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Strategic Export Controls

Yes, I agree with the hon. Gentleman. Indeed, I shall refer in a few moments to that point, which he has rightly raised. To return to the relationship between what has been going on in Tibet and the EU-China embargo, we all recognise that if any category of persons could be absolutely guaranteed to carry out a demonstration or protest peacefully, it is Buddhist monks. I am full of the deepest admiration and respect—I believe that hon. Members on both sides of the House share this feeling—for the Tibetan Buddhist monks who have come out to demonstrate entirely peacefully in Lhasa and elsewhere, in the past two or three weeks, in the certain knowledge that as a result they face the appalling features of the Chinese prison and torture system. I have the utmost, highest admiration for those monks and their moral courage and physical bravery. I note that some of the monks who have now disappeared—including, it has been reported, teenagers as young as 15—visited the Sera monastery in Lhasa. Hon. Members may be interested to know that two years ago I had the good fortune to go with members of the Foreign Affairs Committee to the Sera monastery. I sat on the couch next to the abbot and looked across the room to the wall facing me. There, staring down at me, was a portrait of Chairman Mao in a Buddhist monastery. That spelled out everything about the way in which the Chinese, as a matter of deliberate and sustained policy, have done all that they can to eliminate, as far as possible, Tibetan identity, including language, culture and the sense of being Tibetan in religion. That policy, coupled both with what has been going on in the rest of China—its appalling rate of capital punishment, its prison system, the one-party state and the absence of freedom of expression—and with events overseas and Chinese Government support for regimes such as those of Burma and, as the hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) has mentioned, Sudan, make an overwhelming case for the maintenance of the EU-China arms embargo.