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Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council: Issues and Debates With End of Cold War,
Experts Say Arms Now Sold Like CommoditiesBy Harmonie Toros
Associated Press
June 22, 2000
Superpower control of the arms trade has disappeared with the end of the Cold War and weapons have become simple commodities, bought and sold with little restraint, experts say.
The need to regulate the international trade of weapons - both conventional weapons and small arms - was at the center of a panel at U.N. headquarters Wednesday on the "restructuring of the global arms industry and its implications."
There is a "growing commerce of defense trade to a point where arms are considered a commodity," said Janne Nolan, who researched military spending in developing countries and participated in a U.S. presidential review board on the arms trade.
Even a representative of the arms industry - Joel Johnson of the Aerospace Industries Association - said that with the end of the Cold War "the discipline has gone out of the system." "During the battle days of the Cold War, at least you had two superpowers each of which had some control over its own block," Johnson said, referring to the United States and the former Soviet Union. "Most arms producers today are not global powers, other than the United States, and tend to think in regional not global terms," he said.
Johnson pointed to the example of the French, who sold Mirage jets to Iraq, not imagining they would be fighting the Iraqis during the 1991 Gulf War. During the war "the French realized that they couldn't fly their own Mirages because no one could tell the difference between their Mirages and the Iraqi Mirages," he said.
In the United States, President Clinton issued a directive in 1995 which recognized "that the United States would sell arms with defense industrial interests in mind," Nolan said. "The fig leaf that we did not sell arms for profit ... was finally removed irrevocably," she said.
To stop weapons from getting into the wrong hands, more internationally binding agreements are needed, the experts said.
Natalie Goldring, of the program on disarmament at the University of Maryland, listed a number of measures countries could take, including the destruction of surplus weapons and the registration, licensing and marking of weapons.
And marking should not be limited to arms, but also to items traded for weapons such as diamonds, she said. Britain has proposed that the Security Council impose an embargo on the sale of Sierra Leone diamonds, whose proceeds are being used to finance rebel arms purchases.
Greater control of the arms trade could be achieved with the agreement of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, argued William Hartung, an expert on international arms trade at the New York-based World Policy Institute.
The five - the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China - "control about 80 to 85 percent of value of the global trade of weapons," Hartung said.
Controlling the trade of small arms, which are responsible for most of the deaths in today's wars, is particularly difficult. "These things are cheap, plentiful. You can get surplus, you can get new production, so it's very hard to even know how big the supply is," noted Hartung, adding that part of the small arms used in today's wars could come from stockpiles remaining from the Cold War era in South Asia, Central America or Africa.
Many of these issues are expected to be on the agenda at a U.N. conference on small arms scheduled in June 2001.
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