Europe, Headlines

DISARMAMENT: Illegal Arms Sales Have Climbed Since 9/11

Tito Drago

MADRID, Apr 28 2004 (IPS) - The trafficking of arms through countries allied with the United States has increased since the Sep. 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington, Amnesty International’s head of international relations in Spain told IPS Wednesday.

The trafficking is made possible, said Yolanda Román, by the fact that countries like Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Jordan, Kuwait and Uzbekistan receive military aid from Washington, which does not require them to guarantee that the weapons will not end up in other hands or be used to violate human rights.

Since the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks in which nearly 3,000 people were killed, Washington and its allies have carried out a vast anti-terrorism campaign that has entailed a substantial expansion of defence budgets.

Along with the representatives of other non-governmental organisations (NGOs), Román, an activist with the London-based human rights watchdog, took part in the presentation of the report ‘Alerta 2004’, produced by the Autonomous University of Barcelona’s School for a Culture of Peace.

The report states that global military spending, which had dropped to 690 billion dollars in 1996, rose again to 784 billion dollars in 2002 – equivalent to 2.5 percent of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and to 128 dollars per inhabitant.

That expenditure is four times higher than the 0.7 percent of GDP that industrialised countries pledged to allocate to official development aid (ODA), David Alvarez, president of Spain’s Coordinator of NGOs for Development, told IPS.

According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), only Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden meet the 0.7 percent target, while others, like the United States and Spain, earmark less than 0.35 percent to ODA.

Professor Vicenç Fisas, director of the School for a Culture of Peace, cited the example of Liberia, ”just one of the countries, but by no means the only one,” affected by the illegal arms trade.

In Liberia, which spent much of the 1990s in the grip of a bloody civil war, the army and rebel groups have agreed to a disarmament agreement.

During the civil war, weapons were sent to that West African nation by plane using forged final use or import certificates stating that the crates contained technical equipment or products like detergent for neighbouring Guinea, when they actually contained arms and ammunition for Liberia, he explained to IPS.

Citing figures from 1999, the report states that North Korea was in the lead in terms of arms sales as a proportion of total exports (22.4 percent), followed by Georgia (6.2 percent), Byelorussia (5.2 percent), Bulgaria (5.1 percent), the United States (4.7 percent), Ukraine (4.7 percent), Russia (4.2 percent) and Moldavia (2.1 percent).

Meanwhile, Eritrea, a small country in east Africa, heads the list of countries in terms of weapons purchases as a proportion of total imports (33.5 percent), followed by Saudi Arabia (27.5 percent), Ethiopia (20.5 percent), Burma or Myanmar (13.6 percent), Sierra Leone (12.3 percent), Rwanda (11.9 percent), Pakistan (9.7 percent) and Kuwait (9.5 percent).

At the presentation of the report, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières underlined that the platform of Spain’s new socialist government includes a commitment ”to promote the negotiation and implementation of global disarmament and arms control accords.”

To honour that commitment, Madrid must reinforce national and international mechanisms for oversight and control of weapons sales and commit itself to strict compliance, ”especially of the European Union Code of Conduct on Arms Exports,” Carlos Bravo, the head of Greenpeace-Spain’s disarmament campaign, remarked to IPS.

That is important, he said, because ”the current absence of strict and effective controls on the international arms trade has terrible consequences for the lives of millions of people, contributing to the expansion of armed violence, human rights violations, and the perpetuation of poverty.”

Bravo said it was unlikely, ”but not impossible,” for terrorist groups to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction.

He pointed out that plutonium and uranium have gone missing in several countries, and said that while such materials alone are not enough to manufacture nuclear weapons, they can be used to build ”dirty” atomic bombs.

These low-tech bombs that can be produced with small quantities of nuclear material are not as powerful as conventional atomic bombs, but they disperse radioactivity, ”and keep in mind that one gram of this material can produce lung cancer in one million people,” Bravo added.

Greenpeace and other NGOs hope the new government of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who took office on Apr. 17, will live up to its promises by voting in favour of disarmament measures in the United Nations and other international forums – not like the administration of his predecessor José María Aznar, ”which voted against such measures and increased military spending and arms sales,” said Bravo.

It is not enough to fight terrorism by controlling only arms sales, because terrorists ”don’t use combat vehicles or planes, but explosives,” said Fisas.

According to recent opinion polls, terrorism is the most pressing public concern in Spain since the Mar. 11 explosions in commuter trains in Madrid, which killed nearly 200 people and left more than 1,500 injured.

”Of course arms sales have to be controlled, because of terrorism and wars, but combating terrorism requires police collaboration, a policy of engaging in dialogue with groups that do not yet form part of (the) Al Qaeda (radical Islamist terrorist network), and addressing underlying issues, most of which have to do with underdevelopment and the lack of equal conditions in global trade,” said the professor.

One example is the Middle East, where U.N. resolutions must be respected if peace is to be achieved between Israel and the Palestinians, he said.

A change in focus in development aid and cooperation is also needed, including ”reforms of international trade to achieve a North-South balance,” said Fisas.

Bravo complained of ”hypocrisy” and lack of compliance with nuclear disarmament treaties. ”And the United States is the leader. Although it already has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, President George W. Bush has announced that his country will develop nuclear ‘mini-bombs’,” he said.