Shock at the sale of weapons to ‘repressive regimes’ misses the real issue: what the arms trade tells us about power

Building an empire through arms
17 July, 2013 – Richard Seymour – The Guardian

Why does Britain arm human rights abusers? On the face of it, this is a nonsensical question. The British state is a human rights abuser, from Iraq to Afghanistan. On a scale calibrated according to those atrocities, what do a few bits of kit to Iran matter? What ethical barrier should stop Britain sending crowd control ammunition to Saudi Arabia, or assault rifles to Bahrain? Yet this is to deflect an important political question.

The arms industry accounts for 1.2% of all exports and 0.2% of all jobs in the UK. Economically, it is negligible. And, were it not for high-pressure sales and marketing departments working in the British government on behalf of the industry, it would be even more puny. So what accounts for the extent of state efforts to find clients for the manufacturers of weapons? Why has the British government always found the means to subsidise important arms purchases, through export credits?

Here, it is not sufficient to invoke commercial cynicism or corruption. To explain it, one must insist on the “primacy of politics”. That is, arms flows are centrally about powerful states taking sides in global political struggles, whether they are open and violent as in Bahrain in 2011, or submerged as in Belarus today. The transfer of weapons is simply one particularly sharp and bloodied edge of the projection of imperial power.

In and of themselves, individual trades may be of limited significance. Some news stories have alighted on a few transfers of minor significance to Iran and Syria, which seem to be at odds with Britain’s current foreign policy stance. Rather than sifting through the receipts for arms trades, like tea leaves, looking for patterns, it makes more sense to begin by asking what the geopolitical priorities of the producer states’ are, and how arms sales contribute to realising them.

This is unhelpfully obscured by well-meaning moral condemnations of “arming repressive regimes”. All regimes are repressive to some extent – that’s what weapons are for. The question is what strategic alliances are being forged and sustained. Any British government these days will send a small mountain of arms to Saudi Arabia and Israel on a regular basis. Both of these are states which the British empire had a role in creating, and both represent long-term strategic commitments on the part of the UK. On the other hand, some arms flows reflect temporary tilts, tactical interventions. Examples include the increased flow of weapons to Bahrain two years ago, or – in the early 2000s – to Indonesia when it was suppressing the Acehnese rebellion.

This is not to deny that immediate economic considerations have a role. Once the British state has decided that its arms industry is an important lever, it becomes necessary to support its operation by seeking as many clients as possible. The arms selling wing of the UK Trade & Investment department employs 160 civil servants. More broadly, arms development and sales has had a peculiar, fluctuating combination of economic functions since the end of the second world war. It has enabled states with large military complexes to boost growth and employment through temporary military expenditures, and has given them a means through which to indirectly organise national economies.

Moreover, the strategic pre-eminence of the arms industry for the British state – the existence of taxpayer-funded lobbying and marketing bodies within the state, dedicated to specifically supporting arms deals – makes it ripe for clientelism, bribery and corruption. According to the late Robin Cook, BAE Systems “appeared to have the key to the garden door at Number 10” under New Labour.

However, the commercial considerations would be relatively insignificant, the corruption easily extirpated, were it not for the political role the arms trade fulfils. The old-fashioned word for it is imperialism. …source

Dealing Death From Both Sides of the Aisle – Arms-for-Dictators: a Bi-Partisan Tradition
by JAMES ELLIOTT – 19 July, 2013

The fringe issue of arms export criteria became headline news today, with the Independent’s splash on an ‘arms for dictators’ scandal. A parliamentary report by the Committees on Arms Export Controls raised a few eyebrows, but the embarrassment of the government approving arms sales to 25 out of 27 of the countries blacklisted as human rights abusers will soon vanish.

Of the 3,000 export licenses our government has approved, many have gone to Russia and Iran, who both support and arm the Syrian government. Items have been sent to Sri Lanka, Belarus, China and Zimbabwe – all of which feature prominently on the Foreign Office’s list of states with worrying civil rights records.

David Cameron is known for this. Only two weeks ago I wrote about his trip to the dictatorship of Kazakhstan with arms firm Rolls-Royce, where he boasted about British trade prospects. This follows on from Cameron’s tours of the gulf, where he has joined with arms firms to sell weapons to regimes who repress democracy. During the Arab spring in Bahrain and Egypt, demonstrators have been attacked with British-made tear gas, smoke canisters and demolition charges. Cameron’s arms-dealing jollies were interrupted by the Libyan Revolution, and the revoking of arms exports was a post-facto admission he was very wrong to have sold them in the first place. This dirty record was already known, for example, Amnesty have said that, “In 2009 the Saudi air force used UK-supplied Tornado fighter-bombers in attacks in Yemen which killed hundreds – possibly thousands – of civilians.”

For Conservatives who love to harp on about the strong rule of law, or Lib Dems who present themselves as the party of human rights, this makes for uncomfortable reading. Protecting democracy and human rights is supposed to be non-partisan, uncontroversial and supported by all. But it seems that the only thing non-partisan about human rights is that their violation through arms exports receives cross-party support, and Labour supporters have little to feel smug about given our own party’s track record.

The atrocious arms policy of Tony Blair is best explained by monitoring sales to Israel. When the Second Intifada broke out, the value of UK military export licences to Israel almost doubled from £12.5m in 2000 to £22.5m in 2001. Did this prove a good strategy? Between 2000 and 2010, 6371 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, half of whom were not participating in hostilities.

After Blair’s departure, the silent scandal continued, as David Miliband was forced to admit that British components were used in Operation Cast Lead, an attack on the Gaza strip in 2008-9 which left 1,400 Palestinians dead, and saw Israel accused of war crimes by Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and the UN. This cosiness looks set to continue if Labour wins in 2015, as I have argued in the wake of the recent Labour Friends of Israel lunch and Douglas Alexander’s hawkish speech.

Israel was not the only recipient of Labour’s bloodstained generosity. The genocidal General Suharto, who devastated East Timor, tends to stick in the memory, while China and even Assad’s Syria were invited to arms fairs.

Because the arms industry is given a £700m subsidy, all of us, as taxpayers, voters and citizens, are collectively responsible for these outrages. There is nothing exclusively ‘left-wing’ about supporting human rights, but the conflict between rights and business proves too much for some.

In fact, it is the relationship between business, politics and the law that needs to be re-examined here. It is clearly unacceptable to have a situation where Sherard Cowper-Coles, Britain’s ambassador to Saudi, is allowed to help flog BAE’s £46bn arms sales to that dictatorship, only to get a job with BAE afterwards. …more

UK approves £12bn of arms exports to countries with poor human rights
Richard Norton-Taylor – The Guardian- 16 July, 2013

Israeli soldiers stand on the tanks stationed at an army deployment area
Nearly 400 arms export licences for ‘Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories’, for equipment valued at nearly £8bn, have been approved Photograph: Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images

More than 3,000 current export licences for arms and military equipment worth more than £12bn have been approved for 27 countries classified by the Foreign Office as “of concern” because of their poor human rights record, a cross-party group of MPs reveals on Wednesday.

Countries for which significant sales have been approved include Israel – the destination of the bulk of the arms sales – Saudi Arabia, China, and Zimbabwe, according to the arms export controls committee’s annual report, drawn up by MPs from four separate select committees.

The chairman of the committee, the former Conservative defence minister Sir John Stanley, said: “The scale of the extant strategic licences to the FCO’s 27 countries of human rights concern puts into stark relief the inherent conflict between the government’s arms exports and human rights policies.”

He added: “The government should apply significantly more cautious judgments when considering arms export licence applications for goods to authoritarian regimes‚ which might be used to facilitate internal repression‚ in contravention of the government’s stated policy.”

The approval of nearly 400 arms export licences for “Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories”, for equipment valued at nearly £8bn, includes components for body armour, parts for “all-wheel drive vehicles with ballistic protection”, assault rifles, pistols, military support vehicles, and small arms ammunition.

However, most of the exports in terms of value consisted of cryptographic equipment, used for decoding and encoding communications, the Guardian understands.

More than 400 current export licences to Saudi Arabia include vehicles, components for military communications equipment, crowd-control ammunition, handgrenades, smoke/pyrotechnic ammunition and teargas/irritant ammunition.

For the first time, the arms export controls committee’s report gives details for all 27 countries identified by the Foreign Office as being “of human rights concern”, the number of existing export licences and the nature of the arms and arms-related goods approved.

In the past, details of the licenses were published by different departments around Whitehall and not collected together.

The total value of the exports is not known because some of them are approved with open-ended licences. …more

The Public Prosecution interrogates Rayhana Al-Musawi on her torture without the presence of her lawyer
17 July, 2013 – Al-Wefaq.net

On Tuesday 16th July the Public Prosecution interrogated the female detainee Rayhan Al-Musawi on her claims that personnel of the Ministry of Interior tortured her. Al-Muswi was subjected to degrading, humiliating, illegal and immoral ill-treatment, that included being stripped of her clothes in order to force a false confession that she was part of the “14 February Plot” as alleged by the Authorities. The detainee had testified about her torture in front of a judge on 11th July.

However the judge refused the claims of torture and recorded the incident as psychological harassment. This proves a lack of impartiality and transparency in the case.

Following her claims Al-Musawi was taken to the to the Public Prosecution building, under strict security measures, where she was interrogated for 45 minutes without informing her lawyer.

The Public Prosecution had previously refused a request made by the defense lawyers for power of attorney in her case. The trial lacks the most basic legal guaranties for defendants and which the Interior Ministry claims to provide.

A forensic Doctor saw al-Musawi on the morning of Tuesday, having already given the Public Prosecution full details of her torture and forced undressing to bring about a confession.

Al-Muawi was the only female amongst the defendants, including political and human rights activists, who appeared in court on 11th July.
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Bahraini Regime Forces Attack Protesters’ Houses in Several Villages
17 July, 2013 – FARS

TEHRAN (FNA)- Saudi-backed Bahraini regime forces attacked dozen of houses in a village near the capital Manama, as crackdown on anti-regime protesters continues.

Bahrain’s main opposition party, the al-Wefaq National Islamic Society, said that regime forces have rummaged through the protesters’ homes in the village of Diraz on the Northwestern coast of the Persian Gulf country. The group added that the forces have also stormed into the houses in Sitra and Hamad, the Sanad residential area and al-Dair village, press tv reported.

On Monday, a 55-year-old Bahraini identified as Saeed Abdullah Marzouq died after regime forces shot tear gas into residential neighborhoods in the village of Diraz.

The latest fatality comes ahead of a planned anti-regime protest on August 14, the date that marks the withdrawal of British forces from the Persian Gulf Island back in 1971.

Last year, Amnesty International warned about the Bahraini regime’s misuse of tear gas against protesters and called for an investigation into the tear gas-related deaths.

Bahrainis have been staging anti-regime demonstrations since mid-February 2011, demanding political reforms and a constitutional monarchy, a demand that later changed to an outright call for the ouster of the ruling Al Khalifa family following its brutal crackdown on popular protests.

Scores have been killed, many of them under torture while in custody, and thousands more detained since the popular uprising in Bahrain began.

Protesters say they will continue holding anti-regime demonstrations until their demand for the establishment of a democratically-elected government and an end to rights violations is met. …more

Bahrain Torturers Must Be Held Accountable
17 July, 2013 – Brian Dooley – HRF – Huffington Post

It’s been two years since the King of Bahrain commissioned human rights lawyer Cherif Bassiouni to investigate the events of February and March 2011. The Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) duly confirmed in November 2011 what Human Rights First and other leading international human rights organizations had already reported — that dozens of people had been killed, thousands had been arrested, and there had been widespread use of torture in custody.

The King promised to put things right and implement all of the recommendations made in the BICI report. It hasn’t happened. The culture of impunity identified in the BICI hasn’t been properly addressed, and this month has seen a new spate of torture allegations.

Prominent human rights defender Naji Fateel claims to have been tortured in custody, including being electrocuted in his genitals, suspended from the ceiling and threatened with rape. He is one of 50 defendants charged with terrorism-related offenses in the 14th of February Youth Coalition Cell case which opened on July 11. Others accused for their involvement with that coalition report having been forced to sign confessions under torture. A young woman activist, Rihana Almousawi, appeared in court this month and said she had been stripped naked during detention, reportedly threatened with rape and electrocution. It is also reported that she was forced to stand naked in front of an open door so those outside could see her.

On July 1, Bahraini courts acquitted two security officials, Lt-Colonel Mubarak ben Huwail, Director of Drug Detection, and Lieutenant Noora Bint Ebrahim Alkhalifa, of torturing medics during March and April 2011. Human Rights First has received consistent and credible reports from a number of former detainees alleging that Ben Huwail and Al Khalifa (a member of the ruling family) tortured or mistreated them in detention. …more

Bahraini regime forces attack protesters’ houses in several villages
17 July, 2013 – Islamic Invitation Turkey

Bahraini regime forces have attacked dozens of houses in several villages near the capital, Manama, as the crackdown on anti-regime protesters continues.

Bahrain’s main opposition party, the al-Wefaq National Islamic Society, said that regime forces rummaged through the protesters’ homes in the village of Diraz on the northwestern coast of the Persian Gulf country. The group added that the forces have also stormed houses in Sitra and Hamad, the Sanad residential area and al-Dair village.

On Monday, a 55-year-old Bahraini identified as Saeed Abdullah Marzouq died after inhaling toxic tear gas fired by regime forces into residential neighborhoods in the village of Diraz.

The latest fatality comes ahead of a planned anti-regime protest on August 14, the date that marks the withdrawal of British forces from the Persian Gulf Island back in 1971.

Last year, Amnesty International warned about the Bahraini regime’s misuse of tear gas against protesters and called for an investigation into the tear gas-related deaths.

Bahrainis have been staging anti-regime demonstrations since mid-February 2011, demanding political reforms and a constitutional monarchy, a demand that later changed to an outright call for the ouster of the ruling Al Khalifa family following its brutal crackdown on popular protests.

Scores of people have been killed, many of them under torture while in custody, and thousands more have been detained since the popular uprising in Bahrain began.

Protesters say they will continue holding anti-regime demonstrations until their demand for the establishment of a democratically-elected government and an end to rights violations is met. …more

Bahrain opposition fears protest crackdowns
15 July, 2013 – Seattle-pi

MANAMA, Bahrain (AP) — Opposition groups in Bahrain are appealing for authorities to call off crackdown warnings over plans for a major anti-government rally next month.

Protest factions in the Gulf nation have called for large demonstrations Aug. 14 inspired by the toppling of Egypt’s President Mohammed Morsi.

Bahrain has been wracked by 29 months of near nonstop unrest as majority Shiites seek a greater political voice in the strategic Sunni-ruled kingdom, which is home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet.

Authorities have vowed a harsh response to next month’s planned demonstrations, apparently fearing it could sharply escalate the ongoing street clashes.

A joint statement by five opposition groups Monday urged authorities to remove the threats and allow the “right for peaceful protest.” It also expressed worries over possible arrest sweeps. …source

Exposing the Hypocrisy of ElBaradei and his Liberal Elites
The Grand Scam: Spinning Egypt’s Military Coup
by ESAM AL-AMIN – 19 July, 2013 – Counter Punch

Every coup d’état in history begins with a military General announcing the overthrow and arrest of the country’s leader, the suspension of the constitution, and the dissolution of the legislature. If people resist, it turns bloody. Egypt is no exception.

As the dust settles and the fog over the events unfolding across Egypt dissipates, the political scene becomes much clearer. Regardless of how one dresses the situation on the ground, the political and ideological battle that has been raging for over a year between the Islamist parties and their liberal and secular counterparts was decided because of a single decisive factor: military intervention by Egypt’s generals on behalf of the latter.

As I argued before in several of my articles (as have others), there is no doubt that President Mohammad Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) committed political miscalculations and made numerous mistakes, especially by ignoring the demands of many of the revolutionary youth groups and abandoning their former opposition partners. They frequently behaved in a naïve and arrogant manner. But in any civilized and democratic society, the price of incompetence or narcissism is exacted politically at the ballot box.

Elections and Obstructionism: Do Elections Matter?

To their frustration, the liberal and secular opposition failed time and again to win the trust of the people as the Egyptian electorate exercised its free will when tens of millions went to the polls six times in two years. After overthrowing the Mubarak regime a month earlier, they voted in March 2011 by seventy seven percent for a referendum, favored by the Islamists that charted the future political roadmap. Between November 2011 and January 2012, they voted for the Islamist parties with overwhelming majorities in the lower (seventy three percent) and upper (eighty percent) houses of parliament. In June 2012, they elected, albeit narrowly, for the first time in their history, the civilian Muslim Brotherhood candidate as president in a free and fair election. Finally, last December the Egyptian people ratified by a sixty four percent majority the country’s new constitution. The next parliamentary elections were scheduled for this summer had not the Mubarak-appointed Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC) intervened yet again and invalidated the new election laws.

From the standpoint of the MB and its Islamist allies the SCC played an obstructionist role throughout this process. To their consternation, in June 2012 the court dissolved the lower house of parliament within four months of its election on technical grounds. It was also aiming to dissolve the upper house of parliament as well as the Constitutional Constituent Assembly (CCA) – the body charged with writing the new constitution – days before it was to finish its work. This forced Morsi to intervene and issue his ill-fated constitutional decree on November 22, 2012, in order to protect the CCA from judicial nullification. In an attempt to force its collapse, all secular members of the CCA resigned en masse even though its formation and the parameters of the process were agreed upon in advance, as evidenced by an opposition member who announced it in April 2012.

However, Morsi’s declaration proved to be a watershed moment that galvanized the opposition, which predictably accused him of an authoritarian power grab. In turn, Morsi argued that his decree was necessary to build the democratic institutions of the state that were being dismantled by the SCC one by one. Under intense public pressure he backtracked and cancelled the decree within three weeks, but only after he ensured that the new constitution would be put to a referendum.

After a vigorous public campaign by the opposition to reject the constitution, it was approved by the public by almost two to one. The next constitutional step would have been parliamentary elections within sixty days. But even though the election laws were similar to the laws agreed upon by all parties in the 2012 elections, the opposition complained that the laws favored the Islamist parties and threatened to boycott the elections. Within four months, the SCC twice rejected and halted the elections on technical grounds, thus further solidifying the perception in the eyes of the Islamists that the Mubarak-appointed court continues to thwart the country’s budding democratic institutions.

Strange Bedfellows: The Unholy Trinity of Gulf Sheikhdoms, the Fulool, and Egypt’s Secular Opposition

On April 22, 2011, UAE Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed brought his intelligence and security chiefs to meet with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and his security officials to discuss the ramifications of the Arab Spring. Bin Zayed warned that unless the GCC countries developed a proactive policy to preempt the wave of popular uprisings sweeping the Arab World at the time, none of the region’s monarchs would survive. Three weeks later in an emergency summit meeting in Riyadh he delivered the same message to all the GCC heads of state. While Qatar remained indifferent to his message, the other five countries were receptive. Bin Zayed and Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the Saudi intelligence chief, were tasked with submitting an effective plan to counter the Arab Spring phenomenon in the region. Subsequently, King Abdullah solicited and received the help of King Abdullah II of Jordan to join this effort while Qatar was excluded from all future meetings.

For decades, the UAE had been very close to Mubarak and his cronies. Billions of dollars of ill-gotten fortunes looted from the country were deposited in banks in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. After the overthrow of Mubarak, dozens of security officials and corrupt businessmen quietly left Egypt and relocated to the UAE. When Mubarak’s last Prime Minister, Ahmad Shafiq lost the presidential elections to Morsi in June 2012, he also moved to the UAE. By the fall of 2012, it became evident that the UAE hosted a web of individuals who were plotting the overthrow of Morsi and the MB.

Within a few weeks of the formation of the new government, Shafiq supporter and spokesman for his political party Mohammad Abu Hamid, announced on August 21, 2012, fifteen demands culminating in the goal of toppling the “Muslim Brotherhood or Ikhwan Government.” He warned against the “ikhwanization” of the state, i.e. the appointments of MB members in crucial state positions, and blamed them for the lack of basic services to the public. Abu Hamid also called for subsequent mass protests in Tahrir Square as he accused Morsi of power grab, dictatorship, and judicial interference, long before the president issued his hapless constitutional decree three months later. He further demanded the banning of the MB and its political affiliate, as well as the arrest of its leaders, who he accused of treason. All of his demands would subsequently become the talking points of every opposition party and anti-Morsi media outlet. …more