fullspate

The arms business

While some worry about feeding the Thirld World, others are making big bucks selling Thirld World countries arms so they can kill each other. The major culprit: Britain.

Prologue
Recently, a very young man who pleaded guilty to drug dealing walked from a court in England with no more than a community service order (a period of compulsory unpaid work in the community instead of a prison sentence). This caused an outcry. Local people, including the mayor, were shown on TV angrily condemning the sentence. The mayor, in particular, argued that this man had been dealing in death and ought therefore to have been locked up in prison.

It was a huge exaggeration say that he had been dealing in death because no one had actually died. People may have been ripped off buying little packets of white powder; they will have got high and then felt crap afterwards, but they didn’t die.

At the time I saw these panic-filled reports on TV I happened to be reading a book about the arms trade, and what struck me was the contrast between the amount of airtime given to the condemnation of drug dealing and the total silence about the business of selling arms to groups planning to shoot people. I cannot remember the last time I saw anything on TV about the arms trade, and yet it is the sober men in smart suits selling millions of pounds worth of arms to unscrupulous Third World dictators who are the real dealers in death.

War is very BIG business. As far as arms sales to the Thirld World are concened some of the biggest businessmen are British. Because this is such a sensitive area their actions are controled by the government. The government would like us to believe that it’s priorities are peace and an end to poverty. When the Labour Party came to power in 1997 their manifesto included the promise that

“With a new Labour government Britain will be an advocate of human rights and democracy the world over… It wants Britain to be respected for the integrity with which it conducts its foreign relations.”

After they were elected, the party published another document referring specifically to Africa, describing it as “a scar on the conscience of the world”, and adding that if only the international community had the political will they could sort the situation out and bring peace and prosperity to the region.

These are fine and noble sentiments. But what of the reality? One of the reasons many of the poorest countries in the world are in such a mess is war. Now, you can’t have a war without arms, and since the poorest countries can’t make these themselves, they must be imported. From where, though? Recently the biggest supplier of arms to African countries (and to the Thirld World generally) has been the UK. Between 1992 and 2002 the UK made 422 million pounds selling arms to Africa, compared to the 66 million made by the US.

One of the most bloody scenes of conflict in Africa is the Congo. With a wealth of natural resouces it could be a very rich country if so many different groups weren't fighting for control of the mines. Between 1997 and 2004 some 3.5 million people died in the fighting and 2.25 million more were driven from their homes. 7 different countries are involved in the fighting, including the notoriously ruthless regime of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, each of them aiming for the lion’s share of the Congo’s mineral resources.

The Foreign Office minister in the UK said in parliament that “there could be no military solution to the conflict in the Congo," and he assured everyone that Britain was working for peace. No mention was made of the export licences given by the government to companies selling arms to some of the countries involved in the conflict.

Another example: Libya. Colonel Gaddafi has been in power there for over 30 years. His human rights record is appalling (assassination of political opponents, torture and the long-term detention of suspects without trial, etc). Libyans bombed a German disco and blew up one airliner flying over Scotland killing 170 people and another flying over Niger, and they supported a bombing campaign in Northern Ireland as retaliation when Britain refused to hand over opponents of Gadaffi who had sought asylum in Britain. The international response was to impose a ban on arms sales to the country and much later in 2002 George W. Bush announced that Libya was one of the six countries making up the “axis of evil”.

However, Britain was the country most keen to get the UN and EU to lift the ban on arms sales. By getting Gadaffi to agree to a number of minor concessions (none of which concerned respect for human rights), the British succeeded, and they set about making more money selling arms to the dictator.

One crazy aspect of the way the British sell arms concerns the system of Export Credit Guarantees (ECGs). Selling arms to countries like Zimbabwe and Libya is a risky business. Robert Mugabe and Colonel Gadaffi are not the most trustworthy people to strike a deal with. Under the ECG system, if a foreign country fails to pay, the British government will give the money to the export company and add the sum to the foreign debt of Zimbabwe, Libya or whichever country it happens to be. This system worked perfectly for Saddam Hussein. In the 1980’s he bought 652 million pounds worth of arms from the British, he defaulted on the payments, the companies were reimbursed by the UK government, and in the ensuing wars British troops were shot at by weapons the British had paid for.

Britain may be the world-leader in arms sales to the developing world but the country that spends the most on defence is the US. The figures are unbelievably huge. Between 1945 and 2005 the US spent 19 trillion dollars on that they call “defense”. That’s 19 million, million. And that works out at an average of 867 million dollars a day. Compare that to the combined defence budgets of the 6 countries Bush referred to as the axis of evil (Iran, Iraq, N. Korea, Cuba, Libya and Syria). The US spends more in 2 weeks than they do altogether in a whole year. If they clubbed together they couldn’t even pay for half an aircraft carrier (retail price: 21.3 billion dollars) and the US had five of them in the Gulf in 2003.

It is hard not to draw the conclusion that the prospects for peace are very bleak indeed. Many in the British government would doubtless agree that ideally the world should be a place of peace, but they also know that the country has a huge arms industry (and industries are becoming increasingly rare in the UK as they are so quickly disappearing to China), it has its representatives close to the Prime Minister, lots of jobs are involved, and, more importantly, there is so much money to be made. So the government adopts what could be called a “twin-track” approach: calling for peace and selling arms at the same time.

Perhaps what seems like hypocrisy to some is just plain common sense: you send your diplomats out to persuade people to stop fighting; it’s obviously futile – they are determined to go on shooting each other – it you don’t give them the guns, they will get them elsewhere, so you do what’s best for business and give them a special offer on your ammunition; if the diplomats organise enough press conferences, all the media attention will be on the peace talks. In the end, everyone’s happy: you did what you could for peace, and you made a bob or two on the guns. A few more people are dead, and it is your bullets and shells that killed them, but they were bound to die anyway, and who’s paying attention to these little wars in places hardly anyone knows about?

Footnote 1.
Wars like the one in the Congo are particularly nasty because they involve child soldiers. To recruit new soldiers, thousands of children have been captured in raids on rural villages and they have been forced to fight. What is shocking here is not that some of them end up getting shot, but that all of them are forced to undergo a horrific process to persuade them to kill - a process that leaves them psychologically scarred for life. Children have a natural inclination to play games in which they pretend to kill each other, but they don't have a natural inclination to actually kill. Only in extremely disturbing circumstances can you force them to kill.

Footnote 2.
Although on the news it often seems as if the biggest threat to world peace is weapons of mass destruction, this is actually a little misleading. Since the end of World War II the vast majority of people who have lost their lives in the numerous battles around the world have been killed by small arms (handguns and rifles). Between 1995 and 2005 around 2 million people lost their lives in this way, and it is estimated that over the same period guns were handed over to some 300,000 soldiers aged under 18.