The following article was published in "The Guardian", newspaper
of the Communist Party of Australia in its issue of Wednesday,
June12th, 2002. Contact address: 65 Campbell Street, Surry Hills.
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John Pilger: How Britain's armaments fuel war and poverty
With nuclear powers India and Pakistan on the edge of war, the role of the
Blair Government in fuelling the conflict has been critical.
by John Pilger
In the year 2000, the Government approved nearly 700 export licences For
weapons and military equipment to both countries. These had a total value of
64 million.
India, which gets the great majority of British weapons, is building under
licence Jaguar bombers that are capable of delivering nuclear weapons.
In January, as the two countries prepared for war, Tony Blair arrived in the
subcontinent on what was called a "peace mission."
In fact, as the Indian press revealed, he discussed the opposite of peace --
a 1 billion deal to sell India 60 Hawk fighter-bombers made by British
Aerospace.
"The issue of India acquiring the Hawks", reported the periodical Outlook
India, "was raised by Prime Minister Blair with Prime Minister A B Vajpayee,
Defence Minister George Fernandes said."
Three weeks later, the British High Commission in New Delhi threw a party
for a group of British arms salesmen in town for a major weapons fair called
Defexpo, whose organisers made no secret of their aim to exploit the "recent
developments taking place in the south-east Asia region" -- in other words,
the conflicts in Kashmir and Afghanistan.
So keen has the Blair Government been to exploit this opportunity of war
that a British official has the full-time assignment, in New Delhi, of
"defence supply".
He works with the Defence Export Sales Organisation (DESO) in London, an arm
of the Ministry of Defence, whose sole aim is to sell weapons to foreign
armies.
A secret list of 22 "highly valuable priority markets" targeted for British
arms sales has India and Pakistan near the top.
British missiles, tanks, artillery, howitzers, anti-aircraft guns, small
arms and ammunition are all available on buy-now-pay-later terms.
But the prize is the 60 Hawk fighter-bombers, coyly described as "trainers".
Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt was reported to have "banned"
this deal.
It has not been banned; the delivery date has been simply put back -- which
was the tactic the Blair Government used in delaying the shipment of Hawks
to Indonesia when the dictatorship in that country was attempting to
annihilate East Timor.
Arming both sides
India and Pakistan have millions of impoverished people without basic
services. According to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, the price of one
Hawk bomber is roughly the amount needed to provide 1.5 million people with
fresh water for life.
Arming both sides is, of course, as British as pith helmets. In the
horrendous war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, Britain did just that in
company with other Western countries. At least a million people were killed.
The usual hypocrisy and double standards are even more spectacular under
this government.
Soon after New Labour came to power in 1997, the then Foreign Secretary
Robin Cook announced an "ethical dimension" to foreign policy. He said that
the Government "will not issue an (arms) export license if there is a
clearly identifiable risk that the intended recipient would use the proposed
export aggressively against another country" or if there was a threat to
"regional stability".
He might have been talking about India and Pakistan, whose long-running
dispute over Kashmir is, according to Cook's successor Jack Straw,
"potentially more dangerous than the crisis in the Middle East".
>From the day it took office, veiled by Cook's "ethical" nonsense, New Labour
embraced the arms business. In his first few months as Prime Minister, Blair
approved 11 arms deals with General Suharto's genocidal regime in Indonesia
under cover of the Official Secrets Act.
He has since maintained Britain as the world's third biggest arms trader,
selling more lethal weapons in New Labour's first year than the Tories. More
than two-thirds of sales are to governments with appalling human rights
records.
Britain's biggest customer is Saudi Arabia, the most extreme Islamic regime
on earth, where apostates are beheaded. Women have no rights; it is illegal
for a woman even to drive a car.
Cherie Blair, who with Laura Bush, wife of the American President, denounced
the "brutal oppression of women" in Afghanistan by the Taliban and demanded
their emancipation, has remained silent on the medieval treatment of Saudi
women in the spiritual home of al-Qaeda. Saudi Arabia has most of the
world's oil.
Job creation myth
The results of an investigation by the National Audit Office into the 20
billion Al Yamamah (The Dove) deal between the Saudi princes and the British
arms industry, believed to be the biggest in history, were suppressed first
by the Tories and, since 1997, by Labour.
The reason is that the report almost certainly describes "commissions" paid
on the sale of Tornado fighters -- �15 million on one aircraft is said to
have been the going rate.
Under Blair, taking his lead from Margaret Thatcher's obsession with the
arms industry, sales of weapons and military equipment have become the most
heavily subsidised sector of the UK economy apart from agriculture.
This means that taxpayers underwrite loans-for-arms to dictators oppressing
their people.
The argument that the Government is "protecting jobs" is demolished by the
writing-off of billions of pounds, which could create jobs in peace-time
industries.
This was how Hawk fighter-bombers were "sold" to the Suharto dictatorship.
One of the first things Robin Cook did when New Labour came to power was to
fly out to Indonesia and shake the mass murderer's hand.
Indonesia was then crushing the life out of East Timor, using British
Aerospace's finest products: Hawk aircraft and Heckler and Koch machine
guns.
For two years, with the help of lobby journalists "briefed" by lying Foreign
Office officials, Cook was able to deny that the Hawks were being used in
East Timor -- until the Indonesians grew tired of the subterfuge and made a
fool of him by sending Hawks in menacing passes over Dili, the East Timorese
capital.
The making and selling of arms is crucial to the post-September 11 "war on
terrorism", which is not a war on terrorism at all but a justification for
the US to consolidate and extend its global supremacy.
Indeed, most Anglo-American weapons go to client regimes that promote
terrorism; Saudi Arabia, home of most of the September 11 hijackers and
tutors of the Taliban, is the prime example.
Arms sales and the development of multi-billion dollar warplanes, ships and
missile systems, have an essential place in the "global economy". They
invariably lead to an American economic "boom" or "recovery" which
influences the economies of Europe and much of the world.
In 1960, President Eisenhower called American capitalism a "military-
industrial complex" powered by arms and other military-related contracts.
Forty cents in every dollar ends up with the Pentagon which, in the
financial year 2001-02, will spend a record $400 billion on its war machine.
Not surprisingly, war ensures the industry's prosperity. Following the Gulf
War and the NATO attack on Yugoslavia, both American and British arms sales
leapt.
When the New York Stock Exchange re-opened after September 11, the stocks of
arms companies were almost alone in showing an increase in value. Raytheon,
the missile maker and contributor to New Labour, was one of them.
Middle East
Tony Blair's close links with Israel -- many of them forged by his friend,
the deal-maker Michael Levy, whom he made Lord Levy -- are described as "the
Government's tireless efforts to bring peace and stability to the Middle
East." The opposite is true.
As on the Indian sub-continent, British arms policy has actually fanned the
flames in a region in deepest crisis.
In the first 14 months of the Palestinian uprising against Israel's illegal
military occupation -- when the Palestinians' main weapon was the
slingshot -- the Blair Government approved 230 export licenses to Israel for
arms and military equipment.
The license categories these covered included large-calibre weapons,
ammunition, bombs and almost certainly vital parts for American-supplied
helicopter gunships.
These Apache gunships have been frequently on the news, firing missiles at
civilian areas.
While British weapons and parts were being shipped to the Israeli military
machine, Amnesty International investigators reported "human rights
violations and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions which, over the past
18 months, have been committed daily, hourly, even every minute by the
Israeli authorities against Palestinians".
Foreign Office mouthpieces, also known as junior ministers, routinely tell
Parliament that they have "an assurance that British equipment will not be
used in the Occupied Territories". This is clearly false.
As reporters witnessed recently, Israeli armoured personnel carriers have a
chassis made from British-supplied Centurion tanks.
Business is business, and it never stops. On September 11, at an arms fair
in London's Docklands, there was not even a respectful silence in honour of
the victims of the Twin Towers.
The Israelis had a whole pavilion; one Israeli company, Rafael, was here to
sell the Ministry of Defence the Gill-Spike Anti-tank missile, a weapon
distinguished by its history of use against civilians in Palestine and
Lebanon.
At last year's Labour Party conferencee Blair, playing the Christian
imperialist, promised "the most positive involvement" in Africa that would
attack poverty and under-development and heal "a scar on the conscience of
the world".
Salesmen of death
One of the main causes of poverty in Africa is the amount spent on arms by
regimes offered a variety of enticements by Western business and
governments.
Three months after the Prime Minister's heartfelt words, the value of
British arms sales to Africa was revealed to be a record -- four times that
of the previous year.
It was also disclosed that Blair had given his personal backing to the sale
of a British-made military air traffic control system to Tanzania, one of
the world's poorest countries.
The deal was worth 28 million to the arms firm, BAE Systems. This is just
what is needed in a country so poor that half the population have no access
to running water and children die from preventable diseases.
All over the world 24,000 people, mostly children, die from poverty every
day.
This is the true terrorism, and it is aided and abetted by politicians from
rich, privileged and powerful countries who, in the cause of profit and
feigning respectability, are salesmen of death. Their victims, and the rest
of us, deserve better.
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