A ‘rebel’ fighter opposed to the Gaddafi regime during fighting near the town of Bin-Jawad, eastern Libya, Tuesday, 8 March 2011. Photo: AP Photo/Hussein Malla/flickr CC.
Arms anyone?
Ken Veitch highlights the ‘doublespeak’ of our politicians
Successive British governments, including our present one, have happily traded weapons – euphemistically described as ‘defence equipment’ – to almost anyone who will buy them. We are in the world’s top five countries in the value of the weapons we sell overseas.
As violence flared in Libya, prime minister David Cameron was touring Middle East countries with a team of arms salesmen. Many countries in that volatile and impoverished area buy weapons from Britain. Our coalition government recently sold the tear gas and crowd control ammunition being used by the Gaddafi regime. Only last year fifty British arms producers attended an arms fair in Libya. Saudi Arabia, a serious abuser of human rights, and involved in allegations of bribery by BAE, Britain’s principal arms company, is our main Middle East customer. Israeli jets that bombed civilian targets in Gaza contained components made in Britain.
Despite the global recession, arms sales in 2009 totalled £247billion, a £9billion increase on arms sales in 2008. Campaign Against Arms Trade estimates that there are subsidies, from taxes, roughly equivalent to £9,000 for every arms manufacturing job in Britain. Six of the world’s top ten main arms dealers are based in the US, and the world trade in weaponry has increased in real terms by fifty-nine per cent since 2002.
The coalition government, while severely cutting public services at home, is intent on selling more weapons abroad. In this trading of violence we are wasting the skills of some excellent scientists and technicans. In a bizarre piece of doublespeak our foreign secretary William Hague boasts of plans to boost arms sales ‘consistent with human rights and poverty reduction’. The fact is that Britain will continue to supply human rights violators and underdeveloped countries, to the delight of the arms companies and their shareholders. The arms fairs are elegant events – smart suits and wine; the language is sanitised, with no mention of dismemberment, incineration, or innocent civilian casualties.
The Foreign Office, in a letter I have before me, claims that arms exports are not allowed ‘where the weapons may be used for internal repression, to provoke or prolong armed conflicts, or to aggravate existing tensions or conflict in the country of final destination’. The news reports belie this claim. Of twenty-one states the Foreign Office defines as ‘major countries of concern’ we are selling weapons to eighteen of them. The previous Conservative govern-ment covertly sold arms to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Prior to the 2010 election, the Liberal Democrats strenuously opposed the sale of arms to human rights abusers. Vince Cable inveighed then against a huge deal to sell fighter planes to India: today, he is in the cabinet as business secretary and applauds the sale.
The prime minister, seemingly embarrassed to be trading arms to authoritarian regimes during the current struggles for democracy in North Africa and the Middle East, would have us believe ‘arms sales are a fact of life’. The truth is that arms sales are a fact of death.
Friends concerned about the arms trade may consider contacting their MP or CAAT.
