Does anyone remember the ethical dimension to foreign policy we were promised by our fresh faced new government in 1997? Perhaps you were of the opinion that nothing has become of it? In fact the British Government has expended a significant amount of time and effort constructing a somewhat Orwellian veneer to maintain the appearance of moral authority. The reality beneath this façade is that the contingent sections oaf the (un)civil service assigned to the regulation and oversight of the arms trade merely pay lip service to humanitarian concerns.
Arms export licenses are administered by the Export Control Organisation (ECO), an adjunct of the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. When a licence is applied for, Kafkaesque copies must be circulated through a further three government departments, (the Ministry of Defence, Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development). These departments judge each application on a case-by-case basis against the ‘Consolidated Criteria’ to determine its success or failure, and it’s here we find the devil in the detail.
For example, in order for a licence to be refused over humanitarian or human rights concerns, the criteria state that there must be “clear risk” that equipment “might” be used in internal repression. Clear as mud. That the government must be ‘certain’ that something ‘could’ happen gives control legislation the reliability of a weather forecast.
This deliberately vague set of guidelines has been custodian to the flourishing growth of arms sales to Indonesia (from May 1997 to Dec 2004 accounting for £393 million). This is despite the fact that in the last few years alone Scorpion tanks and Saladin APCs have been deployed against separatists by a government that Amnesty International claims presides over “torture, excessive use of force and unlawful killings by police and security forces.”
This is the defining characteristic of a regulatory infrastructure that is, depending on your level of cynicism, catastrophically incompetent or devilishly neglectful. Farcically, in 2005 the ECO granted arms export licenses to 13 of the 20 “countries of major concern” identified by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in its Human Rights Annual Report. One can only conclude the two departments stopped speaking to each other after some embarrassingly drunken antics erupted at their Christmas party. That two ministries can seemingly reconcile each other’s activities under the roof of one party is an act of bureaucratic double-think that would make even Sir Humphrey Appleby blush.
Anna Stavrianakis’ pamphlet “The Façade of Arms Control” (available through Campaign Against Arms Trade) presents this cycle of tacit complicity in a stunningly rendered account of exactly how this system has managed to maintain itself. She concludes that: “The licensing process is thus better understood as a ritualised activity that functions to create the appearance of control and image of benevolence and restraint.”
However, the tide is turning, in the shape of growing popular awareness and disapproval of Britain’s place as a leading global arms dealer. A recent visit from the head of the Saudi Arabian royal family (as one of the UK’s biggest arms trading partners) provoked a national outcry against the barbaric practices indulged in by the ruling elites. Also the government’s suspension of an Serious Fraud Office investigation into BAE was condemned as an outrage by all sections of society. Events like this continue to judge the arms trade in the court of public opinion.
Perhaps the biggest campaigning breakthrough of the last ten years has been the closure of the Defence Export Services Organisation (DESO) last year. DESO was a section of the MOD, perennially headed by a former arms trade boss, which was charged with the responsibility of procuring contracts for British firms to sell weapons to foreign governments. What angered campaigners most about this arrangement was the disproportionate amount of government money it funnelled into an industry that, in 2004, accounted for only 2% of UK exports.
This is justified by grossly exaggerated pithy economic arguments that continue to be weathered by an increasingly globalised economic structure that provides little job security. Indeed, the economic benefits of the UK’s export trade to Saudi Arabia have been compared to the optimism surrounding potential long term contracts to be signed with the Shah’s Iran in the seventies. The question is: is it economically prudent or morally acceptable to base a major plank of a regional economic strategy on an arms deal with a corrupt and authoritarian regime that looks increasingly vulnerable?
Todd Higgs is Media Assistant at Campaign Against the Arms Trade, www.caat.org.uk
