DISARMAMENT: Britain To Tighten Arms Sales Regulations

By Neena Bhandari Reprint | | Print |

Neena Bhandari

LONDON, Jan 17 2000 (IPS) - Close on the heels of Britain’s pre- Christmas pledge to write off all debts owed by the world’s most impoverished countries, London is to ban the use of export credits for arms sales to 63 nations.

Forty-one of these countries are eligible for debt relief under the heavily indebted poor country (HIPC) initiative. A further 22 can obtain “soft loans” from the World Bank on a low-cost, concessionary basis.

The countries listed include war-ravaged Sierra Leone and Ethiopia, while some of the biggest markets for British arms sales in the past such as Indonesia, Pakistan and Nigeria have been excluded.

“This is part of an attempt to ensure aid and debt relief are channeled into poverty reduction rather than military spending,” said Finance Minister Gordon Brown last week.

Otherwise, he said, the aid could end up “flowing to prestige projects that do nothing to relieve poverty or to corrupt regimes and to military excess that destroys rather than builds for a better future.”

“Only when combined with the right economic and social policies, which are essential to sustainable economic development, can debt relief be the catalyst for the true release from poverty”, Brown said.

Treasury sources said the hard-line on export credits would include not only military hardware but also luxury goods such as yachts for political leaders in impoverished nations.

Brown and the British International Development Secretary Clare short have, in the past, insisted on strict conditions for those getting debt relief.

This follows the groundbreaking initiative by wealthy countries last year to write off up to 60 billion Pounds owed by 41 highly indebted poor countries (HIPC). Once any of these countries starts receiving help from the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) under the HIPC scheme, all its debts to Britain will be scrapped.

One US Dollar is equal to 0.612 pounds.

Since the HIPC initiative was launched in 1996, only four poorest countries out of the 41 who qualify, have seen actual reductions in their debt payments.

Uganda, Mozambique, Bolivia and Mauritania will be fast tracked to qualify for HIPC relief by the end of January. The rest will qualify by the end of next year. In each case Britain’s write-off would then kick in.

The 41 HIPC countries owe Britain only two billion pounds out of their total debt of 132 billion pounds.

As part of the 1999 Cologne agreement, Britain had pledged to cancel 1.6 billion pounds of its debts owed by developing countries.

British charity, Christian Aid spokesperson Dominic Nutt says the rich countries “have made some promises on debt relief, unfortunately it is not enough to save the lives in Africa of 19,000 babies a day. The G-7 are all mouth and no trousers”.

The charity, which has launched a poster campaign showing all Group of Seven (G-7) ministers – from Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, United States and Italy – in their underpants, feels the only debt relief which will help is the one given without any strings attached. Conditions attached could actually undermine the benefits to the poor.

A recent survey by the World Bank shows that under structural adjustment programmes, real per capita health spending has fallen by 15 percent in the 53 countries where the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has demanded cuts in government expenditure, with African countries bearing the brunt.

The safety net of basic health provision, which the state is supposed to provide for the poor, does not exist and governments struggling to keep up debt payments just do not have the money to pay for it.

According to Christian Aid’s new report, Millennium Lottery: who lives, who dies in an age of Third world debt?: ” UK bilateral debt from the HIPC totals nearly 5 billion pounds and Britons spend 5.5 billion pounds on pet food each year.”

“In Africa per capita health spending per year averages only 4.25 pounds and is as low as two pounds per person in some countries, while British per capita health spending is 664 pounds. Millennium babies will live rich full lives in the UK whereas babies born in Africa may not even see their fifth birthdays”, the report says.

The Third World debt is harming the debtor countries of the South as much as the creditor nations of the North with only a fraction of the elite benefiting at the expense of majority of the world’s people and the environment.

While the cream of Third World society remains insulated from debt distress, it is the ordinary people who are squeezed to pay back loans they never asked for and have fought against as it has done them no good.

As Susan George, author and campaigner on the subject of debt writes, “Fifty years of development assistance from the North has showed that it does not help to provide support or aid unconditionally to countries that are not committed to reducing poverty and faster growth. Both the developed and the developing countries are trapped in the cycle of lending and borrowing.

“There is another measurable cost: The strong correlation between debt and world-wide military conflict. Loans have been employed by Third World governments to buy arms from northern manufacturers for use against internal and external opponents. Debt promoted the Gulf war, she says

“The Governments in many of these debtor countries are dominated by ruling elite-familial, tribal or military, who have compelled their people to accept the draconian policies imposed by the major multilateral agencies packaged as ‘structural adjustment’.

Jubilee 2000, which campaigns for debt relief, has welcomed the British move and hopes that it will produce a domino effect with other industrialised nations like Japan, France, Germany and Italy following suit. The US and Canada have already committed themselves to debt relief.