An abject attitude to arms sales in the US presidential election
When a Mexican man was executed in Texas in 1997 there was a bit of a row because not only had he signed his "confession" in English, a language he didn't understand, he was denied access to the Mexican consul. After his execution Governor George W. Bush issued a statement that since Texas had not signed the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations it was not bound by it.
But the US had and it was legally binding on all states. Is this a forewarning of how a President Bush would treat the rest of the world -- with, putting it at its mildest, nothing less than arrogant contempt? As for a President Al Gore he shows every sign of walking in Bill Clinton's footsteps, with perhaps an even heavier tread. He seems, too often, to regard the Pentagon as the arm of government that calls the major shots on foreign policy and as being the last in line to have their toes trodden on.
Illustration: Mountain People
In sum when it comes to such questions as arms sales, the issue which presidential candidate Jimmy Carter described as a "cancer," it is no nearer forward being operated on than was Carter's own aborted attempt.
In Clinton's first term Amnesty International questioned the US government about the use of American military helicopters and armored vehicles allegedly involved in human rights violations in Turkey. Under pressure from Congress the State Department compiled a report on human rights violations by the Turkish armed forces. It concluded there was "highly credible" evidence that US-supplied arms and jet fighters had been used to violently subdue Kurdish villages in a totally excessive way.
In 1996, the US temporarily suspended the sale of advanced attack helicopters. But two years later there were fresh reports that hundreds more armored vehicles had been sold. The US Defence Secretary visited Turkey and reportedly lobbied on behalf of American companies wishing to co-produce advanced helicopters there. In that same year an American company sold 10,000 electric shock weapons to the Turkish police.
In Afghanistan where American weapons were supplied en masse with no questions asked to help repulse the invading army of the Soviet Union, 20 years later the country is so overrun with arms there is no recognized stable government, only armed factions, and the country has lapsed into becoming little more than heroin producing businesses which make a living by satisfying the appetites of the international drug mafia. Ironically the State Department recently pinpointed this corner of South Asia (including Pakistan) as a new terrorist "hub." In Angola, American arms supplied over years to UNITA, the guerrilla movement hostile to the pro-Soviet central government, helped stoke a war that is now so out of control that the country is without any central services to speak of and has become the country in Africa, despite its incredible mineral wealth, that is the most ill-fed and disease prone of all.
In Nicaragua, arms supplied by the Reagan Administration in secret defiance of Congressional writ kept alive a civil war that could have been ended much earlier than it eventually was, by compromise and elections.
After the great Indonesian army massacre in East Timor in 1991, the US formally cut its so-called International Military and Education Training Programme for the Indonesian army. But in March 1988, leaked documents revealed that the US government had secretly used another little known aid effort -- the Joint Combined Exchange and Training Programme -- to train the Indonesian army, including its notorious special forces command, in close quarters combat, sniper techniques and psychological operations. US combat troops participated in at least 41 exercises between 1992 and 1997, despite the build-up of human rights abuses which led in 1998 to the overthrow of the country's ruthless dictator, Suharto.
Today the US government, with Clinton brushing aside Congressional human rights restrictions, is starting to supply large amounts of weapons to Colombia for its army to engage in anti-narcotics operations and hunting down leftist guerrillas although this will put the US and its military advisors in cahoots with an army not only known for its massive human rights violations but its ties to ruthless rightist paramilitary groups that are also up to their eyes in the drug business.
Under Section 502 B of the Foreign Assistance Act, the US is required to cut off all security assistance to any government which "engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognised human rights" unless the president deems there are "extraordinary circumstances." In practice Section 502 B has never been used. Likewise, Congress has never formally blocked a sale proposed by the executive, although a few sales have been delayed, modified or withdrawn. In 1994 President Clinton was the first world leader to call for the elimination of anti-personnel mines, which have inherently indiscriminate effects resulting in innumerable civilian deaths and injuries. Yet when 122 states signed the Ottawa convention in 1997 prohibiting the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of mines the signature of the US was conspicuously absent. The governments of China, Egypt, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia and South Korea also refused to sign.
The UN has scheduled for next year a Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons, a timely move in the light of the evidence that these, in the words of an Amnesty International report, were "the principal weapons used to commit human rights abuses in the world's many internal conflicts during the 1990s, where more than 80 percent of the casualties have been women and children." Will the new US Administration whose predecessors have given almost zero scrutiny of US foreign sales of small arms, show any interest? Or will it be once again George W. Bush assuming that international statutes or resolutions are water off a duck's back or Al Gore maintaining that the Pentagon must go at its own pace? So it seems.
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