BRITAIN: Salesmen of death

BY JOHN PILGER

LONDON — Soon after New Labour came to power in 1997, the then foreign
secretary, Robin Cook, announced an “ethical dimension” to British foreign
policy. He said that the government “will not issue an (arms) export licence
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”.

However, 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, Tony 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 US 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.

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 US 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 US$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.

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 licences to Israel
for arms and military equipment. The licence categories these covered included
large-calibre weapons, ammunition, bombs and almost certainly vital parts
for US-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 conference 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”. 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.

[Abridged from <http://www.johnpilger.com>.]

From Green Left Weekly, June 5, 2002.

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From GLW issue 495