Pilger on British role in India/Pakistan conflab

[Philip Ferguson <plf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

WITH nuclear powers India and Pakistan on the edge of war, the role of the
Blair government in fuelling the conflict has been critical. : John Pilger
:27 May 2002


 In the year 2000, the Government approved nearly 700 export licences for
weapons and military equipment to both countries. These had a total value of
£64million. India, which gets the great majority of British weapons, is
building under licence Jaguar bombers that are capable of delivering nuclear
weapons.

In January, as the two countries prepared for war, Tony Blair arrived in the
subcontinent on what was called a "peace mission." In fact, as the Indian
press revealed, he discussed the opposite of peace - a £1billion deal to
sell India 60 Hawk fighter-bombers made by British Aerospace. "The issue of
India acquiring the Hawks," reported the periodical Outlook India, "was
raised by Prime Minister Blair with Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee, defence
minister George Fernandes said today."

Three weeks later, the British High Commission in New Delhi threw a party
for a group of British arms salesmen in town for a major weapons fair called
Defexpo, whose organisers made no secret of their aim to exploit the "recent
developments taking place in the south-east Asia region" - in other words,
the conflicts in Kashmir and Afghanistan.

So keen has the Blair government been to exploit this opportunity of war
that a British official has the full-time assignment, in New Delhi, of
"defence supply". He works with the Defence Export Sales Organisation (DESO)
in London, an arm of the Ministry of Defence, whose sole aim is to sell
weapons to foreign armies. A secret list of 22 "highly valuable priority
markets" targeted for British arms sales has India and Pakistan near the
top. British missiles, tanks, artillery, howitzers, anti-aircraft guns,
small arms and ammunition are all available on buy-now-pay-later terms.

But the prize is the 60 Hawk fighter-bombers, coyly described as "trainers".
Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt was yesterday reported to have
"banned" this deal. It has not been banned; the delivery date has been
simply put back - which was the tactic the Blair government used in delaying
the shipment of Hawks to Indonesia when the dictatorship in that country was
attempting to annihilate East Timor.

INDIA and Pakistan have millions of impoverished people without basic
services. According to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, the price of one
Hawk bomber is roughly the amount needed to provide 1.5million people with
fresh water for life.

Arming both sides is, of course, as British as pith helmets. In the
horrendous war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, Britain did just that in
company with other Western countries. At least a million people were killed.

The usual hypocrisy and double standards are even more spectacular under
this government. Soon after New Labour came to power in 1997, the then
Foreign Secretary Robin Cook announced an "ethical dimension" to foreign
policy. He said that the Government "will not issue an (arms) export licence
if there is a clearly identifiable risk that the intended recipient would
use the proposed export aggressively against another country" or if there
was a threat to "regional stability".

He might have been talking about India and Pakistan, whose long- running
dispute over Kashmir is, according to Cook's successor Jack Straw,
"potentially more dangerous than the crisis in the Middle East".

>From the day it took office, veiled by Cook's "ethical" nonsense, New Labour
embraced the arms business. In his first few months as Prime Minister, Blair
approved 11 arms deals with General Suharto's genocidal regime in Indonesia
under cover of the Official Secrets Act.

He has since maintained this country as the world's third biggest arms
trader, selling more lethal weapons in New Labour's first year than the
Tories. More than two-thirds of sales are to governments with appalling
human rights records. Britain's biggest customer is Saudi Arabia, the most
extreme Islamic regime on earth, where apostates are beheaded. Women have no
rights; it is illegal for a woman even to drive a car.

CHERIE Blair, who with Laura Bush, wife of the American President, denounced
the "brutal oppression of women" in Afghanistan by the Taliban and demanded
their emancipation, has remained silent on the medieval treatment of Saudi
women in the spiritual home of al-Qaeda. Saudi Arabia has most of the
world's oil.

The results of an investigation by the National Audit Office into the
£20billion Al Yamamah (The Dove) deal between the Saudi princes and the
British arms industry, believed to be the biggest in history, were
suppressed first by the Tories and, since 1997, by Labour. The reason is
that the report almost certainly describes "commissions" paid on the sale of
Tornado fighters - £15million on one aircraft is said to have been the going
rate.

Under Blair, taking his lead from Margaret Thatcher's obsession with the
arms industry, sales of weapons and military equipment have become the most
heavily subsidised sector of the UK economy apart from agriculture. This
means that taxpayers underwrite loans-for-arms to dictators oppressing their
people. The argument that the Government is "protecting jobs" is demolished
by the writing-off of billions of pounds, which could create jobs in
peace-time industries.

This was how Hawk fighter-bombers were "sold" to the Suharto dictatorship.
One of the first things Robin Cook did when New Labour came to power was to
fly out to Indonesia and shake the mass murderer's hand. Indonesia was then
crushing the life out of East Timor, using British Aerospace's finest
products: Hawk aircraft and Heckler and Koch machine guns.

For two years, with the help of lobby journalists "briefed" by lying Foreign
Office officials, Cook was able to deny that the Hawks were being used in
East Timor - until the Indonesians grew tired of the subterfuge and made a
fool of him by sending Hawks in menacing passes over Dili, the East Timorese
capital.

The making and selling of arms is crucial to the post-September 11 "war on
terrorism", which is not a war on terrorism at all but a justification for
the US to consolidate and extend its global supremacy. Indeed, most Anglo-
American weapons go to client regimes that promote terrorism; Saudi Arabia,
home of most of the September 11 hijackers and tutors of the Taliban, is the
prime example.

Arms sales and the development of multi-billion dollar warplanes, ships and
missile systems, have an essential place in the "global economy". They
invariably lead to an American economic "boom" or "recovery" which
influences the economies of Europe and much of the world.

In 1960, President Eisenhower called American capitalism a "military-
industrial complex" powered by arms and other military-related contracts.
Forty cents in every dollar ends up with the Pentagon which, in the
financial year 2001/2, will spend a record $400billion on its war machine.
Not surprisingly, war ensures the industry's prosperity. Following the Gulf
War and the Nato attack on Yugoslavia, both American and British arms sales
leapt. When the New York Stock Exchange re-opened after September 11, the
stocks of arms companies were almost alone in showing an increase in value.
Raytheon, the missile maker and contributor to New Labour, was one of them.

TONY Blair's close links with Israel - many of them forged by his friend,
the deal-maker Michael Levy, whom he made Lord Levy - are described as "the
Government's tireless efforts to bring peace and stability to the Middle
East." The opposite is true.

As on the Indian sub-continent, British arms policy has actually fanned the
flames in a region in deepest crisis. In the first 14 months of the
Palestinian uprising against Israel's illegal military occupation - when the
Palestinians' main weapon was the slingshot - the Blair government approved
230 export licences to Israel for arms and military equipment. The licence
categories these covered included large-calibre weapons, ammunition, bombs a
nd almost certainly vital parts for American-supplied helicopter gunships.
These Apache gunships have been frequently on the news, firing missiles at
civilian areas.

While British weapons and parts were being shipped to the Israeli military
machine, Amnesty International investigators reported "human rights
violations and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions which, over the past
18 months, have been committed daily, hourly, even every minute by the
Israeli authorities against Palestinians".

Foreign Office mouthpieces, also known as junior ministers, routinely tell
Parliament that they have "an assurance that British equipment will not be
used in the Occupied Territories". This is clearly false. As reporters
witnessed recently, Israeli armoured personnel carriers have a chassis made
from British-supplied Centurion tanks.

Business is business, and it never stops. On September 11, at an arms fair
in London's Docklands, there was not even a respectful silence in honour of
the victims of the Twin Towers. The Israelis had a whole pavilion; one
Israeli company, Rafael, was here to sell the Ministry of Defence the
Gill-Spike Anti-tank missile, a weapon distinguished by its history of use
against civilians in Palestine and Lebanon.

At last year's Labour Party conference Blair, playing the Christian
imperialist, promised "the most positive involvement" in Africa that would
attack poverty and under-development and heal "a scar on the conscience of
the world".

One of the main causes of poverty in Africa is the amount spent on arms by
regimes offered a variety of enticements by Western business and
governments.

Three months after the Prime Minister's heartfelt words, the value of
British arms sales to Africa was revealed to be a record - four times that
of the previous year. It was also disclosed that Blair had given his
personal backing to the sale of a British-made military air traffic control
system to Tanzania, one of the world's poorest countries.

THE deal was worth £28 million to the arms firm, BAE Systems. This is just
what is needed in a country so poor that half the population have no access
to running water and children die from preventable diseases.

All over the world 24,000 people, mostly children, die from poverty every
day. This is the true terrorism, and it is aided and abetted by politicians
from rich, privileged and powerful countries who, in the cause of profit and
feigning respectability, are salesmen of death. Their victims, and the rest
of us, deserve better.

John Pilger's latest book, The New Rulers of the World, is published by
Verso.



~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.