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Arms-dealing Blair
SECRET TALKS to secure arms deals and slush funds to
provide lavish gifts to Saudi princes. These are just two examples of
doing business, New Labour style. In September, The Guardian newspaper
reported a breakthrough in investigations by the Serious Fraud Office
that aerospace company, BAE, runs a £60 million slush fund specifically
to promote defence equipment contracts with the Saudi regime. Arrests
were made on money-laundering charges (14 September). Apart from arms
sales, BAE receives more than £1bn a year from Saudi Arabia for running
much of the regime’s air force. Prince Turki bin Nasr, in charge of
long-running arms contracts with BAE Systems (Britain’s biggest arms
company), shipped a fleet of luxury cars out of London.
Behind-the-scenes talks have also involved Saudi
pressure for the extradition from Britain of two ‘dissidents’, and for
dropping the slush fund court action, in return for placing orders worth
£40 billion in the Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft, in which BAE has a
large stake. Mike Turner, BAE’s chief executive, seems to be very
understanding: "They [Saudi leaders] don’t, rightly, like the fact that
members of their royal family are being named in our press". (The
Guardian, 27 September)
Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, backs the
deal. His brother Charles, Lord Powell, is a Downing Street insider – he
was Margaret Thatcher’s foreign affairs adviser and is a BAE consultant.
Blair went to the Saudi capital, Riyadh, on 2 July, his defence
secretary stooge, John Reid, made a two-day visit three weeks later.
Reid met with Prince Naif, the interior minister responsible for the
secret police.
There are some contradictory pressures, however, on
different government departments. The Foreign Office is uneasy because
any Typhoon deal would include sending British technicians and their
families to Saudi Arabia – on top of those already in place to service
Tornado warplanes. These present targets for terrorism and increase the
risk of attacks in Britain. One of the recurrent themes of al-Qa’ida
propaganda is the presence of US and other foreign forces on ‘Islamic
soil’, which is used to justify terrorist attacks.
The Saudi regime is pressuring Blair to extradite
Mohammed al-Masari, who fled Saudi Arabia in 1994. Al-Masari is linked
to a radio station which has supported attacks on British troops in
Iraq. The request to expel Saad al-Faqih, who has been granted asylum,
has created more controversy. Neither the Foreign Office nor security
forces claim that he is a danger to Britain.
Saudi Arabia also wants British Airways to resume
flights to the country which were postponed in March after a series of
terrorist attacks.
Prince Naif previously had offered the release of
British citizens falsely arrested (and tortured) for bombings – which
turned out to be the work of al-Qa’ida – in exchange for the expulsion
of al-Faqih. The Blair government did nothing to help them. Bill
Sampson, one of those arrested, commented: "The British government was
more concerned to maintain BAE’s contracts with the Saudi Arabians than
to protect British citizens… He [Prince Naif] used us as a bargaining
chip. It is clear that Faqih is non-violent and the most popular
dissident opposing the Saudi regime". (The Guardian, 28 September)
According to the same article, the government had agreed to expel al-Masari
and al-Faqih. Sampson and the others detained are attempting to sue
Saudi secret police in the British courts.
Apart from the Saudi scandal, the New Labour
government is involved in an aggressive sales drive of weapons of mass
destruction, as well as tools of repression. The biennial Defence
Systems and Equipment international (DSEi) exhibition held in East
London, mid-September, provided a great opportunity. Britain is
established as the second-largest arms market worldwide, after the US.
The war and occupation of Iraq enables companies to boast that their
products are ‘battle-tested’. There were companies (for example, TAR
Ideal, from Israel) specialising in leg irons and 300,000-volt stun
guns, both banned for export under British law.
Organisers of the arms fair claimed that the
companies were only advertising these barbaric tools of repression, not
selling them. That made it OK. Alex Nicholl, DSEi director, even
objected to the term ‘arms fair’: "People can’t just walk in off the
street and buy weapons". But it’s not ordinary people we have to worry
about. Rather, it is repressive regimes, such as Algeria, China,
Colombia, Indonesia, Jordan, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam, all
invited to the show, which carry the greatest threat to working-class
people.
The arms fair was organised by Spearhead, which is
owned by the massive publishing group, Reed Elsevier. This earned an
editorial rebuke from the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, which
is published by Reed Elsevier. Apart from condemning the arms trade and
its incompatibility with a medical journal, The Lancet made the point
that poor countries waste billions of dollars on weaponry which could go
to civilian use. In 2004, for example, 59% of arms sales went to
‘developing countries’ - $22 billion (£12bn). This money should be spent
raising people out of poverty, providing healthcare, sanitation,
accommodation, education, training and decent jobs.
The bill for policing this festival of destruction –
including 1,000 police officers a day deployed on or around the site –
and for providing junkets for state leaders has been passed onto the
taxpayer. DSEi organisers were asked for a contribution but refused!
Denel, a South African company, makes and supplies
cluster bombs (as do BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin of the US), which
featured in its catalogues at the arms fair. These are not deemed
illegal under so-called ‘international law’, but groups such as the Red
Cross/Crescent and Human Rights Watch oppose them because of their
indiscriminate nature. Denel markets a 155mm shell which disperses 42
drink-can-size bomblets over an area 200m by 200m. Many of the bomblets
fail to explode and are subsequently detonated when people tread on
them, or when children, attracted to their bright colours, pick them up.
Paul Beaver, DSEi spokesman, was dismissive: "There are far worse
weapons, you know". Unicef, the United Nations children’s organisation,
reported that more than 1,000 children were injured by unexploded bombs
after the official end of the Iraq war in 2003. British and US forces
used 13,000 cluster bombs in Iraq in that year alone. (The Independent,
14 September)
There seems to be no end to BAE’s murky deals. It
has recently come to light that it paid millions of dollars into the
secret bank accounts of Chile’s former dictator, General Augusto
Pinochet. The Chilean judge, Sergio Muñoz, has unearthed documents of
payments totalling $2.1 million from 1997 to July 2004. These payments
were to ‘facilitate’ arms and weapons system sales to Chile and other
Latin American states. Pinochet was discovered to have held over 100
accounts in the names of family members, his lawyers and in false names.
(The Guardian, 15 September)
These revelations show the endemic corruption within
the arms trade, and which is replicated throughout the capitalist
system. Everything is up for sale including, it seems, government asylum
policy. Blair and his cronies are pursuing the same old methods of
previous Tory and Labour administrations. It is a far cry from New
Labour’s pronouncements that it would implement an ‘ethical foreign
policy’, made when it came to power in 1997.
Billions of dollars go on research and development
into the most efficient means of destroying people and property. That
money and the skills of technicians and workers in the arms industry
should go on research to provide medical treatment and nutrition to all
people, and to tackle such massive global problems as environmental
destruction. Such a shift of emphasis is not possible under the current
capitalist economic system, based as it is on cut-throat competition in
the drive for profits between corporations and the nation states on
which they are based. It would require a system based on collective
organisation and international cooperation: democratic socialism in
which the working class owns, controls, manages and plans the economy.
Manny Thain
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