Death Trading.

Canada has carefully cultivated an image as a peacemaker, but we also make it into the international top-ten list of arms suppliers

Peace activists say Canada is hypocritical: it talks loudly about global peace while, behind the scenes, it is busy peddling weapons to the Third World. Richard Sanders of the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade is a typically vocal opponent of Canadian policy. "Our government makes proud statements about its restrictive arms trade guidelines," he wrote in August 2000, "while encouraging and assisting military producers to make deals that undermine international peace and security."

Canada does indeed try to stop arms getting into the hands of those who make mischief. The mechanism for doing this is the Export Control List (ECL). The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade is the guardian of the ECL, so companies wanting to export military equipment must clear it with the Department first.

Foreign Affairs operates under guidelines which say, in part: "Canada closely controls the export of military goods and technology to countries that are involved in or under imminent threat of hostilities ... and whose governments have a persistent record of serious violations of the human rights of their citizens, unless it can be demonstrated that there is no reasonable risk that the goods might be used against the civilian population."

That sounds reasonably airtight. But, if the export controls are solid how come Canadian companies were selling military equipment to the Indonesian government? Under President Suharto (in power 1968-98), the Indonesian government had a terrible human rights record. The worst excess came in 1991. A large crowd of people gathered in the town of Dili in East Timor. They demonstrated in favour of independence from Indonesia, which invaded and occupied their land in 1976. Indonesian troops opened fire on the demonstrators killing between 100 and 180 civilians.

Yet, five years later, this is what the East Timor Alert Network reported:

"An Access to Information request filed by Parliamentarians for East Timor revealed that in the final four months of 1996 alone, the Canadian government approved five separate export permit applications, valued at a total of $32,285,205.86. This equipment fell into a category described as including: `military vehicles such as armoured personnel carriers and military transport trucks;' `military aircraft and helicopters;' and related parts and components for these categories."

It seems there are loopholes in Canada's military equipment exports controls you can drive a Coyote armoured vehicle through. As Richard Sanders of the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade says, the guidelines "Do not state that Canadian companies cannot sell military equipment to governments engaged in war, or that might be used against civilians. They merely state that such sales will be `closely controlled.'"

But, the federal government has a dilemma; it wants to be ethical but the defence industry is an important source of high technology, research and development, and jobs.

There are the big contractors such as Bombardier, General Electric Canada, and Raytheon Systems. Canada's Department of National Defence does business with 1,500 small companies as well. Some of these, of course, supply inoffensive materials such as paperclips and uniforms, while others do accounting work and management consulting.

In 1997, the Canadian Defence Industries Association conducted a study of the Canadian defence industry, and its economic impact. It determined that, "in 1996, more than 1,500 firms had revenues of $100,000 or more from the defence markets of Canada, the United States, and/or the Rest of World." It said more than 50,000 jobs were generated or supported by those defence revenues.

Some of the defence contractors are heavy hitters that sometimes play rough. When the fuss blew up about Canadian arms being sold to Indonesia, the Department of Foreign Affairs was reluctant to cancel its export permits. The East Timor Alert Network (ETAN) got hold of an internal memo which said "We can expect significant objection by the company, possibly a legal suit, if the permit were to be revoked."

Kerry Pither of ETAN reacted: "If it had come out at the time," she said later, "that the Canadian government was more concerned about being sued by a company than it was about the human cost of supplying equipment ... I think Canadians would have been horrified."

FACT FILE

Amnesty International has reported that human rights abuses are "widespread," "officially sanctioned," or "commonplace," in the following countries: Argentina, Brazil, China, Egypt, Israel, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, Turkey, and Venezuela. All these nations bought Canadian military hardware in 1998.

SUGGESTED ACTIVITY:

Former president of Costa Rica, Oscar Arias wrote the following in an article in The Guardian (England) in 1996: "It seems immoral to justify a few thousand jobs in the West at the expense of pouring more arms into a developing world that does not need them and cannot afford them. If we accept such reasoning, it would not be surprising if a Colombian or Bolivian were to argue that exporting mind-altering drugs is justified because the production of cocaine creates jobs in agricultural, industrial, and commercial sectors." Discuss.

Websites

Canadian Defence Industries
Association
http://www.cdia.ca/

Dept. of Foreign Affairs
& International Trade
http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/
~eicb/export/milit_tech-e.htm

Project Ploughshares
http://www.ploughshares.ca/

RELATED ARTICLE: COMING BACK TO BITE

Many peace activists question the economics of arms sales. There's little doubt that the sale of weapons contributes to the destabilization of developing countries. So, the governments of exporting countries find themselves picking up the pieces of conflicts they indirectly cause. This is what happened in Somalia in 1991. American forces landed there under the United Nations flag to restore peace after a long and bloody civil war. Part of the operation involved collecting weapons that were sold during the 1980s to the Somalian government by the U.S. arms industry. During the action in Somalia, 30 members of the U.S. forces were killed and 175 wounded. In another case, the British government sold arms worth $1 billion U.S. to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. In 1991, Britain was part of the coalition that attacked Iraq during the Gulf War. Understandably, Saddam Hussein refused to pay for the weapons, which he used to threaten British pilots flying over Iraq. And, UN peacekeepers have often found themselves looking at the business end of a weapon supplied by their own country.