Light in the
Dark Tunnel of the Arms Trade
By JONATHAN
POWER
March 10, 1999
LONDON- Arms deals gone wrong are leaving quite a trail.
The murder of Swedish prime minister, Olof Palme? The murder
of Andre Cools, the socialist politician in Belgium, whose
party colleague Willy Claes had to resign as
secretary-general of NATO, caught up in the investigation
and questions that followed? A British journalist found
hanging in a hotel room in Chile, eight years ago? And now
the long and tortuous saga of Jonathan Aitken, the former
British minister of state for defense procurement. "If there
is a more serious case of corruption in post-war British
politics we would be interested to know about it",
editorialised the Guardian last week, the paper which
exposed the million dollar racket.
All these, bar the last, have serious question marks.
Nothing has ever been proved in court. In Palme's case we
only have the circumstantial evidence that he was the front
man for a controversial deal between the Swedish arms
manufacturer, Bofors, and India. We certainly know that huge
bribes were paid to the Indians and it could be that
competitors or, more likely, their agents, wanted Bofors'
trump card, Palme, the friend of the Indian prime minister
Rajiv Gandhi, out of the way. In Belgium, thanks to inept
and slow-footed police work, all the leads seem to have
dried up. And with the case of the British investigative
journalist, Jonathan Moyle, we only have the verdict of a
British inquest which concluded he was "unlawfully killed"
and a book that marshals evidence that accuses the head of
public relations, the late Raul Montecinos, at Cardoen, a
Chilean firm that was planning to convert American civilian
helicopters into gunships for sale to Iraq. A new Chilean
police investigation into the case continues.
Maybe all that two paragraphs like the above do is to
give one or two readers, perhaps even the odd senior
government official, sweaty palms for a moment and then the
defenses come into play: Arms sales are an unfortunate
necessity, a currency of diplomacy, a means of ensuring
local balances of power, of lowering unit production costs
and unemployment in the defense sector and so on. For a
short while, in 1991-92, it looked as if policy makers had
momentarily seen through this. Editorial pages in papers
across America, Britain, France and even Russia criticized
the role that their governments had played in taming Saddam
Hussein. Politicians and legislatures around the world spoke
out against the dangers of commercially-driven, often
secretive, arms sales. Today much of this is forgotten.
Attention has been tightly focussed on Iraq's attempt to
build weapons of mass destruction. Little is said about the
vast array of tanks, planes, howitzers, missiles,
anti-aircraft weapons and naval ships that enabled Saddam to
mount his invasion of Kuwait in the first place. That these
all came from deals with the West and Russia, barely a
word.
Arms sales, mainly from the West, have continued to grow
over the last five years, despite the end of the Cold War.
The U.S. and the European Union account for 80% of global
sales.
"If we don't sell (fill in with the weapon) to (fill in
with the country) someone else will." This has been the
justification that supposedly trumps all the arguments
against. What has not been considered until very recently is
a third way--the U.S. and Europe barring their companies
from arms sales and using their considerable political and
economic clout to encourage other allies to follow suit.
There are some hopeful signs. Last week the treaty
banning land mines came into effect. Even though, after much
prevarication, the U.S. has decided not to join because, it
argues, it still needs land-mines on the South-North Korean
border--no one doubts that peer pressure from its Western
allies, all signatories, will bring America into the fold
sooner rather than later. Even now the U.S. is committed to
terminating use and sales elsewhere.
The next big step is to give life to the codes of conduct
on arms sales that are being actively pushed by legislators
on both sides of the Atlantic. The international effort has
been orchestrated by Oscar Arias, the former Costa Rican
president who won the Nobel peace prize for negociating an
end to the Nicaraguan civil war. He never fails to point out
that 18 of the world's poorest countries spend more on their
militaries than on education and health combined.
In June 1977, the U.S. House of Representatives, despite
persistent opposition from the White House, voted approval
of a code. Although less stringent than its early drafts, it
is an important first step, requiring that would-be buyers
satisfy certain standards on democracy, human rights and
non-aggression. (According to the lobby group, The
Demilitarization of Democracy, 85% of U.S. transfers during
1990-95 went to states that would not have met such
criteria.)
In the European Union a similar effort has made more
progress. Last May foreign ministers of the European Union
agreed in principle to a code of conduct, although,
inevitably, it was a watered down version of what Nordic
members had proposed.
Slowly, much too slowly, notions of responsibility and
restraint are percolating into the orifices of Western
decision makers. But the arms sales industry is used to
playing hard ball and its rogue elements will stop at
nothing to get their way. Corruption, even an occasional
murder, are tools of the trade. Their day to day lobbying
powers are formidable. No wonder that governments have shown
an enormous capacity for fudging arms limiting declarations
made in the past, and, doubtless, they will continue to
succumb to these formidable pressures. The fight to control
arms sales has barely begun.
Copyright © 1999 By JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and e-mail:
JonatPower@aol.com
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