Page 2 of 2 Curbing the global arms
bazaar By Alan Boyd
Pakistan
- the US, France, Germany, the Netherlands and
Russia - as well as Israel, Singapore, South
Africa, Italy, South Korea and Poland.
About 40% of Asia's $8 billion worth of
weapons came from the US in 2005, with Russia
supplying 24%, France 17%, Britain 7% and China
3%. In the Middle East, which got $12 billion of
arms in
the
same year, the US supplied 46%, Britain 27%,
France 11%, Russia 4% and China 0.8%.
India became one of the first suppliers to
break openly with global arms controls when it
scrapped a blacklist of "sensitive" states in
2002. Its manufacturers have since started
exporting to Myanmar and Sudan, which are both
under UN and European Union arms embargoes.
However, it is not only unscrupulous Third
World countries that are adding to the stockpile
of 640 million weapons. Nearly half of all weapons
sold to developing countries come from the US,
compared with 15% for Russia and 13% for Britain.
A study by the World Policy Institute
found that the United States had transferred
weaponry to 18 of the 25 countries involved in an
ongoing war, while more than half of the buyers
were defined as undemocratic by the US State
Department's annual Human Rights Report.
Washington usually justifies the sales as
part of its "war on terrorism", though many
suspect it has a deeper goal of checking the
expanding military power of China.
Significantly, the Pentagon is selling the
F-16 fighter jet - a weapon that is regarded as
having a strategic role in arsenals and is usually
made available only to close allies - to both
Pakistan and its bitter rival India.
"F-16s with advanced medium-range
air-to-air missiles are not for fighting al-Qaeda.
They are for fighting India," Wade Bouse, research
director at the Arms Control Association, said
after the Pakistani deal went through. "We are
creating our own market by selling to both sides
of regional conflicts."
Nonetheless, the
US is likely to continue blocking arms-control
initiatives as long as the anti-terrorism campaign
and containment of China form the basis of its
foreign-policy strategy.
There is also a
domestic agenda at play: Americans own 220 million
guns, nearly enough for every man, woman and child
in the country and one-third of all small arms in
circulation. Political leaders are unwilling to
support controls that might undermine electoral
support.
The UN treaty seeks to plug
loopholes that allow suppliers to circumvent
shipment rules by simply changing a product's
specifications or sending it from an offshore
distributor.
Selling weapons as
unassembled kits or in a piecemeal fashion is
legal, while manufacturers often supply
blacklisted countries by allowing others to
assemble them under license. They are marked as
originating from the country of the assembler.
Legal frameworks have not kept pace with
technical advances in weaponry, with essentials
such as engines and electronics often not
appearing on exporters' lists of sensitive
equipment that is banned from sale.
In the
study Arms Without Borders, it was reported
that China was able to skirt a European and North
American ban on the supply of military helicopters
because the prohibition only referred to the
shipment of "whole" units. Now known as the Z-10,
the helicopter was manufactured from components
built at separate plants in the US, Britain and
Canada.
Tellingly, only a third of the
weapons in circulation are being used by armed
services or law-enforcement agencies in the
countries that buy them.
As many as 6.4
million weapons are in the hands of militants,
including terrorists, with some put to use in the
two dozen conflicts under way throughout the
world, including ethnic strife in Sri Lanka, the
Indonesian archipelago and Myanmar, and
insurgencies in the Philippines and southern
Thailand.
The main victims are civilians:
Oxfam, a British NGO, has estimated that at least
300,000 people a year are killed by portable
weapons such as handguns, rifles, grenades and
bombs. "We are at a point in history where
many of these sales are not essential for the
self-defense of these countries and the arms being
sold continue to fuel conflicts and tensions in
unstable areas," Daryl G Kimball, executive
director of the Arms Control Association in
Washington, said in a 2006 report.
"It
doesn't make much sense over the long term."
Alan Boyd, now based in Sydney,
has reported on Asia for more than two decades.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd.
All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
