arms trade

President Suharto, who ruled Indonesia, had massacred over a million of his fellow citizens when he seized power in 1965. Over 30 years later, he was waging a vicious war against an independence movement in East Timor. (Foreign Secretary) Robin Cook said he supported the delivery of Hawk aircraft to Indonesia. He claimed that the Indonesian government had assured the Foreign Office that the planes were only training aircraft and would not be used against the people of East Timor. The Hawk was originally developed as a trainer but was also marketed by British Aerospace for use as a cheap ground attack plane. The Hawks were delivered to Indonesia and used to bomb villages in East Timor.

In 1993, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Australian Parliament reported that “at least 200,000” had died under Indonesia’s occupation: almost a third of the population...

For three decades, the Australian, US and British governments worked tirelessly to minimise the crimes of Suharto’s gestapo, known as Kopassus, who were trained by the Australian SAS and the British army and who gunned down people with British-supplied Heckler and Koch machine guns from British-supplied Tactica “riot control” vehicles.

In one year, the British Department of Trade provided almost a billion pounds worth of so-called soft loans, which allowed Suharto buy Hawk fighter-bombers. The British taxpayer paid the bill for aircraft that dive-bombed East Timorese villages, and the arms industry reaped the profits.

In 2001, the UK government approved the sale of a £28 million military air traffic control system to Tanzania. The World Bank, which usually steers clear of criticising individual purchases, said that the system was both unsuitable for Tanzania's needs and out of date, and that a civilian system could be purchased for an eighth of the cost. Campaigners argued that the deal should be stopped on the basis that half the population of the country lacked access to clean water. This was also the position of Clare Short, then the International Development Secretary, but she was over-ruled as Tony Blair intervened personally to ensure the deal went through.

In 1965, [Denis] Healey asked Sir Donald Stokes, the head of Leyland Motors, to enquire into the possibility of establishing a sales body for British weapons...

[Following Stokes’ feasibility study], Sir Henry Hardman, the top civil servant at the MoD, said: ‘Sir Donald Stokes had indicated that it was often necessary to offer bribes to make sales... The commercial technique was to gather intelligence on the right people who controlled sales and purchases. When the right person was found, effort would be concentrated on him and, in time, a sale would be effected. Sir Donald stressed that a great many arms sales were made, not because anyone wanted the arms, but because of the commissions involved en route.’

One of the founding fathers of the modern British military suppliers was Sir Basil Zaharoff. Born in rural Turkey, he worked as a brothel tout, counterfeit currency dealer, banker, private arms trader and, finally, the respected director of Vickers, the British armaments manufacturer that was the forerunner of BAE Systems. He spared no effort in sabotaging his competitors’ products, bribing foreign military leaders and arming both sides in a war. Britain made him a baron and he died in 1936, laden with honours.

A recent Congressional Research Service report on international arms sales records that last year the United States delivered nearly $8 billion worth of weapons to Third World countries. This was about 40% of all such arms transfers. The United States signed agreements to sell over $10 billion worth of weapons, one-third of all arms deals with Third World countries.

$10 billon a year is the estimated cost of meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal for water and sanitation, which would reduce by half the proportion of people in the world without proper access to drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015. Today, about 1.1 billion people do not have access to a minimal amount of clean water and about 2.6 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation.