Comment: Authoritarian arms fair attendance is deadly business
The UK's promotion of democracy and human rights is fundamentally undermined by sales of arms to authoritarian regimes.
By Ann Feltham
A turning point for arms exports occurred in 1966 when Labour's defence secretary Denis Healey set up the UK's government's first arms sales unit, the Defence Sales Organisation (DSO). This was "to ensure that this country does not fail to secure its rightful share of this valuable commercial market". A decade later and DSO was organising military export equipment exhibitions – firstly on an annual and then on a biennial basis. Governments, both Labour and Conservative, arms companies and the UK's military turned a blind eye to human rights. They feted high-ranking delegations from governments such as those of Saddam's Iraq, Pinochet's Chile and Suharto's Indonesia.
This brings us to Defence and Security Systems International (DSEi) exhibition which is taking place from 13th to 16th September at London's ExCel centre. It is the latest in the series which started back with those 1970s arms fairs. In keeping with the times, the actual organisation has been hived off to a private company, Clarion Events, but the government's arms sales unit in its latest incarnation, UK Trade and Investment's Defence and Security Organisation, is supporting the show. Defence secretary Liam Fox is giving the keynote address on the opening day.
Exactly which countries are sending delegations this year is a bit of a mystery. For many years the attendance list could only be obtained by a combination of careless exhibitors who left the vital document lying around and astute journalists who noticed it. More recently, in a gesture towards openness, the official invitation list has been made public. In June, in answer to a parliamentary question, 37 countries were named – none of them were from the Middle East or North Africa. Other official sources talk of over 60 delegations being invited. The conclusion is that it is 'business as usual' despite the Arab Spring and regimes such as arch-authoritarian Saudi Arabia will have the official blessing.
So why does the arms fair attendance matter? After all, it is argued, the equipment that forms part of any deal under discussion at the arms fair would need to go through the UK's export licensing procedures. In practice, however, very few licence applications are ever refused. It needs an international arms embargo, as recently in the case of Libya, or an invasion of UK territory, as with Argentina back in 1982, before the arms companies stop their wooing and the supplies stop flowing. Far from being rigorous controls, the export licensing process can be better seen as a fig leaf giving a veneer of respectability to an unsavoury business.
Those trying to allay fears about DSEi by mentioning the licensing procedures are also wrong on another count. Deals that are arranged where the equipment does not come through the UK do not need UK export licences. The arms industry is now a global one and companies have factories and offices in many countries. British Aerospace, which in the late 1980s marketed its Hawk jets to Saddam and managed sell them to Suharto, became the major part of what is now BAE Systems. It has more employees in the US than the UK. It sells more to the Pentagon than it does to the UK Ministry of Defence.
So why, even if they find selling arms to the likes of Saddam and Gadaffi rather distasteful, do some people, particularly politicians, still try to justify it? It is, they say, because of jobs. We hear it endlessly – arms exports and military spending are vital for the UK economy. They provide highly skilled employment that is unavailable elsewhere. There are many responses to this myth. Perhaps most damningly a rebuttal has been provided by the arms industry itself. In September 2010, the president of General Dynamics UK told the Commons' defence committee: "The skills that might be divested of a reducing defence industry do not just sit there waiting to come back. They will be mopped up by other industries that need such skills."
If 1966 was the year the UK government publicly aligned itself with the arms business, then 2011 should be the year it learns its lesson. It is time for the UK government to stop supporting the arms business. The public subsidy provided could instead be used to allow the country's scarce engineers to use their skills to work on renewable energy and other much-needed projects. The UK's promotion of democracy and human rights will not then be undermined by the desire to sell weaponry to authoritarian regimes. The government will also save itself, and its successors, from the frequent scandals that occur because of their continuing involvement in this deadly business.
Ann Feltham is the parliamentary co-ordinator of the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT). She can be contacted at parliamentary@caat.org.uk
The opinions in politics.co.uk's Comment and Analysis section are those of the author and are no reflection of the views of the website or its owners.
