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by Kath Noble
(April 30, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Funny things seem to happen in the international media. The BBC recently reported that a British NGO called Saferworld was deeply worried about the Government's purchase of 10,000 missiles from Slovakia. The Sri Lankan Army sometimes uses its weapons indiscriminately and civilians are occasionally caught up in the violence, it said.
And the European Union has agreed a code of conduct that prohibits exports under such circumstances. Saferworld was calling on the Slovakian government to put a stop to the sale, according to the BBC. Except that it wasn’t! The NGO immediately issued a denial. It claimed to have been misinterpreted and misrepresented by the BBC. And then things got even stranger. The BBC rewrote the story on its website without reference to this controversy saying that the same concern had been expressed by another British group called the Campaign Against the Arms Trade.
t looks like fake journalism to me. The BBC presented the original article as if the issue had been raised by Saferworld. The headline read, 'Attack on arms sale to Sri Lanka'. 'An arms trade monitoring group has criticised the sale of 10,000 missiles by Slovakia,' the text began. But this obviously can’t have been the case. Saferworld was presumably approached and asked a number of leading questions in order to provide the substance for a story that had already been decided upon by somebody else. We can only guess who and why. And when it complained, it was simply replaced by a more pliable organisation. That is one who would agree with the argument being put forward by the BBC. The story stayed the same. And the Campaign Against the Arms Trade was drafted in as if it too had alerted the world to a serious problem. The piece started, ‘An arms trade campaigning group has criticised the sale of 10,000 missiles by Slovakia.’ The BBC essentially made up its own news that day.
The joke is a bit more subtle than that though. The BBC ought to pay more attention to its selection of experts. Saferworld works to prevent irresponsible arms exports, so its concerns over this specific case might be considered relevant, subject to its awareness of the current situation in Sri Lanka. It presses for controls to ensure that weapons sales don’t contribute to the ability of undemocratic regimes to suppress their people or to engage in acts of aggression abroad, and it argues against arms purchases by countries that might better use the money for development work. It also encourages monitoring to ensure that weapons don't go astray and end up with criminal groups. The Campaign Against the Arms Trade is rather different. It exists solely to push for an end to arms exports, and it could probably be relied upon to oppose all weapons sales to any country under whatever circumstances. Sri Lanka and the Government's 10,000 missiles from Slovakia were more or less immaterial here. The BBC must have known this very well but it didn’t say anything about the background or objectives of the organisation in its broadcast. I must admit to having some sympathy for this NGO. The arms trade is a dirty business that really ought to be stopped at once. Proliferation of weapons makes it easy for rebel groups to wage war against their governments, while states building up their defence capabilities can exacerbate tensions between neighbours and actually push
them towards confrontation. Better technology often prolongs conflicts and usually makes them more deadly. And hundreds of thousands of people die every year as a direct result of war, while millions more are seriously affected in other ways. It's awful. Worse, it's built on bribery. Leaders frequently buy arms not because they really need them, but in order to pocket the commissions on offer with every deal. National budgets are diverted from essential expenditure on social services, useful work to develop infrastructure and valuable investment in productive capacity for the sake of a few weapons companies and their mega profits. The British government is at the heart of the problem. Britain earns around $10 billion per year from the arms trade, and it is the second biggest exporter of weapons after the United States.
Its companies make impressive profits, yet the industry is also subsidised annually to the tune of more than $1 billion. The British government has for many years had a special department staffed by some 500 civil servants purely for the purpose of promoting weapons sales abroad, which is considerably more effort than it puts into supporting other equally important sectors of the economy, and this office has always been led by somebody on secondment from a British manufacturer. Ministers and officials often find their way onto the director boards of the major arms companies after their retirement from public office, as do senior figures from the armed forces. The British government is completely entangled with its weapons exporters. Regulation hasn't worked.
First, the British government has encouraged arms sales to just about everybody. The Zimbabwe regime was still buying military equipment from British companies while it was waging war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. China received around a billion dollars worth of British military technology over ten years in which it was the subject of a European Union embargo. And Britain was pushing exports to both India and Pakistan while they were posturing over Kashmir. The Indonesian government has been an excellent client of British industry throughout its wars in East Timor, West Papua and Aceh. And Israel has used British military material in its West Bank operations and probably also during the invasion of Lebanon. Saudi Arabia is the best buyer of all despite being a completely autocratic and unstable regime in a sensitive region. And Britain sends military components and technology to countries known to have far fewer controls in place, such as Russia and Turkey.
The Channel Islands and a number of other territories without armies have also been the recipients of British weapons. And Britain hasn’t even investigated claims that its brokers have arranged arms for Sudanese forces in Darfur and for rebel groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The British government helped one of its companies to break a United Nations embargo and export military technology to Saddam Hussein in the run up to the first Gulf War. Talk about liberal! Secondly, bribery has been actively supported by the British government. BAE Systems has an appaling reputation. Britain's largest arms exporter is dogged by allegations of corruption just about everywhere it operates from Africa to Latin America and the Middle East to Europe. In the 1980s, the Saudi regime bought an awful lot of combat aircraft, military helicopters and equipment for air bases, only to replace them not so many years later. Then the South African government was persuaded into buying a surprising number of fighter jets at twice the price of the offer preferred on technical grounds by their Air Force in the 1990s. And in the 2000s, Tanzania suddenly found itself with an overpriced and unnecessarily advanced radar system for military aircraft. BAE Systems doesn't seem to be able to shake off its bad name, and the evidence against it is mounting up. The Serious Fraud Office started looking into all these cases, plus similar incidents in Chile, Qatar, Romania and the Czech Republic, but the main investigation was abandoned on the instructions of the Prime Minister. The British government doesn't seem to want to clean up its act. The Campaign Against the Arms Trade has got a point. Nobody should expect anything good to come out of the arms trade. The scientists, engineers and other professionals employed in this work could do just as well if not rather better in other industries. Countries who don’t currently produce weapons might claim that they need to import for their own defence, but the benefits from the considerable reduction in available arms worldwide would probably compensate. Let's all give it up, I agree.
The Government's purchase of 10,000 missiles from Slovakia isn't the place to start though. The Campaign Against the Arms Trade was wrong to allow itself to be drawn into applying its general principle to this specific case about which it doesn't appear to know very much. Sri Lanka really doesn’t need any more weapons when it's in the middle of a conflict, it apparently told the BBC. Yes, there has been more than enough death and destruction already. Stop the war, what a good idea! But reducing the supply of weapons to one side obviously gives the other an advantage, and a moral balance has to be struck here. Ending the arms trade is about doing the right thing, after all. The BBC probably didn’t ask about measures to prevent weapons falling into the hands of the LTTE. But Sri Lanka definitely isn’t going to benefit from a redistribution of power in that direction. The Government's 10,000 missiles from Slovakia will at least be aimed at armed cadres on the battlefield, unlike most of the munitions that come back this way, and this fact simply can’t be ignored in any decent debate. The Campaign Against the Arms Trade should have insisted that there were broader questions to bear in mind. International media shenanigans are such that we can’t actually be sure that this isn’t exactly what was said. So shame on you, BBC!
- Sri Lanka Guardian
No Wonder. That news came from the British Bullshit Corporation.
Carlo
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