The testimony of the former Foreign Office policy adviser Mark Smith confirms exactly what the Campaign Against Arms Trade has been arguing for decades – the UK’s arms-export control system is rotten to its core (I saw illegality and complicity with war crimes. That’s why I quit the UK Foreign Office, 9 February). When we successfully took the government to court to stop arming Saudi Arabia, the key legal and moral questions were essentially the same. How could the UK government continue supplying arms in the face of overwhelming evidence of the most horrific crimes being committed against civilians?
What Smith’s evidence shows is that the only way for the Foreign Office to keep doing this is to bully civil servants and diplomats into changing their reports, warning them not to leave any written evidence, or even asking them to “delete correspondence”. There has been a systematic effort to manipulate and suppress the truth.
Sadly, what we see is not a “broken” export-licensing system but one working exactly as intended – as Smith says, it serves “to create a facade of legitimacy, while allowing the most egregious crimes against humanity to take place”.
Thousands of campaigners across the UK have been vindicated, but it’s too late for tens of thousands of Palestinian and Yemeni people, who have been murdered with weapons and components exported from the UK. This has to be a wake-up call and lead to systemic change in our arms-export licensing system.
Dr Sam Perlo-Freeman
Research coordinator, Campaign Against Arms Trade
• Mark Smith’s brave and principled stand shows how compromised and weak British foreign policy has become. In a post-Brexit Trump world, our only “principles” appear to be to perform as a slavish support act to whatever the US government deems to be in its interest.
Our erstwhile EU partners must despair, while a “transactional” US president fantasises about golf courses on Gaza’s ruins and graves. The callow attempts of politicians and civil servants to circumvent the clear prescriptions of international law and morality deserve general condemnation. We need to call out this complicity with genocide.
Paul Bennett
London
• As a concerned citizen who worked in the Foreign Office many years ago, I wish to congratulate Mark Smith for his honesty and courage in resigning on moral issues. I have worked abroad for most of my adult life, including in Lebanon, and am greatly concerned by, and identify with, the Palestinian cause.
He rightly calls the war against Palestinians genocide, and clearly shows the complicity of the British government. I second his call for other civil servants in the Foreign Office to press the government to end this indefensible policy.
Helen Jones
Bristol
• Mark Smith has learned that the UK government doesn’t care about Palestinians, or the war crimes committed against them. What the government does care about is money. The UK makes a nice profit from selling arms to Israel. Additionally, by going along with the genocide in Gaza, it can maintain good relations with its top trading partner, the US. The government doesn’t care about fairness, justice or honesty. Mr Smith’s problem is that he has a conscience.
Laura Harling
El Dorado Hills, California, US
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