Thank you very much, Ronald (Ronald Lamola, Minister of International Relations and Cooperation of South Africa) and let me say, my dear brother, what a joy is to see the G20 in Africa at long last. And we thank Brazil for its stewardship last year.
The challenges that we face are truly global.
We will not begin to tackle them unless we harness the potential of this continent, bursting with growth and opportunities and with so many young people, talented young people at its heart.
The starkest challenge we face is escalating conflict, both between and within nations, driving vicious cycles of grievance, displacement and low growth.
Your presidency, Ronald calls for solidarity, and solidarity starts by recognizing and naming the victims of war and injustice.
Innocent Ukrainians enduring bombardment night after night from Odessa to Zaphorizhya, the hostages still cruelly held underground by Hamas, 16 months old on from the trauma of October the 7th, and the Palestinian civilians driven from their homes in Gaza and the West Bank, the Sudanese refugees flee their burning villages to escape across the border to Chad, the overwhelming majority of them, women and children having endured the most unimaginable and indiscriminate violence.
As I said when I visited Chad, there can be no geopolitical stability, whilst there remains a hierarchy of conflicts, with those on this continent finding themselves at the bottom of the global pile.
And that’s why, since starting this job, I’ve made a reset with the so called Global South, a central plank of the UK Foreign Policy, and it’s why I doubled British aid for Sudan, and I prepared a conference in London to push for a political process which will end the fighting and protect civilians.
And that’s why I’ve called out the Rwandan Defence Force operations in the eastern DRC as a blatant breach of the UN Charter which risks spiralling into a regional conflict, and that’s why I will again make clear to President Kagame, that further breaches of DRC’s sovereignty will have consequences.
Because at the heart of my government’s approach to foreign policy lies the belief that regional and geopolitical stability can only be delivered through respect for international law and the principles of the UN Charter.
And as my Canadian, Australian, Japanese colleagues have said, respect for international law must underwrite a free and open Indo Pacific, just as it must underwrite the Euro Atlantic, with the security of those two regions ever more closely linked.
And as we turn to the Middle East, the ceasefire in Gaza is painfully fragile, I’m grateful that so many of us here today are working together to ensure that it holds we must continue to work together tirelessly to secure the release of the remaining hostages, to bolster the Palestinian Authority, and to boost aid into Gaza and to develop a long term plan for governance and security on the strip so that we can advance towards, a two state solution. Which remains the only long term viable pathway to peace.
And finally, in Ukraine, the only just and lasting peace will be a peace that is consistent with the UN Charter, and we want that as soon as possible.
You know, mature countries learn from their colonial failures and their wars, and Europeans have had much to learn over the generations and the centuries.
But I’m afraid to say that Russia has learned nothing.
I listened carefully to Minister Lavrov intervention just now he’s, of course, left his seat, hoping to hear some readiness to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty.
I was hoping to hear some sympathy for the innocent victims of the aggression.
I was hoping to hear some readiness to seek a durable peace.
What I heard was the logic of imperialism dressed up as a realpolitik, and I say to you all, we should not be surprised, but neither should we be fooled.
We are at a crucial juncture in this conflict, and Russia faces a test.
If Putin is serious about a lasting peace, it means finding a way forward which respects Ukraine’s sovereignty and the UN Charter which provides credible security guarantees, and which rejects Tsarist imperialism, and Britain is ready to listen.
But we expect to hear more than the Russian gentleman’s tired fabrications.
