Mideast Arms Buyers Shun U.N. Register

DISARMAMENT: Mideast Arms Buyers Shun U.N. Register
Thalif Deen
http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/interna.asp?idnews=25721

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 4 (IPS) – The U.N.’s annual arms register, created
about 12 years ago to ensure military transparency among member states,
continues to be shunned by some of the world’s biggest arms buyers in
the Middle East and by key arms exporters such as China.

Of the 191 member states only 60 countries have consistently
participated in the register, which records governments’ voluntary
submissions on arms imports and exports.

A total of 167 governments have reported at least once, while 108 states
have participated at least six times. The latest register issued last
week contains data and information on arms transactions from 106
governments.

But absent from the list are declarations from countries such as Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — four of the
largest arms buyers in the Middle East.

But even arms exporters, including the United States, France, Britain,
Russia and Germany, are reluctant to reveal their Middle East clients,
particularly if there are ”non-disclosure” clauses in their military
contracts. As a result, these transactions fail to get into the
register.

According to the latest figures released by the U.S. Government
Accountability Office (GAO), Washington provided over 74 billion dollars
worth of weapons and military training to Middle Eastern nations during
1991-2000.

The updated figure through 2004 would be over 80 billion dollars,
according to military analysts monitoring the Middle East.

The largest single arms buyer was Saudi Arabia, accounting for about
33.5 billion dollars worth of U.S. weapons, followed by Israel (18.8
billion dollars), Egypt (12.7 billion dollars), Kuwait (5.5 billion
dollars) and the UAE (1.4 billion dollars).

The weapons delivered included state-of-the-art fighter planes, combat
helicopters, warships, sophisticated missile systems, armoured personnel
carriers and battle tanks.

Although Israel is the only major Middle Eastern arms buyer that is a
regular participant in the U.N. register, it is also the primary
political reason why Arab nations boycott the project.

”We have no intentions of participating in the register as long as
Israel gets away with its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons,” an
Arab diplomat told IPS.

The register records arms imports and exports in seven specific
categories of conventional weapons: battle tanks, armoured combat
vehicles, large calibre artillery systems, fighter aircraft, attack
helicopters, warships and missiles and missile launchers.

But it excludes both weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and also small
arms, the weapons of choice in ongoing civil wars and ethnic conflicts
worldwide, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Egypt made its only submission to the register in 1992, the year it was
created. Jordan, Qatar, Lebanon and Libya have made occasional
declarations, and Oman and Tunisia only once.

As a result, the Middle East, described as the world’s largest single
market for conventional arms, does not figure prominently in any of the
12 arms registers released since its creation.

”Transparency in arms possession is a well-established objective in the
arms limitation field, although it is not a disarmament measure per
se,” says Jayantha Dhanapala, a former U.N. under-secretary-general for
disarmament affairs.

”Nations are less suspicious of each other if they know the details of
each other’s arsenals and this confidence-building measure leads,
hopefully, to arms reductions so that we have security at much lower
levels of armaments than we do today, consuming a staggering 956 billion
dollars on military expenditure in the last year,” Dhanapala told IPS.

He pointed out that the register has expanded both ”quantitatively and
qualitatively” since its inception in 1992.

”Despite the lack of universal participation, the register does cover a
substantial area of the arms trade in the seven categories of major
conventional weapons,” he added.

Asked about the absence of WMDs, Dhanapala said that a German proposal
for a parallel Nuclear Arms Register and other calls for small arms
registers in specific regions ”would help to extend the principle of
transparency in arms, and encourage fuller participation in the arms
register.”

China, one of the world’s five major arms exporters, is also conspicuous
by its absence. So are most countries on the African continent.

China did declare its arms imports and exports during 1992-1996. But it
has boycotted the register since 1997 on the ground that the United
States is giving legitimacy to China’s ”renegade province” by
including Taiwan in its official list of military clients.

Until and unless Taiwan is removed from the U.S. list, China has said it
will not be a party to the document.

”The arms register has many of the same strengths and weaknesses now as
when it was first implemented more than a decade ago,” says Natalie
Goldring, executive director of the Security Studies Programme in the
Edmund A Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in
Washington DC.

Its major strength is that it is the only global document on the weapons
trade that consists solely of official government data, she says. In
addition, participation in it continues to be strong, with more than 100
countries reporting already, and more submissions expected in the coming
weeks.

”Unfortunately, the register still does not meet the needs of those
countries in which small arms are taking such a tremendous toll,”
Goldring told IPS.

She said there is little incentive for countries in Africa to
participate, for example, because the small arms and light weapons that
are primarily used for killing in those countries are not included in
the register.

”As U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on the 10th anniversary of
the register’s implementation, it could be a tool for early warning of
military build-ups and potential conflict”.

”But to serve as such a tool, the register must be strengthened
substantially,” said Goldring, who has written more than a dozen
monographs, book chapters and articles — both on the arms register and
on conventional weapons transfers — over the last decade.

A group of U.N. arms experts has already recommended that the register
be expanded by lowering the reporting threshold of artillery systems
from 100mm to 75mm and by including “man portable” air defence systems
(MANPADS) as a sub-category under the existing category of missiles and
missile launchers.

Also, according to Goldring, ”if the United States showed restraint in
its arms transfers, it would be in a markedly better position to
encourage other countries to do the same.” (END/2004)

TRANSPARENCY IN ARMAMENTS
United Nations Register of Conventional Arms
http://disarmament2.un.org/cab/register.html