Alicia Kearns – 2023 Speech on Sudan
The speech made by Alicia Kearns, the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, in the House of Commons on 24 April 2023.
I echo the thanks that have been expressed to the staff from the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence who evacuated our diplomats and their families.
The central tenet of the contract between British nationals and their Government, or indeed the nation state, is trust, and at this point trust is being stretched: trust that we will evacuate those people and convey them to a place of safety when they are in need. I recognise the complexity and risk, I recognise that we have thousands of nationals in Sudan while others have just hundreds, and I recognise there is reportedly a military reconnaissance team on the ground—perhaps the Minister can confirm that—but I urge my right hon. Friend, who is very honourable, to get our people home, because that is what the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence train our people to do.
If, however, we are following the United States policy of non-evacuation or limited evacuation, we must have the moral courage to tell our British nationals that that is the case, because they are running out of food, water, electricity and internet signal, and some are killing their pets because they know that they can no longer feed them. We have a duty to empower them with the information that they need in order to make the right decisions for themselves and their families, but I urge the Minister to accept that time is running out and we need to do the evacuation now.
Mr Mitchell
I thank the Chair of the Select Committee for her comments, and I am grateful to her for thanking the crisis centre, which is working night and day. I can assure her that while the United States made it clear that it was taking its diplomats out in the early operation that both it and we conducted, it has also made it clear that, as things stand, it is not planning to take any of its citizens out. We have not made that clear. Indeed, we made it clear that we are working at all levels to try to ensure that we can do so. We are looking at every single conceivable option, and we will—as my hon. Friend has suggested—do everything we possibly can to help in every way we can.
