What do bagpipes have to do with the war in Libya? On NATO’s website, you can read about Marc Forterre, a French colonel and avid piper, whose musical instrument was mistaken for a weapon by airport staff in Addis Ababa. It would make a charming vignette, if it wasn’t for how the tale segues into editorialising about how the alliance helps the African Union to conduct its own military operations.
This celebration of trans-continental harmony is deceitful. It omits any acknowledgment of how most African governments are at odds with NATO over its attacks on Libya – and with good reason.
Apologists for the war maintain that it is based on the “responsibility to protect”, a concept usually abbreviated as R2P. Yet by examining past comments of James Jones, the decorated general who was Barack Obama’s national security adviser until November last, we might get a more accurate explanation. “As commander of NATO, I worried early in the mornings about how to protect energy facilities and supply chain routes as far away as Africa, the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea,” Jones said in 2008. (It is instructive that he joined the board of Chevron earlier that year).
Though the main tenets of R2P look laudable, the background of its chief proponent Gareth Evans can only arouse suspicion. When he was Australia’s foreign minister in 1989, Evans signed the Timor Gap Treaty with his then Indonesian counterpart Ali Alatas. This enabled the theft of oil resources off East Timor, where 250,000 people died in one of the twentieth century’s most brutal occupations.
Just as the motives of a sham humanitarian like Evans should be questioned, doubts must be cast on Obama’s sincerity when he defended bombing Libya on the pretext “we were faced with the prospect of violence on a horrific scale”. Could the haste with which the West intervened not have more to do with Libya boasting Africa’s largest proven oil reserves? And were Western leaders and their chums in BP and Total not jittery over threats made by Muammar Gaddafi in 2009 (and reiterated in the past few weeks) to nationalise those resources?
Yes, it may be too reductionist to describe what is happening in Libya as another war for oil. The truth is probably that it is not only a war for oil but also to assert the control of America and its European stooges over Africa.
Having already declared war in Europe (Serbia) and taken charge of one in Asia (Afghanistan), it was perhaps logical that NATO would soon stretch its imperial tentacles into Africa. In 2007, Africom, its command for operations in Africa, was set up. “Factsheets” churned out from Africom’s headquarters in Stuttgart bragged of support for health, education and water projects. Yet that mask of charity belies a remark made by Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, then NATO’s secretary-general, the previous year, when he said the alliance was willing to use warplanes to secure oil and gas supply routes from Africa.
No war is fought for noble motives. If you really think that Sarkozy or Obama wished to protect civilian lives, study the eyewitness account signed by Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian doctors working in Libya on 24 March. They document how dozens of innocent people were killed and maimed by NATO bombs falling on residential areas of Tajhura, a suburb of Tripoli. The onslaught led to the roof collapsing in the maternity ward of a hospital, causing numerous miscarriages.
This serves as a reminder of how NATO bombed Serbia in 1999. On that occasion, a children’s hospital in Belgrade’s embassy district was targeted. As Michel Chossudovsky, a Canadian economist, points out on the website Global Research, sleeping babies were spared by the alliance’s missiles. Generators were hit instead, depriving incubators of power.
Moreover, there is a distinct possibility that the consequences of NATO’s actions will continue to be felt in Libya long after the bombs have stopped falling, especially if those bombs were coated with depleted uranium (DU). While the Pentagon has said it has no reports that the substance is being used, the A-10 Warthogs flown by the US Air Force are equipped with guns designed to fire DU-tipped munitions.
I called a NATO spokesman to ask if the alliance has any policy or rules on depleted uranium. “The jury is still out scientifically on what the ramifications and dangers of using it are,” the spokesman told me. That appears to me as a flimsy attempt to justify the unjustifiable. While it may be impossible to prove that the upsurge of childhood cancer found in Iraq following the First Gulf War (1991) was linked to DU, there is ample circumstantial evidence to suggest it can have lethal consequences. Jawad Khadim al-Ali, an Iraqi doctor, is among those to have found an abnormally high incidence of cancer in parts of Basra where intense bombardment took place.
If you still need reasons why NATO should not be trusted, check out Rolling Stone’s new account of what young soldiers serving with the alliance got up to in Afghanistan. After Andrew Holmes, a corporal, nonchalantly shot dead an unarmed farmer, his squad leader presented him with the man’s finger as a trophy.
“Our values are firmly based on freedom, democracy and the rule of law,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s secretary general and former Danish premier, said at the end of March. How are those values compatible with rewarding a murderer?
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 3-9 April 2011
Showing posts with label East Timor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label East Timor. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
EU Boosts Arms Manufacturers
Arms traders are to be given a central role in formulating a new European Union (EU) blueprint for stimulating weapons production, it has been confirmed.
The EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, announced Mar. 31 that it is to draw up an action plan for how small and medium-sized companies that manufacture military goods or their components can be strengthened.
Dagmar Metzger, an EU official overseeing support for the weapons industry, said that contact between civil servants in Brussels and arms traders will be increased. The AeroSpace and Defence Industries Association of Europe (ASD), an umbrella group for arms-makers, is to be intimately involved in deciding the plan’s contents.
Metzger would not comment on the ethical and human rights issues surrounding the arms trade. “We make defence industrial policy,” she said. “We are not talking about core military business. We are not supporting military exports, the production of weapons, arms, whatever. We are only talking about industrial policy, nothing else.”
She nonetheless acknowledged that EU officials are examining the possibility of establishing an internet-based service, through which small-scale arms companies could become aware of new calls for tender to supply armed forces across the Union. “The action plan shouldn’t be just a piece of paper,” she added. “It has to be filled with life.”
Six states account for an estimated 87 percent of all weapons production in the EU: France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Spain. Traditionally, the governments of these countries have been wary of developing weapons jointly with outsiders, while the military-industrial sector has been exempt from EU rules on competition applying to other economic activities. Last year, though, the Commission proposed two laws requiring that most military contracts published in one EU country should be open to firms in another and that the procedures covering the movement of weapons within the Union should be simplified.
According to observers, most of the EU’s policy decisions on armaments in recent years are almost identical to recommendations made by the arms lobby. In 2004, the arms trade received a considerable boost when the European Defence Agency (EDA) was established with the explicit objective of assisting EU governments to build up their arsenals. At that time, the three largest arms companies this side of the Atlantic – BAE, EADS and Thales – issued a joint statement predicting that the agency would be a “vital tool” in raising military expenditure. Between them, the firms involved had supplied the weapons that fuelled some of the bloodiest conflicts of the past 50 years. BAE’s precursor British Aerospace, for example, made the Hawk jets that Indonesia’s former military dictatorship used in attacks on civilians in East Timor, where one-third of the island’s 600,000-strong population was wiped out between 1975 and its eventual independence in 1999.
The idea of a web-service that would drum up business for smaller weapons-makers – with less than 250 staff - follows on from the ‘electronic bulletin board’ that the EDA runs for major firms. By mid-March this year, this database had published details of almost 480 contract opportunities. Some 290 contracts with a combined value of over 4 billion euros (5.4 billion dollars) have been awarded following their publication by the agency.
Tomas Baum, director of the Flemish Peace Institute, which conducts research on the global arms trade, said that the European Commission is eager to encourage arms production by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), rather than leaving such production to the usual corporate giants. “The Commission is very smart at playing the game,” he said. “There has been a very big resistance by (EU) member states to liberalising the internal market (for military goods). Now the Commission is using SMEs to again attack the hegemony of big industry in this area.”
Another item on the wish-list of arms companies is that they should enjoy greater access to the EU’s scientific research grants, which total 53 billion euros for the 2007-13 period. Since the 11 September 2001 atrocities, the Commission has rewritten the rules covering its multi-annual programmes for research to enable the funding of security projects of a nominally civilian nature such as those covering the emergency response to acts of large-scale violence. The possibility of widening the scope of the programme to include hardcore military research is being considered, EU officials have admitted.
Israel, the main foreign partner of the EU’s research programme, has been a key beneficiary of the decision to extend the remit to “security”. Israeli firms and universities, including those that have developed weapons and other technology used in the occupied Palestinian territories, have taken part in 12 of the 58 “security research” projects financed by the EU to date.
Frank Slijper from the Dutch Campaign Against the Arms Trade said that it would be logical for the Commission to recommend that purely military research should be financed directly from the EU’s budget. “The Commission and industry says time and again that there is no real boundary between civilian and military,” he added. “The two areas are so mixed.”
Slijper lamented that the growing EU support for the arms industry is not being subject to proper democratic scrutiny. “Brussels in general is very unreceptive to people who are critical of their views,” he said. “They want to bolster their projects and they don’t like people who start asking difficult questions about the ethical aspects of these projects. This is an area of the EU’s work that is happening outside the public view. People in Brussels prefer to keep it that way.”
First published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net)
The EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, announced Mar. 31 that it is to draw up an action plan for how small and medium-sized companies that manufacture military goods or their components can be strengthened.
Dagmar Metzger, an EU official overseeing support for the weapons industry, said that contact between civil servants in Brussels and arms traders will be increased. The AeroSpace and Defence Industries Association of Europe (ASD), an umbrella group for arms-makers, is to be intimately involved in deciding the plan’s contents.
Metzger would not comment on the ethical and human rights issues surrounding the arms trade. “We make defence industrial policy,” she said. “We are not talking about core military business. We are not supporting military exports, the production of weapons, arms, whatever. We are only talking about industrial policy, nothing else.”
She nonetheless acknowledged that EU officials are examining the possibility of establishing an internet-based service, through which small-scale arms companies could become aware of new calls for tender to supply armed forces across the Union. “The action plan shouldn’t be just a piece of paper,” she added. “It has to be filled with life.”
Six states account for an estimated 87 percent of all weapons production in the EU: France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Spain. Traditionally, the governments of these countries have been wary of developing weapons jointly with outsiders, while the military-industrial sector has been exempt from EU rules on competition applying to other economic activities. Last year, though, the Commission proposed two laws requiring that most military contracts published in one EU country should be open to firms in another and that the procedures covering the movement of weapons within the Union should be simplified.
According to observers, most of the EU’s policy decisions on armaments in recent years are almost identical to recommendations made by the arms lobby. In 2004, the arms trade received a considerable boost when the European Defence Agency (EDA) was established with the explicit objective of assisting EU governments to build up their arsenals. At that time, the three largest arms companies this side of the Atlantic – BAE, EADS and Thales – issued a joint statement predicting that the agency would be a “vital tool” in raising military expenditure. Between them, the firms involved had supplied the weapons that fuelled some of the bloodiest conflicts of the past 50 years. BAE’s precursor British Aerospace, for example, made the Hawk jets that Indonesia’s former military dictatorship used in attacks on civilians in East Timor, where one-third of the island’s 600,000-strong population was wiped out between 1975 and its eventual independence in 1999.
The idea of a web-service that would drum up business for smaller weapons-makers – with less than 250 staff - follows on from the ‘electronic bulletin board’ that the EDA runs for major firms. By mid-March this year, this database had published details of almost 480 contract opportunities. Some 290 contracts with a combined value of over 4 billion euros (5.4 billion dollars) have been awarded following their publication by the agency.
Tomas Baum, director of the Flemish Peace Institute, which conducts research on the global arms trade, said that the European Commission is eager to encourage arms production by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), rather than leaving such production to the usual corporate giants. “The Commission is very smart at playing the game,” he said. “There has been a very big resistance by (EU) member states to liberalising the internal market (for military goods). Now the Commission is using SMEs to again attack the hegemony of big industry in this area.”
Another item on the wish-list of arms companies is that they should enjoy greater access to the EU’s scientific research grants, which total 53 billion euros for the 2007-13 period. Since the 11 September 2001 atrocities, the Commission has rewritten the rules covering its multi-annual programmes for research to enable the funding of security projects of a nominally civilian nature such as those covering the emergency response to acts of large-scale violence. The possibility of widening the scope of the programme to include hardcore military research is being considered, EU officials have admitted.
Israel, the main foreign partner of the EU’s research programme, has been a key beneficiary of the decision to extend the remit to “security”. Israeli firms and universities, including those that have developed weapons and other technology used in the occupied Palestinian territories, have taken part in 12 of the 58 “security research” projects financed by the EU to date.
Frank Slijper from the Dutch Campaign Against the Arms Trade said that it would be logical for the Commission to recommend that purely military research should be financed directly from the EU’s budget. “The Commission and industry says time and again that there is no real boundary between civilian and military,” he added. “The two areas are so mixed.”
Slijper lamented that the growing EU support for the arms industry is not being subject to proper democratic scrutiny. “Brussels in general is very unreceptive to people who are critical of their views,” he said. “They want to bolster their projects and they don’t like people who start asking difficult questions about the ethical aspects of these projects. This is an area of the EU’s work that is happening outside the public view. People in Brussels prefer to keep it that way.”
First published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net)
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