----- Original Message -----
From: MichaelP <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, 9 September 1999 07:41
Subject: Arms trade menu
BBC Wednesday, September 8, 1999
Indonesia pulls out of [brit] arms fair
Indonesia has pulled out amid growing violence in East Timor
The Indonesian Government has declined an invitation from the UK's
Ministry of Defence to attend an arms fair next week.
The move follows intense pressure on the UK Government to withdraw its
invitation to the Indonesians because of the repression by militias in
East Timor.
An MoD spokesman said: "Certain things are obviously on their mind
domestically and they are obviously busy with things in East Timor."
EAST TIMOR
Earlier, the ministry had denied newspaper reports stating it had bowed to
pressure from the Foreign Office and cancelled the invitation to
Indonesian military officers.
Defence Procurement Minister Lady Symons has previously insisted Indonesia
should be allowed to attend the arms fair despite the violence in East
Timor to look at "self-defence" equipment on sale.
'TRADING THE TOOLS OF REPRESSION'
Human rights organisations have consistently attacked the UK's sale of
arms to Indonesia, claiming it breaches Labour's pledge to pursue an
ethical foreign policy.
[ image: Baroness Symons: Defended arms sales to Indonesia]
Susan Kobrin, a spokesperson for Amnesty International, said: "The
decision of the Indonesians to withdraw from the arms fair may help the
government avoid an embarrassing situation but will do very little to help
the people in East Timor.
"The decision to grant export licences lies with the government and the
Department for Trade and Industry and they need to decide whether they are
willing to trade in the tools of repression.
"The violence could end very quickly if the Indonesians chose to bring
their army under control.
"We have called for a UK moratorium on the sale and supply of military
equipment and training that could be used to inflict human rights abuses."
ROW OVER JETS
The international exhibition at Chertsey in Surrey and London Docklands is
the UK's largest arms fair.
It is being organised, on behalf of the UK arms industry, by Spearhead
Exhibitions. But the MoD routinely sends out invitations to foreign
governments.
The row over the arms fair invite grew last week when Foreign Secretary
Robin Cook admitted UK-built Hawk jets had been used for internal
repression within East Timor.
Britain has supplied more than 40 Hawks to Indonesia since the early 1980s
and Jakarta is still awaiting delivery of the majority of an order for 16
of the planes under a deal struck in 1996.
Lady Symons had insisted the UK does not supply arms to be used for
internal repression, but faced criticisms from MPs from all parties,
including Donald Anderson, the influential Labour chairman of the Foreign
Affairs Select Committee.
More than 600 companies from 50 countries will be exhibiting at the
Defence Systems and Equipment International exhibition, which opens on 14
September.
================
[This piece is about newly-dead Alan Clark, who as one of Maggie
Thatcher's ministers helped the brit interest in arms sales - Cheers
-MichaelP ]
GUARDIAN (London) Thursday September 9, 1999
by Hugo Young
Stop selling UK arms to the cruellest regimes on earth
False promises made by Jakarta belie the crassness of Britain's position
Alan Clark's most enduring contribution to politics, apart from his
ripping diaries, was as the only serving minister to express the truth
about the arms industry. His conduct over selling the tools of war to Iraq
in the late 1980s personified it. As the Scott Inquiry discovered, Clark's
words and deeds were the acme of evasion, duplicity, cynicism and outraged
innocence in the service of the national interest. In the hour of British
complicity in the hideous events in East Timor, this unvarnished realism
might be the epitaph he best deserves.
As a minister in two departments, Clark thought all arms sales were prima
facie desirable. In the case of Iraq, he pressed for restrictive
guidelines to be relaxed, and tipped the wink to Matrix-Churchill
munitions men. He taught them how to frame their licence applications for
dual-use equipment to conceal its military dimension. Being economical
with the actuality, he said, was the first duty of anyone, including a
minister, who operated in this world.
Behind these opinions, which embarrassed his colleagues and partly caused
the Scott Inquiry to be set up, lay a brutal attitude to power and money.
Every country should have any arms it could pay for. Britain was a massive
arms-maker, the second biggest global exporter. She could be proud of the
industrial and imperial history that produced this happy outcome. The job
of a British munitions worker was worth more than the life of any East
Timor dissident trying to get away from Indonesia.
The Clark philosophy was, in reality, the British philosophy, uncluttered
by paper rules and regulations which try to make the official version seem
more respectable. The premise is that this is a rough old world, in which
Britain must defend the jewel among her exports. The presumption is that
every arms sale is good, unless proved otherwise. The pre-condition is a
high degree of secrecy, in the name of commercial and diplomatic
confidence. The result is Britain's chronic entanglement, from time to
time highly visible, with some of the most corrupt and cruel regimes in
the world.
When Labour came in, it had a chance to deconstruct this philosophy, which
a fair number of its supporters detest. But there was never a chance that
this would happen. No Labour leader in recorded time has promised to wind
down the arms industry, and Mr Blair was not going to be the first to try.
Instead there has been reform at the edges. Transparency is a little
wider. The rules now debar arms from being sold to "regimes that might use
them for internal repression". The relationship to human-rights threats is
rather more explicit. Robin Cook played a positive part in constructing a
voluntary code to deter EU countries from outbidding each other in the
oppressions they were prepared to overlook to make a quick buck.
But the Indonesian case exposes a large hole in Labour's new foreign
policy; the other half of what was being asserted in Kosovo. British
intervention, a la Kosovo, will not happen: too far away, not enough
troops. The Blair doctrine of crusading humanitarianism has practical
limits. On the other hand, how can this doctrine possibly coexist with the
interventions that have already taken place, over many years, on the side
of Jakarta, to help expand Indonesian power in general and the oppression
of East Timor in particular?
These turn out to have had horrendous effects. British Hawk aircraft were
sold, and used for counter-insurgency purposes in East Timor. The precious
distinction between oppressive and non-oppressive weaponry was, in
practice, fictitious hair-splitting, of which Alan Clark would have been
proud. The promises made by Jakarta that "British defence equipment will
not be used against civilians" were cited by sales-hungry politicians (A
Goodlad, minister of state, 16 Nov 1994) whose gullibility was exceeded
only by their cynicism. British water-cannon, which can have no other use
than crowd-control, were sold in circumstances that came to embarrass even
a Tory government, when this police weaponry arrived in the hands of a
state apparatus that has no regard for the rights of its opponents.
The past cannot be undone, and the strategic economy of the British arms
industry will not be dismantled. Nor is there a decisive reason why it
should be, so long as the public accedes to the dirty world in which we
live, wants Britain to be part of it, and desires to keep most of the jobs
it brings here. But current events cry out for some selectivity and
sacrifice, from a government that uses as many high-flown words about
international morality as Mr Blair and Mr Cook have done.
Jakarta has shown itself to be a completely unreliable upholder of basic
democratic decencies. Plainly, there can be no question of licensing the
remaining Hawk aircraft for sale there. If that costs Britain money, so be
it. There should also be an absolute ban on the sale of water cannon,
small arms, riot control equipment, and armoured personnel vehicles, since
they are equally usable, and used, for internal policing as external
defence. Likewise, British military training, having conclusively failed
to inculcate the values of Sandhurst into the sinister Indonesian military
elite, should be withdrawn.
More widely, the presumptions should change. With countries like
Indonesia, where there is no confidence in democratic liberty, arms sales
should be the exception not the rule, and be licensed only when a
legitimate defence case has been made. At present the onus is the other
way. The selling government, moreover, should be far more concerned to
monitor end-use than Britain has ever been prepared to be: it was left to
journalists and other targets to prove the Hawks' presence over East
Timor. Once the sales are made, Whitehall loses interest in what happens
next.
These are modest suggestions, rendered even more so by the small part
Indonesia actually plays in the total pattern of British exports. In a
scholarly paper for Saferworld, Malcolm Chalmers showed that Indonesia
accounted for 0.3% of British exports, no more than 20% of which, over the
decade, were defence exports. The involvement has become fatally
conspicuous, and the political damage done by it echoes the long-term
folly of selling tanks to the Shah of Iran and warships to the Argentine
junta. It puts us on the wrong side of an international scandal condemned
by the UN ever since Indonesia seized East Timor in 1975. But the economic
stake at issue could, in the scheme of things, hardly be more trivial.
To address it, however, is to challenge the philosophy that made
GEC-Marconi rich, and Alan Clark famous for his candour. Britain is asked
a very particular question, far from the hot air of grand interventionism.
The new moralists must not be allowed to bury it in evasive complications.
=================================
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