Spare a thought these icy days of January for the arms industry. Recession has had such a devastating effect on makers of tanks and warplanes that the European Defence Agency is holding a conference later this month to mull over what can be done. According to the EDA, military spending has been “declining steadily” on this continent since 2005.
Pause for a moment. Is that really something to be exercised about? There is little to celebrate about the economic downturn but lower expenditure on the tools of war and oppression might offer one reason to be cheerful.
Unfortunately, the EDA’s own data hints that the situation is not as dramatic as the words “declining steadily” imply. In 2006, the 26 countries belonging to the agency spent 201 billion euros on the military. That fell to 194 billion euros in 2010. Significantly, though, the figure for 2010 was the same as that for the previous year. You don’t need to be a mathematical whizz-kid to discern a pattern here: rather than declining steadily, expenditure appears to be levelling off.
The EDA’s number-crunchers have calculated that at 520 billion euros, the US spent 2.7 times more on the military than the agency’s participating states in 2010. The suits and uniforms of Brussels seem to regard this imbalance as a bad thing. I, on the other hand, take solace in the fact that Europe isn’t aping that imperial leviathan across the Atlantic as wholeheartedly as it could.
Bywords for corruption
My solace is nonetheless slender. Over the Christmas break, I read Andrew Feinstein’s book The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade. It traces how the firms which pushed for the establishment of the EDA have become bywords for corruption.
When the EDA was launched in 2004, the three giants of Europe’s weapons industry – Thales, EADS and BAE Systems – issued a joint statement predicting that the agency would play a “vital role” in stimulating greater investment in war (OK, I have resorted to paraphrasing). Feinstein devotes several chapters of his 672-page tome to the shenanigans of BAE.
In 2010, BAE was fined 400 million dollars in the US, the largest ever penalty imposed on a British corporation. That followed BAE’s admission of guilt that it had written false letters to the American authorities 10 years earlier. The authorities were investigating kickbacks that the company had paid while seeking deals in Saudi Arabia, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
Feinstein explains meticulously how BAE not only gave bribes, it was granted permission to do so by Britain’s powers that be. Back in 1977, Britain issued the “Cooper directive” – named after an official in its ministry of defence – which authorised the payment of secret commissions by British firms angling for government-to-government contracts. The directive was a response to an official memo, stating that the Saudi royal family expected money under the table if they were to buy weapons from the West.
A one-time member of Parliament for the African National Congress, Feinstein indicates that the human cost of arms sales can’t merely be totted up using casualty figures from the battlefield (where such figures exist). As a legislator, he took part in a probe over a major arms purchasing decision announced by the South African government in 1999. Feinstein calls BAE “the villain in the piece”, citing estimates that 300 million dollars was paid in bribes and commissions to senior politicians, middlemen, civil servants and the ANC itself (Feinstein came under intense pressure from party colleagues not to cause them embarrassment but – pun intended – stuck by his guns). By 2018, the total price tag for this deal could exceed 6 billion dollars. In the five years following the decision, 365,000 South Africans perished from AIDS; for every rand spent on keeping people with HIV alive, 6.75 rand went on buying weapons.
Blair: saviour of Africa?
Do you remember how Tony Blair decided that eradicating African poverty should be the central theme of Britain’s presidencies of the EU and G8 in 2005? Blair doubled up as a “saviour” of Africa and a salesman for BAE during his term as prime minister. One of his most disgusting acts was to persuade the president of Tanzania, one of the world’s poorest countries, to spend 40 million dollars on a radar system for military aircraft.
BAE is not the only company on Feinstein’s radar screen (pun intended once again). He highlights how Thales of France was ordered in 2010 to pay a fine of over 800 million dollars to Taiwan after being convicted of inflating the price of frigates supplied as part of an arms deal struck in the early 1990s.
On paper, the European Union’s institutions and offices have a strong policy against fraud. Yet they remain happy to court arms companies, even when those firms are implicated in large-scale corruption. Thales recently gave a demonstration to Frontex, the EU border management agency, of a pilotless drone (or unmanned aerial vehicle) in a Greek military base. Named the Fulmar, the plane in question is Spanish-owned but uses equipment designed by Thales. Intriguingly, it can be launched from a catapult, rather than a runway.
Frontex sees its role as keeping foreigners out of Europe and doesn’t appear perturbed by how the people in question are usually impoverished and in need of help. It comes as no surprise then that its racist endeavours are being aided by others who are far better known for corruption than compassion.
●First published by New Europe, 22-28 January 2012.
Showing posts with label BAE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BAE. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Time for outrage against academic support for Israel
Persistent campaigning by the Palestine solidarity movement has turned Veolia into something of a toxic brand. From Manchester to Melbourne, local authorities have been quizzed about their dealings with the French corporate giant because of its role in constructing a light rail system for illegal Israeli settlements in Jerusalem.
The controversy has affected Veolia’s bottom line, resulting in the loss of contracts worth €10 billion over the past six years. So it recently turned to the Brussels bureaucracy for moral - or, perhaps more accurately, immoral - support.
On 31 October, Antonio Tajani, vice-president of the European Commission, opened the “Go4 Europe” business conference in Tel Aviv. On promotional material that Tajani and his aides almost certainly read, Veolia was listed as one of the event’s four “platinum sponsors”. As Tajani used the occasion to laud Israel’s “business–friendly environment” (his words), he gave his tacit blessing to companies such as Veolia that have seized the opportunities presented by an apartheid state.
Tajani cannot profess ignorance of how the gathering served a propaganda function. The founder of the annual conference, Edouard Cukierman, is a self-declared “economic Zionist”, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. As well as being active in the technology industry, Cukierman works in the media division of the Israeli military, a force that has a tenuous relationship with the truth (to put it mildly). He is the son of Roger Cukierman, a former head of CRIF (the representative council for Jewish institutions in France), one of the most influential groups in this continent’s Israel lobby.
Nominated to the EU executive by Italy’s then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi in 2008, Tajani is a key ally for Israel in Brussels. For the 14 years before that appointment, he was a standard-bearer of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party in the European Parliament. During his time there, he joined the steering committee of the European Friends of Israel, a network of elected representatives who can be relied on to champion Israel, regardless of what it does.
Greenwashing apartheid
Tajani used his Halloween trip to engage in the “greenwashing” of Israeli apartheid. By visiting an electric cars firm, he helped depict Israel as a country that is serious about harnessing its innovative powers to reduce pollution. He failed to acknowledge how Israel is in reality an environmental villain, that steals precious water resources from the West Bank’s Palestinians to fill swimming pools and sustain elaborate floral displays in illegal Jewish-only settlements.
Along with Ireland’s EU commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, Tajani is in charge of administering the Union’s multi-annual programme for scientific research. Israel is the most active non-European participant in this programme; Israeli universities and private firms are currently involved in 800 EU-financed research activities with a total value of €4.3 billion. On his Tel Aviv visit, Tajani indicated that he wished to expand the research cooperation with Israel even further now that a revamped version of the EU programme, titled Horizon 2020, is being planned. As it is likely to have a budget of about €80 billion between 2014 and 2020, it is safe to assume that many Israeli entrepreneurs see it as a cash cow. The amount would be an increase of some €27 billion over what the Union allocated to research between 2007 and 2013.
The EU’s scientific research activities seldom grace the pages of our newspapers. Yet if journalists bothered following the money trail, they would realise that the programme’s beneficiaries include Israeli companies that supply the weapons and surveillance equipment used to systematically violate an entire people’s rights.
David Cameron’s apparent antipathy to Brussels notwithstanding, Britain is also an enthusiastic participant in the EU’s research activities, many of which link up UK-based academics and businesspeople with their Israeli counterparts.
BAE, a company known to arm such repressive regimes as the Saudi royal family and Indonesia under Suharto, is taking part in an EU-financed project exploring how pilotless drones – or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – can monitor Europe’s borders. Israel Aerospace Industries, one of two manufactuers of the pilotless drones with which Gaza’s 1.6 million civilians were attacked in late 2008 and early 2009, is also involved in OPARUS (Open Architecture for UAV-based Surveillance Systems), as that project is named. What this means is that the Union is taking advice from companies that facilitate war crimes on how to pursue a racist agenda of keeping foreigners out of Europe.
The Israeli Institute for Technology in Haifa – generally known as the Technion – believes that innovation should aid Zionism. It has boasted of developing a remote-controlled bulldozer, explicitly intended for use in destroying Palestinian homes so that the land on which they are situated can be handed over to Israeli settlers. The Technion is a significant player in the EU’s research programme. Considering its determination to wreck Palestinian houses, it is perverse that the Technion is involved in a €4.4 million scheme called Responsible Infrastructure and Building Security (RIBS). This project is being coordinated by University College London; its stated objective is to help defend important sites “against hostile reconnaissance, intruders and hazardous attack”.
The Technion is involved, too, in an EU-funded project with the Police Service of Northern Ireland called CommonSense, which is focused on the detection of bombs with special sensors.
Dishonesty at the heart of Europe
Since I began writing about how Israel milks the EU’s science funds two years ago, I have been told repeatedly by Brussels officials that the research in question is strictly civilian. Frankly, those assurances are dishonest. Following the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, the EU’s main institutions agreed to finance research of a “security” nature. The objectives of this research were decided in consultation with the arms industry. In theory, this research is not supposed to lead to the development of actual weapons systems. In reality, there is nothing to stop the fruits of it from having military applications. To contend that the EU is helping Israel invent tools of repression that will be used against Palestinians in the future is not in the least bit fanciful.
A glance at the aforementioned Israel Aerospace Industries’ website is sufficient to learn that its core business is the production of weapons, although it dabbles in “green” technology. Anyone who believes that its real interest in UAV research projects is benign must be naive in the extreme.
By embracing Israeli arms companies so tightly, the EU is flouting the spirit and more than likely the letter of the 2004 International Court of Justice ruling on Israel’s wall in the West Bank. The ruling stipulated that governments and public bodies must not render any aid or assistance to the wall as it violates international law. IAI’s subsidiary Tamam provided a surveillance system, based on technology installed in helicopters, for that wall. Continuing to allocate research subsidies to IAI is tantamount to approval of its role in equipping an illegal structure.
The high level of cooperation between European universities and Israel is something that should be challenged by every teacher and student who believes in basic principles of justice. An exemplary decision was taken in November by the King’s College London Student Council, when it voted to condemn the participation of that university in an EU nanotechnology project that also includes Ahava, an Israeli company producing cosmetics in the illegal settlement of Mitzpe Shalem. The previous month, the University of London Union also condemned the collaboration of British universities with Ahava; as the ULU is the largest student’s union in Europe, the significance of the move should not be underestimated.
Hopefully, these are the first steps in a major battle aimed at expelling Israel from the EU’s research programme.
Palestinian organisations fighting a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel issued a call in October for all European universities to cease cooperating with Israeli partners. The organisations contended that the involvement of Israeli arms companies in the EU’s research programme contravened the association agreement that underpins the Union’s relations with Israel. Now in force for more than a decade, that accord says unambiguously that all cooperation with Israel is conditional on respect for human rights.
Inserting human rights clauses in the trade and political contracts it signs with foreign governments is standard EU practice; indeed, Brussels officials tend to describe such clauses as non-negotiable. Words, of course, are meaningless if they are not acted on. The EU is not only refusing to take action against Israel, it is busily conniving in Israel’s crimes.
Heaping research subsidies on Israel’s war industry is an affront to the notion that science should serve the public good. If there was more knowledge among Europe’s taxpayers about how our money is going to companies that profit from the suffering of Palestinians, I am convinced that most decent people would be outraged. The only barrier to that outrage is a lack of awareness. With enough consciousness-raising, the barrier can surely be removed.
●First published by Middle East Monitor, 1 December 2011.
The controversy has affected Veolia’s bottom line, resulting in the loss of contracts worth €10 billion over the past six years. So it recently turned to the Brussels bureaucracy for moral - or, perhaps more accurately, immoral - support.
On 31 October, Antonio Tajani, vice-president of the European Commission, opened the “Go4 Europe” business conference in Tel Aviv. On promotional material that Tajani and his aides almost certainly read, Veolia was listed as one of the event’s four “platinum sponsors”. As Tajani used the occasion to laud Israel’s “business–friendly environment” (his words), he gave his tacit blessing to companies such as Veolia that have seized the opportunities presented by an apartheid state.
Tajani cannot profess ignorance of how the gathering served a propaganda function. The founder of the annual conference, Edouard Cukierman, is a self-declared “economic Zionist”, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. As well as being active in the technology industry, Cukierman works in the media division of the Israeli military, a force that has a tenuous relationship with the truth (to put it mildly). He is the son of Roger Cukierman, a former head of CRIF (the representative council for Jewish institutions in France), one of the most influential groups in this continent’s Israel lobby.
Nominated to the EU executive by Italy’s then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi in 2008, Tajani is a key ally for Israel in Brussels. For the 14 years before that appointment, he was a standard-bearer of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party in the European Parliament. During his time there, he joined the steering committee of the European Friends of Israel, a network of elected representatives who can be relied on to champion Israel, regardless of what it does.
Greenwashing apartheid
Tajani used his Halloween trip to engage in the “greenwashing” of Israeli apartheid. By visiting an electric cars firm, he helped depict Israel as a country that is serious about harnessing its innovative powers to reduce pollution. He failed to acknowledge how Israel is in reality an environmental villain, that steals precious water resources from the West Bank’s Palestinians to fill swimming pools and sustain elaborate floral displays in illegal Jewish-only settlements.
Along with Ireland’s EU commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, Tajani is in charge of administering the Union’s multi-annual programme for scientific research. Israel is the most active non-European participant in this programme; Israeli universities and private firms are currently involved in 800 EU-financed research activities with a total value of €4.3 billion. On his Tel Aviv visit, Tajani indicated that he wished to expand the research cooperation with Israel even further now that a revamped version of the EU programme, titled Horizon 2020, is being planned. As it is likely to have a budget of about €80 billion between 2014 and 2020, it is safe to assume that many Israeli entrepreneurs see it as a cash cow. The amount would be an increase of some €27 billion over what the Union allocated to research between 2007 and 2013.
The EU’s scientific research activities seldom grace the pages of our newspapers. Yet if journalists bothered following the money trail, they would realise that the programme’s beneficiaries include Israeli companies that supply the weapons and surveillance equipment used to systematically violate an entire people’s rights.
David Cameron’s apparent antipathy to Brussels notwithstanding, Britain is also an enthusiastic participant in the EU’s research activities, many of which link up UK-based academics and businesspeople with their Israeli counterparts.
BAE, a company known to arm such repressive regimes as the Saudi royal family and Indonesia under Suharto, is taking part in an EU-financed project exploring how pilotless drones – or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – can monitor Europe’s borders. Israel Aerospace Industries, one of two manufactuers of the pilotless drones with which Gaza’s 1.6 million civilians were attacked in late 2008 and early 2009, is also involved in OPARUS (Open Architecture for UAV-based Surveillance Systems), as that project is named. What this means is that the Union is taking advice from companies that facilitate war crimes on how to pursue a racist agenda of keeping foreigners out of Europe.
The Israeli Institute for Technology in Haifa – generally known as the Technion – believes that innovation should aid Zionism. It has boasted of developing a remote-controlled bulldozer, explicitly intended for use in destroying Palestinian homes so that the land on which they are situated can be handed over to Israeli settlers. The Technion is a significant player in the EU’s research programme. Considering its determination to wreck Palestinian houses, it is perverse that the Technion is involved in a €4.4 million scheme called Responsible Infrastructure and Building Security (RIBS). This project is being coordinated by University College London; its stated objective is to help defend important sites “against hostile reconnaissance, intruders and hazardous attack”.
The Technion is involved, too, in an EU-funded project with the Police Service of Northern Ireland called CommonSense, which is focused on the detection of bombs with special sensors.
Dishonesty at the heart of Europe
Since I began writing about how Israel milks the EU’s science funds two years ago, I have been told repeatedly by Brussels officials that the research in question is strictly civilian. Frankly, those assurances are dishonest. Following the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, the EU’s main institutions agreed to finance research of a “security” nature. The objectives of this research were decided in consultation with the arms industry. In theory, this research is not supposed to lead to the development of actual weapons systems. In reality, there is nothing to stop the fruits of it from having military applications. To contend that the EU is helping Israel invent tools of repression that will be used against Palestinians in the future is not in the least bit fanciful.
A glance at the aforementioned Israel Aerospace Industries’ website is sufficient to learn that its core business is the production of weapons, although it dabbles in “green” technology. Anyone who believes that its real interest in UAV research projects is benign must be naive in the extreme.
By embracing Israeli arms companies so tightly, the EU is flouting the spirit and more than likely the letter of the 2004 International Court of Justice ruling on Israel’s wall in the West Bank. The ruling stipulated that governments and public bodies must not render any aid or assistance to the wall as it violates international law. IAI’s subsidiary Tamam provided a surveillance system, based on technology installed in helicopters, for that wall. Continuing to allocate research subsidies to IAI is tantamount to approval of its role in equipping an illegal structure.
The high level of cooperation between European universities and Israel is something that should be challenged by every teacher and student who believes in basic principles of justice. An exemplary decision was taken in November by the King’s College London Student Council, when it voted to condemn the participation of that university in an EU nanotechnology project that also includes Ahava, an Israeli company producing cosmetics in the illegal settlement of Mitzpe Shalem. The previous month, the University of London Union also condemned the collaboration of British universities with Ahava; as the ULU is the largest student’s union in Europe, the significance of the move should not be underestimated.
Hopefully, these are the first steps in a major battle aimed at expelling Israel from the EU’s research programme.
Palestinian organisations fighting a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel issued a call in October for all European universities to cease cooperating with Israeli partners. The organisations contended that the involvement of Israeli arms companies in the EU’s research programme contravened the association agreement that underpins the Union’s relations with Israel. Now in force for more than a decade, that accord says unambiguously that all cooperation with Israel is conditional on respect for human rights.
Inserting human rights clauses in the trade and political contracts it signs with foreign governments is standard EU practice; indeed, Brussels officials tend to describe such clauses as non-negotiable. Words, of course, are meaningless if they are not acted on. The EU is not only refusing to take action against Israel, it is busily conniving in Israel’s crimes.
Heaping research subsidies on Israel’s war industry is an affront to the notion that science should serve the public good. If there was more knowledge among Europe’s taxpayers about how our money is going to companies that profit from the suffering of Palestinians, I am convinced that most decent people would be outraged. The only barrier to that outrage is a lack of awareness. With enough consciousness-raising, the barrier can surely be removed.
●First published by Middle East Monitor, 1 December 2011.
Monday, July 4, 2011
Dodgy arms dealers dictate policies
To William Hague, the wave of protests in the Middle East and North Africa this year constitute “the most important event of the early twenty-first century”. The foreign secretary’s paeans to freedom have been effusive but evasive. One salient fact that he neglected to mention in a May address to London’s Mansion House is that Britain has helped suppress some of the very same protests.
Two months earlier, Saudi troops invaded Bahrain to defend a beleaguered monarchy, bringing numerous tanks supplied by BAE Systems with them. Known as Tacticas, these tanks were made in the northern English city of Newcastle (with final assembly in Belgium). Saudi Arabia ordered over 260 of these vehicles in 2006, on the proviso they would be delivered in 2008. While the relevant licenses were issued under a Labour government, the current coalition in London hasn’t revoked any export permits for arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
BAE is a byword for dodgy deals. Early last year, it paid a fine of $400 million to avoid being sued for corruption – over sales to Saudi Arabia and elsewhere – by the US Department of Justice. A British Serious Fraud Office investigation into BAE’s Saudi connections was shelved in 2006 on the order of that other valiant defender of liberty Tony Blair.
Its tarnished reputation does not seem to bother European Union’s officials, however. The European Defence Agency has tasked BAE with drawing up a blueprint for meeting the Union’s requirements on “precision guided ammunition” by the end of this year. Precision-guided weapons are supposed to allow targets be selected with pinpoint accuracy but they are invariably used to butcher the innocent.
This is one of many troubling activities by the EDA that elicits virtually no criticism in the press. The agency is obsessed with pilotless drones – or unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) - and believes it’s imperative that they are used for everything bar washing the dishes. Research by the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, estimates that for every “militant” killed in US drone attacks undertaken as part of its “war on terror”, 10 civilians have also been killed.
An EDA paper on drones that I stumbled upon indicates that the agency’s contractors have a twisted worldview. This paper was written for the agency by BMT Defence Services, a designer of warships. It referred to scenarios BMT was studying on the use of drones and indicated that the analytical system it had devised could enable distinctions to be drawn “between friendly and potentially hostile population groups”.
Although the agency’s staff routinely reel off three-letter acronyms, only one such acronym is apt in this case: WTF. What is the real message here: that population groups opposed to the military invasion of their country can be considered as “legitimate” targets? That notion is not as far-fetched as it may seem. Israel, home to some of the world’s leading weapons firms, declared Gaza an “enemy entity” in 2007. By the end of the following year, Israel was testing out its state-of-the-art drones on this “hostile population”. The “collateral damage” included children and pregnant women.
During last month’s Paris Air Show – a jamboree for the arms industry – the EDA formally signed a cooperation accord with the European Space Agency, a nominally civilian body. At a briefing beforehand, journalists were assured that the EDA has no intention of introducing weapons into Space. Rather, the agency’s focus is on bits of debris floating around in parts of the universe and the threats they could pose to this planet.
I am sceptical of that assurance. The history of the EU’s adventures in Space are that projects that appear benign end up having other applications. In 2002, the European Commission recommended that Galileo, the satellite navigation system, should be civilian in nature. By 2008, the same institution indicated that the military would comprise about half of all clients with access to Galileo’s encrypted signals.
Moreover, some informed analysts predict that the drones so dear to the EDA’s heart will soon make extensive use of satellite technology. A 2010 study by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs argued that improved satellite communications capacities will be “absolutely essential” for drones over the coming two decades.
There is a more fundamental reason why the EDA should be regarded as sinister: it is the brainchild of the arms industry. After pushing for an agency of its type to be established for many years, weapons manufacturers saw their wish come true in 2004. BAE and its French equivalent Thales were then represented on an official working group that drafted part of the EU constitution, which was subsequently copied and pasted into the Lisbon Treaty. To their delight, that treaty allows the agency to take “any useful measure” to “strengthen the industrial and technological base” of Europe’s arms industry.
One probable consequence of that clause is that the Union’s scientific research programme will be used to develop the weapons of the future. Indeed, this may already be happening. Thales is the top recipient of grants earmarked for “security” projects under the current multi-annual programme, which runs from 2007 to 2013. While all these schemes are supposed to be non-military, there are no safeguards in place to prevent the fruits of EU-funded research being used for aggressive purposes.
The arms industry thrives on the destruction of human life and the denial of human rights. Its level of influence is pernicious.
·First published by New Europe, 3-9 July 2011
Two months earlier, Saudi troops invaded Bahrain to defend a beleaguered monarchy, bringing numerous tanks supplied by BAE Systems with them. Known as Tacticas, these tanks were made in the northern English city of Newcastle (with final assembly in Belgium). Saudi Arabia ordered over 260 of these vehicles in 2006, on the proviso they would be delivered in 2008. While the relevant licenses were issued under a Labour government, the current coalition in London hasn’t revoked any export permits for arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
BAE is a byword for dodgy deals. Early last year, it paid a fine of $400 million to avoid being sued for corruption – over sales to Saudi Arabia and elsewhere – by the US Department of Justice. A British Serious Fraud Office investigation into BAE’s Saudi connections was shelved in 2006 on the order of that other valiant defender of liberty Tony Blair.
Its tarnished reputation does not seem to bother European Union’s officials, however. The European Defence Agency has tasked BAE with drawing up a blueprint for meeting the Union’s requirements on “precision guided ammunition” by the end of this year. Precision-guided weapons are supposed to allow targets be selected with pinpoint accuracy but they are invariably used to butcher the innocent.
This is one of many troubling activities by the EDA that elicits virtually no criticism in the press. The agency is obsessed with pilotless drones – or unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) - and believes it’s imperative that they are used for everything bar washing the dishes. Research by the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, estimates that for every “militant” killed in US drone attacks undertaken as part of its “war on terror”, 10 civilians have also been killed.
An EDA paper on drones that I stumbled upon indicates that the agency’s contractors have a twisted worldview. This paper was written for the agency by BMT Defence Services, a designer of warships. It referred to scenarios BMT was studying on the use of drones and indicated that the analytical system it had devised could enable distinctions to be drawn “between friendly and potentially hostile population groups”.
Although the agency’s staff routinely reel off three-letter acronyms, only one such acronym is apt in this case: WTF. What is the real message here: that population groups opposed to the military invasion of their country can be considered as “legitimate” targets? That notion is not as far-fetched as it may seem. Israel, home to some of the world’s leading weapons firms, declared Gaza an “enemy entity” in 2007. By the end of the following year, Israel was testing out its state-of-the-art drones on this “hostile population”. The “collateral damage” included children and pregnant women.
During last month’s Paris Air Show – a jamboree for the arms industry – the EDA formally signed a cooperation accord with the European Space Agency, a nominally civilian body. At a briefing beforehand, journalists were assured that the EDA has no intention of introducing weapons into Space. Rather, the agency’s focus is on bits of debris floating around in parts of the universe and the threats they could pose to this planet.
I am sceptical of that assurance. The history of the EU’s adventures in Space are that projects that appear benign end up having other applications. In 2002, the European Commission recommended that Galileo, the satellite navigation system, should be civilian in nature. By 2008, the same institution indicated that the military would comprise about half of all clients with access to Galileo’s encrypted signals.
Moreover, some informed analysts predict that the drones so dear to the EDA’s heart will soon make extensive use of satellite technology. A 2010 study by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs argued that improved satellite communications capacities will be “absolutely essential” for drones over the coming two decades.
There is a more fundamental reason why the EDA should be regarded as sinister: it is the brainchild of the arms industry. After pushing for an agency of its type to be established for many years, weapons manufacturers saw their wish come true in 2004. BAE and its French equivalent Thales were then represented on an official working group that drafted part of the EU constitution, which was subsequently copied and pasted into the Lisbon Treaty. To their delight, that treaty allows the agency to take “any useful measure” to “strengthen the industrial and technological base” of Europe’s arms industry.
One probable consequence of that clause is that the Union’s scientific research programme will be used to develop the weapons of the future. Indeed, this may already be happening. Thales is the top recipient of grants earmarked for “security” projects under the current multi-annual programme, which runs from 2007 to 2013. While all these schemes are supposed to be non-military, there are no safeguards in place to prevent the fruits of EU-funded research being used for aggressive purposes.
The arms industry thrives on the destruction of human life and the denial of human rights. Its level of influence is pernicious.
·First published by New Europe, 3-9 July 2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
Put merchants of death out of business
Over the past few years I have developed an unhealthy obsession with the arms industry. Just as I tend to become transfixed in art galleries, the images of precision-guided missiles in “defence” magazines can leave me with a pleasantly blank sensation. That’s when I have to shake myself and recall that these photogenic instruments were designed for the sole purpose of ending human life.
The promotional copy pumped out by weapons manufacturers renders satire redundant. In February, Belgium’s FN Herstal displayed some of its shiny new assault pistols and submachine guns at the IDEX arms fair in Abu Dhabi. An explanatory note told us that the Liège-based firm “contributes to maintain and restore international peace and security”.
One day after the exhibition opened, a video appeared on YouTube. It showed a Libyan civilian clasping one of the “special” weapons held by forces under Muammar Gaddafi’s control. Branded an FN-303, the weapon was made by the aforementioned Herstal, as part of its contribution to international peace and security. About 2,000 such weapons were authorised for export to Libya by the Walloon regional government in June 2009. This is by no means the first time that Herstal has profited from grubby deals. Automatic rifles made by the company were found in eastern Congo in 2005, indicating they were used in a war that left nearly 400,000 people dead over the previous two years.
In a prescient report published in November last, the Dutch Campaign Against the Arms Trade cited Libya as one of the clearest cases where EU governments attach greater importance to “export promotion” than to ethical considerations when licensing the arms trade. When Gaddafi was the West’s favourite bogeyman in the mid-1980s, the European Community imposed an arms embargo on Libya. But as soon as it was lifted in 2004, arms exporters scrambled to do business with their new buddies. The British trade association Defence Manufacturers Association rhapsodised in 2005 about how Libya was a “relatively sophisticated customer with a political will to procure equipment”. The “relatively sophisticated” Gaddafi could be persuaded to be anything: one British deal to supply an elite brigade in Libya’s army was worth €100 million.
Since 1998, the EU’s governments have been committed to observing a “code of conduct” on arms exports. Made legally binding a decade later, it requires that weapons are not sold to countries where they are likely to be used for internal repression or to exacerbate regional tensions. Like more than a few policy documents, it looks great on paper and is routinely violated in practice.
It is not difficult to see why. Data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that the arms trade has been largely cushioned from the global recession. In 2009, the volume of sales for the world’s top 100 arms companies amounted to $401 billion, a rise of almost $15 billion over the preceding year. One-third of these companies have their headquarters in Western Europe; they include BAE, EADS, Finmeccanica and Thales.
With their deep pockets, the representatives of these companies have no problem twisting arms in the Brussels bureaucracy and in national capitals of EU countries. Due to their diligent schmoozing, support for the arms industry is being treated as an enterprise promotion dossier in the nominally civilian European Commission. The EU’s multi-annual “framework programme” for scientific research has also been partly hijacked by the arms industry. A little-noticed study completed at the European Parliament’s request in 2010 decried a clash of interests: the same arms companies that persuaded the EU authorities to allocate science grants for “security research” after the 11 September 2001 attacks have been the biggest recipients of those same grants. Out of a sample of 91 projects with a total value of €443 million analysed for that study, the French firm Thales bagged well over half (€254 million) of the cash on offer.
Top-level politicians often double up as salespeople for the arms industry. Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, is pushing for the arms embargo slapped on China after the Tiananmen Square massacre to be scrapped on the grounds that relations with Beijing need to be nurtured for strategic reasons. Proving that she suffers from the same lack of scruples as other top players in New Labour, she is more concerned with drumming up business for the arms industry than in China’s oppression of Uighurs in Xinjiang or Buddhists in Tibet. Proving, too, that mollycoddling the arms industry transcends party lines in British politics, David Cameron toured the Persian Gulf last month with a few of his country’s leading arms traders. Critics of the trade are “completely at odds with reality”, the prime minister thundered.
It is right that a fresh ban on weapons sales to Libya has now been introduced. But we know that such bans can be lifted on the flimsiest of pretexts. The EU officially stopped selling weapons to Uzbekistan after its troops mowed down peaceful protesters at Andizhan in 2005. Four years later, the embargo was removed because the Uzbek authorities were deemed useful allies for NATO’s imperial war in Afghanistan.
At the United Nations, a July 2012 deadline has been set for a global treaty to regulate the arms trade. As weapons-sellers are so powerful, there is only one way to combat them: by massive public pressure. Everything must be done to put merchants of death out of business.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 6-12 March 2011.
The promotional copy pumped out by weapons manufacturers renders satire redundant. In February, Belgium’s FN Herstal displayed some of its shiny new assault pistols and submachine guns at the IDEX arms fair in Abu Dhabi. An explanatory note told us that the Liège-based firm “contributes to maintain and restore international peace and security”.
One day after the exhibition opened, a video appeared on YouTube. It showed a Libyan civilian clasping one of the “special” weapons held by forces under Muammar Gaddafi’s control. Branded an FN-303, the weapon was made by the aforementioned Herstal, as part of its contribution to international peace and security. About 2,000 such weapons were authorised for export to Libya by the Walloon regional government in June 2009. This is by no means the first time that Herstal has profited from grubby deals. Automatic rifles made by the company were found in eastern Congo in 2005, indicating they were used in a war that left nearly 400,000 people dead over the previous two years.
In a prescient report published in November last, the Dutch Campaign Against the Arms Trade cited Libya as one of the clearest cases where EU governments attach greater importance to “export promotion” than to ethical considerations when licensing the arms trade. When Gaddafi was the West’s favourite bogeyman in the mid-1980s, the European Community imposed an arms embargo on Libya. But as soon as it was lifted in 2004, arms exporters scrambled to do business with their new buddies. The British trade association Defence Manufacturers Association rhapsodised in 2005 about how Libya was a “relatively sophisticated customer with a political will to procure equipment”. The “relatively sophisticated” Gaddafi could be persuaded to be anything: one British deal to supply an elite brigade in Libya’s army was worth €100 million.
Since 1998, the EU’s governments have been committed to observing a “code of conduct” on arms exports. Made legally binding a decade later, it requires that weapons are not sold to countries where they are likely to be used for internal repression or to exacerbate regional tensions. Like more than a few policy documents, it looks great on paper and is routinely violated in practice.
It is not difficult to see why. Data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that the arms trade has been largely cushioned from the global recession. In 2009, the volume of sales for the world’s top 100 arms companies amounted to $401 billion, a rise of almost $15 billion over the preceding year. One-third of these companies have their headquarters in Western Europe; they include BAE, EADS, Finmeccanica and Thales.
With their deep pockets, the representatives of these companies have no problem twisting arms in the Brussels bureaucracy and in national capitals of EU countries. Due to their diligent schmoozing, support for the arms industry is being treated as an enterprise promotion dossier in the nominally civilian European Commission. The EU’s multi-annual “framework programme” for scientific research has also been partly hijacked by the arms industry. A little-noticed study completed at the European Parliament’s request in 2010 decried a clash of interests: the same arms companies that persuaded the EU authorities to allocate science grants for “security research” after the 11 September 2001 attacks have been the biggest recipients of those same grants. Out of a sample of 91 projects with a total value of €443 million analysed for that study, the French firm Thales bagged well over half (€254 million) of the cash on offer.
Top-level politicians often double up as salespeople for the arms industry. Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, is pushing for the arms embargo slapped on China after the Tiananmen Square massacre to be scrapped on the grounds that relations with Beijing need to be nurtured for strategic reasons. Proving that she suffers from the same lack of scruples as other top players in New Labour, she is more concerned with drumming up business for the arms industry than in China’s oppression of Uighurs in Xinjiang or Buddhists in Tibet. Proving, too, that mollycoddling the arms industry transcends party lines in British politics, David Cameron toured the Persian Gulf last month with a few of his country’s leading arms traders. Critics of the trade are “completely at odds with reality”, the prime minister thundered.
It is right that a fresh ban on weapons sales to Libya has now been introduced. But we know that such bans can be lifted on the flimsiest of pretexts. The EU officially stopped selling weapons to Uzbekistan after its troops mowed down peaceful protesters at Andizhan in 2005. Four years later, the embargo was removed because the Uzbek authorities were deemed useful allies for NATO’s imperial war in Afghanistan.
At the United Nations, a July 2012 deadline has been set for a global treaty to regulate the arms trade. As weapons-sellers are so powerful, there is only one way to combat them: by massive public pressure. Everything must be done to put merchants of death out of business.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 6-12 March 2011.
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