. We should ask where the international community was when 200,000 or 300,000 people were shot in the head and dumped in the desert. Rwanda sticks in our minds. I do not know whether other Members have seen the film ““Shooting Dogs””. I watched it and I wept. The most painful part of that film—an excruciatingly painful and raw piece of film making—was a scene at the end in which a we saw a hapless spokesperson from the United States Administration of the time struggling not to use the word ““genocide””. That really brought into stark relief the point made by the hon. Member for Buckingham. In the end, we asked the international commission of inquiry to go and do its work on behalf of the United Nations, and it reported on what it found. Whether we describe that as genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes, what matters is whether we are prepared to do anything about it. What has been at the heart of our debate today is how, as an international community, we have struggled to turn the fine desires that we expressed in words and resolutions at the millennium review summit into doing something to prevent such things from happening to people. That is the biggest challenge that the world faces so far as peace and security are concerned. We have an institution whose job it is to do it, but if it cannot reach agreement and somebody exercises a veto, nothing happens. On the other hand, when countries decide to take unilateral action, others tut and say that that should not happen. Such action should have legitimacy only if it is taken by the international community through the institutions that we have created. We have been discussing what happens when crises, suffering and pain fall between the cracks of the system that we have created. I come back to the point that I made at the end of my opening remarks. In the end it is down to two things: have we the will to do anything about it, and are people prepared to contribute—to play their part? I say that not in the sense of trying to pat the British Government on the back; that would be wholly inappropriate, although we have tried hard to do our bit. Do we all need to do more? Yes, we do, because the fact that the suffering in Darfur continues is to the shame of every one of us. Question put and agreed to. Adjourned accordingly at sixteen minutes past Five o’clock.