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 £64million. 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 £1billion 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 today."
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 yesterday 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.
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 1.5million 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 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".
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 this country 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.
The results of an investigation by the National
Audit Office into the £20billion 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 -
£15million 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 2001/2, will spend
a record $400billion 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 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 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.
John Pilger's latest book, The New Rulers of the
World, is published by
Verso.
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