Deputy Speaker, when former President Nelson Mandela announced that human rights would be the light that guides our foreign affairs, we made a clear break with our foreign policy past. To give effect to the principle that human rights should be the foundation of our foreign policy, we passed a law regulating the sale of conventional arms.
In the preamble to that law, we say that our country is a responsible member of the international community and will not trade in conventional arms with states engaged in repression, aggression and terrorism. And yet it now emerges that we are dealing with some of the most repressive regimes in the world.
We sold conventional arms to Libya, Syria and Venezuela. We are attempting to sell conventional arms to Syria and Zimbabwe. We also demonstrated military support equipment in North Korea. In the end we did this, not because there is a crisis in our conventional arms control regime - and there is a crisis - but because this government has never found a dictator it doesn't like. That is why we need an urgent debate on the crisis in the National Conventional Arms Control Committee and its implications for South Africa. Thank you. [Applause.]