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Of Various Calibers
// Arms exporters don't want a single standard for trade
The first two jet fighters purchased from Russia under a $3-billion contract will be delivered to Venezuela today. The huge deal was made possible by the embargo on arms shipments imposed by the United States on the Hugo Chavez regime. An agreement on military-technical cooperation will be signed in Moscow today with Indonesia. Moscow has concluded contracts with that country for $1-billion worth of arms deliveries. That is also an artifact of the U.S. embargo on arms deliveries to that country that was in force throughout the 1990s and in the early 2000s. That embargo was intended to influence the excessive force Indonesian authorities were using against rebels there. It should be noted that Russia is far from the only country that enters a market for arms in the wake of another country's embargo.
There are a number of agreements and directives regulating the arms trade. The most comprehensive document to limit arms exports is the United Nations blacklist. UN embargos are frequently ineffective, however. According to information provided by Oxfam International, arms manufactured in Greece, China, Russia and the U.S. were supplied to the Democratic Republic of Congo, to which the UN has banned arms shipments. Major arms exporting countries have their own blacklists that are better observed. The problem is that they do not coincide.
The Russian blacklist, according to Vadim Kozyulin, an analyst at the Center for Political Research in Russia, is not made public and is not mandatory. The president can make decisions (that are also not made public) to send arms anywhere. The American blacklist is public knowledge and consists mainly of countries that the U.S. accused of financing terrorism. The European Union has the largest blacklist. But arms suppliers frequently violate it. For instance, according to Amnesty International, the British company BAE Systems sold arms to Uganda and Indonesia, countries under EU arms embargo, though its South African subdivision. Disparities between national blacklists create a gray area that allows arms to enter countries where they will knowingly be used against civilians. “Russian representatives answer American reproaches for selling arms to Uzbekistan by mentioning that the U.S. sells arms to Turkey, which mistreats the Kurds,” Kozyulin noted.
Those disparities are a driving force in the arms trade. For every Russian contract concluded with the People's Republic of China, to which neither the U.S. nor the EU will sell arms, an analogical contract is mad between the U.S. and Taiwan, and vice versa. As a result, the military budgets of developing countries grow at a rapid pace. In 2005, according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service, arms export contracts worldwide were worth almost $45 billion, of which $30 billion went to developing countries. In 2003, that figure was $16 billion. Amnesty International calculated that that sum would be sufficient to provide universal elementary education in all “poor” countries and to reduce infant mortality there by two-thirds through 2015.
At the end of last month, the UN General Assembly resolved to establish a working group to develop a universal agreement on arms trade. Those efforts were begun in 1990, and have been supported by a group of 15 Nobel Peace Prize winners. The work is now in its final stages. The agreement will unify blacklists, create rules for trading in arms and create a general system of sanctions.
That could stop the export and re-export of arms to hot spots and unstable countries. But the agreement has too many opponents. The decision to set up the working group was made with the support of an absolute majority of countries. Only the U.S. opposed the decision. Russia, China and several other countries abstained from voting. The Americans held that control mechanisms on the arms trade are already in place on a national level and doubted the effectiveness of the UN in that area. Kozyulin expressed similar doubts. He thought that the interested countries are planning to make the agreement “toothless.”
At the same time, developing countries are rapidly establishing arms industries and becoming exporters themselves. Amnesty International points to the examples of China, India, Brazil and the Republic of South Africa. Many in those countries perceive the UN agreement as an attempt by large arms exporters, especially those in the EU, to dictate the rules of the market. The “developing exporters,” as AI calls them, are firmly determined to fight the “cartel” of developed countries.
All the Article in Russian as of Dec. 01, 2006
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