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APPG Reports Arms Control Meeting | Arms Control Meeting |
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Oona King MP spoke about the impact of the global arms trade on Africa.
'The Global Arms Trade Treaty: should the UK sign up?' Meeting arranged by Amnesty International and Oxfam. MacMillan Room, Portcullis House, House of Commons, 17th June 2004, 1900h. Left to right: Oona King MP (Chair, All Party Group on the Great Lakes Region and Genocide prevention), David Akinsanya (BBC reporter), Nick Hodgson (Amnesty International), Michael Crowley (Amnesty International and Omega Foundation)  This year marks the tenth anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda. Africa and the world still feel the reverberations of those 100 days in 1994 where whole families were slaughtered in the worst crime against humanity our generation has seen. Reports from non-governmental organisations, journalists and from the UN have detailed how the perpetrators of the genocide were supplied with light arms and weaponry before, during and after the conflict. The flow of weapons to Rwanda and her neighbours in the Great Lakes region has flamed the fires of conflict and insecurity. Poverty, insecurity, disease and death are all trademarks of the illicit trade in conventional weapons. For many states, caught in situations of conflict or repression it’s the AK-47 that is a weapon of mass destruction. The UK government, over the last decade has been a leading light in the struggle against illicit arms deals. We recognise the links between poverty, conflict and arms flows. Factors influencing UK Conflicts across the world today are fuelled by the illicit trade in arms, with developing countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America spending $22bn a year on their arms. In countries such as Angola this can amount to over a third of the national annual budget. One civilian dies every minute from the misuse of conventional weaponry (500,000/year). And the spread of illicit arms shipments is often considered to have encouraged the use of rape as a weapon of war in various places including Rwanda and Yugoslavia. Then there’s the abduction of Ugandan children to serve in the Lord’s Resistance Army to take a specific example, or there’s the more general estimate by the World Refugee Survey of the forced displacement of over 22 million people worldwide. But few countries have suffered more through the deployment of small arms in a conflict zone than the Democratic Republic of Congo. The situation in the east of the DRC has rapidly declined to crisis levels with the country’s infrastructure destroyed. There is little food, education or health care available. The 5 year conflict that ended in July 2003 left an estimated 3.5 million dead, and a further 3.4 million internally displaced. Life expectancy has dropped to just 40 years, sexual violence is endemic, and children continue to be used as soldiers, porters, cooks and sex slaves. The health and education infrastructure of the country has been destroyed. Outbreaks of malaria and bubonic plague rapidly increased during the conflict. In some areas, rates of malnutrition increased nearly tenfold. The war severely hampered HIV/AIDS education and prevention. Most health regions were overwhelmed by treating battle wounds for combatants and non-combatants alike, with a quarter of all the beds in hospitals in one health district taken up by victims of gunshot wounds in December 2000. If you think of the strain we currently put on the NHS, imagine how much worse that would be if we lost a quarter of all beds to gun shot wounds During the conflict education was virtually non-existent with 70% of children receiving no form of education whatsoever in 1999-2000. As we’ve seen in the last few weeks local low level conflict continues to jeopardise the political process, and has left an estimated 200,000 armed men, mostly ex-combatants in the DRC. Much of the conflict was further enflamed by the role of outside nations shipping arms into the DRC. Uganda, for example shipped arms throughout the conflict into North Kivu and Ituri. Uganda in turn ships most of its arms from overseas. For example a shipment from North Korea in February 1999 supplied 6 tanks, 5,000 anti-tank missiles, 5,000 anti-aircraft missiles, 1,000 grenade launchers, 2,000 boxes of ammunition and 5,000 automatic machine guns to Uganda (Norwegian Initiative on Small Arms Transfers database.) As chair of the All-Party Group on the Great Lakes and Genocide prevention I take the issue of illicit arms deals in the DRC very seriously. This year, the Group is conducting research into Small Arms flows in the DRC. The report will be published in the next few months and is part of our ongoing work to better understand the causes of conflict in the region. We do not need to travel to Africa to witness the destructive impact of the arms trade however, arms shipment effects crime on our own streets. Increasingly the guns used in Britain are being shipped in through criminal gangs in Eastern Europe in order to support organised crime. The National Criminal Intelligence Service has recognised the links between the trafficking of weapons overseas and the sale of weapons into the UK. The All Party Group on Gun Crime has also identified this link and commented that the fight to combat gun running into the UK and the fight to prevent the shipment of arms to conflict zones in Africa are intrinsically linked. So where do we go from here? The growth in global terrorism should be a reason to strengthen export restrictions rather than to repeat the mistakes of the 1980s where Western powers shipped arms to Iraq and Afghanistan to carry out proxy wars. A long term view of global security is important in assessing the commitment of our arms export industry to unstable states or states with a poor human rights record Having said that, unless you are a pacifist you will accept the fact that governments and inter-governmental organisations like the UN need arms to provide security. This remains true, we must however tighten up our system of arms control Labour achievements up to the Export Control Act (2002) Before the Labour government brought in annual reporting on UK arms exports the actual scale of UK strategic exports were difficult to track. Between 1993 and 1997 the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute concluded that the UK was the third largest exporter of conventional weapons worldwide. Sadly many of the deals that established our defence industry’s profile internationally under the previous government were with countries with severe human rights and security problems. Throughout the 80s and 90s the UK commissioned several major arms deals that evoked much criticism. These included the UK’s biggest arms export deal, the Al Yamamah deal, signed in 1985 and worth £20 billion between Saudi Arabia and the UK, a deal worth £1.3 billion with Malaysia in 1988 which was expensively and illegally linked with UK overseas aid, and the sale of arms to Iraq by Matrix Churchill, leading to the long running and much publicised Scott enquiry. Obviously I believe Labour’s done a damn-sight better. We have a strong commitment to international development and human rights. Labour’s record on the greater provision of international aid, on debt relief, on increased investment in developing countries and in promoting a system of fairer trade reflect the government’s commitment to poverty reduction. Within months of the 1997 election the government introduced a ban on the export of torture equipment. This was soon followed by the 1998 ban on anti-personnel land mines. In 1997 the government also set out new criteria governing arms export licenses, and introduced an annual report on arms exports. Internationally the UK was one of the first to ratify the Ottawa treaty as part of its programme to tackle the proliferation of anti-personnel land mines. During the 1998 British Presidency of the European Union the UK successfully argued for an EU wide Code of Conduct on arms sales. We’ve also been committed to the International Criminal Court, a ban on the export of torture equipment and the implementation of the Human Rights Act. In 2000 the government brought together the national criteria and the EU code in the Consolidated Export criteria which helped further establish the relevance of human rights, security and sustainable development to defence export contracts This commitment has been furthered by the introduction of new controls under the Export Control Act (2002), which modernise and further the UK’s system of export control. The provisions under the Act completed their implementation in May 2004 and have strengthened the UK’s approach to export controls. They also make the publication of an annual report on strategic export controls a statutory obligation. The new legislation also tackles the problem of overseas trade by tightening controls on trafficking and brokering. The Government is committed to reviewing the legislation within the next three years to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed enforcement regime . There has also been some pressure on the government to extend full extra territorial control on arms trades, so that UK citizens, operating anywhere can be prosecuted for pursuing arms deals that would not be granted a license if commissioned within the UK. Extraterritorial controls are in place on UK persons anywhere in the world who traffic or broker in arms to embargoed destinations, or in certain long-range missiles, or torture equipment to any destination. There are a number of reasons put forward for not extending full extra territorial controls. There are concerns about whether it’s practicable to apply additional large areas of the UK export control regime on an extraterritorial basis. This would be likely to criminalize legitimate business by UK defence companies overseas carried out according to the laws of the appropriate country. It might also lead to conflicts of jurisdiction where other countries take a different view to us, on individual cases; and also to enforcement difficulties. Extending full extra-territorial powers may well spread our licensing and enforcement resources too thinly and undermine the effectiveness and credibility of the new regime as a whole. As such in its response to the quadripartite select committee’s report on the new statutory regime. Given this, the government feels that the most effective means of tackling brokering outside the UK is to adopt a multi-lateral approach. The strengths of the British approach, must be viewed within the broader context of the international community’s responsibility to control the proliferation of small arms. We need to tackle the argument we’ve just heard from the arms industry is, “If we don’t sell, someone else will.” A uniform set of international guidelines would make it clear to everyone that there are certain situations where it is not acceptable for anyone’s defence industries to sell arms, and that anyone doing so would be breaching international law. So the suggestion from a number of UK non-governmental organisations, such as Amnesty International and Oxfam for an international arms trade treaty is welcome. The suggested treaty would provide a set a minimum standard for the control of arms exports. The treaty, if enacted, would allow greater scrutiny of arms transfers and reinforce states’ direct commitments under international law. It is in all our interest to work towards a tough international legal standard in regulating the trade in small arms. Conclusion Britain has repeatedly proved its commitment to peace and justice internationally. We remain committed to the global campaign to ensure people’s basic human rights. We are committed to assisting international development. We are committed to fighting crime and terror. From its very outset the Labour government has recognised that in order to achieve these commitments there must be control on the trade in conventional weaponry. The UK was amongst the first nations to sign up to the Ottawa land mine treaty, we used our presidency of the European Union to establish the EU wide code of conduct on arms sales. Domestically we have consistently acted to restrict the flows of weaponry from our own industries into inappropriate areas. There is much still to be done however and the proposed global arms treaty in principle represents another step in the struggle to ensure that conflicts, crime and humanitarian crises across the world are not enflamed by the constant proliferation of weaponry. |
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