How Britain's armaments fuel war and poverty

by John Pilger

With nuclear powers India and Pakistan on the edge of war, the role of the 
Blair Government in fuelling the conflict has been critical.

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.