By Edmund Cairns
February 8, 2000
The case of Kenya: In 1998 (the most recent year for figures for arms exports), the department of trade and industry approved licences for the sale of machine-gun parts, rifles and ammunition to Kenya. It is difficult to imagine how these are consistent with the aims of preventing conflict and eradicating poverty as stated by Clare Short's department for international development and pursued with £34m of bilateral aid to Kenya in 1998-99.
With one hand, the government seeks to cut the external debt of poor countries, on condition resources are not squandered on weapons of war. With the other, it supplies or does little to prevent the supply of aircraft and arms to the same countries.
It is in Africa - 14 ongoing armed conflicts, 8m displaced people - that the incoherence of arms and aid is most apparent.This is perhaps why a new effort is being made inside Whitehall to make policy towards sub-Saharan Africa more "joined up".
As part of the 2000 comprehensive spending review - which means the treasury is in the driving seat - Clare Short is leading a policy review on conflict prevention in sub-Saharan Africa to "consider how the UK's objective for conflict prevention in this region can best be defined and delivered. The review will also consider the scope for applying conclusions to conflict prevention worldwide".
Meanwhile Robin Cook is repackaging foreign policy, replacing the vexing word "ethical" with the message that the UK's national interest is the global interest and vice versa. Such language of enlightened self-interest should appeal more to other ministers, notably those in defence and trade, who never quite took to the ethical dimension. Can Labour combine the promotion of human rights and encouragement to trade within the same policy? Africa is its supreme test.
UK investment in sub-Saharan Africa totalled £4.9bn in 1997. Trade is concentrated on South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. Together they account for 72% of exports to Africa, which were worth £2.7bn in 1999. (This represents 1.8% of total UK exports for January-November last year.) The short-term national interest might seem limited to seeing that these dominant African economies are stable and maximising trade in specific sectors, such as arms.
But the UK's long-term self-interest also lies in such huge potential markets and sources of natural resources as Angola and the Congo, countries blighted by violence. South Africa shows how, once seemingly intractable conflicts have been resolved, things come good for UK plc too. The British trainers helping to integrate apartheid-age enemies into the South African army, paid for by the ministry of defence and the foreign office, represent the kind of initiative which could be more widely applied with additional funds. Such training cannot be supported by Clare Short's department despite recognising its importance in countries emerging from conflict.
British interests go wider than commerce. Governments in modern democracies where media are strong have an interest in responding to what electorates judge to be wrong: brutal wars and extreme poverty head the list. Public opinion has an ethical dimension. Following it, the government has to do what it can to reduce war and conflict in Africa.
Labour has recognised that if you want to reduce conflict, you have to reduce poverty. At its crudest, former fighters are unlikely to sit playing cards if they are hungry. In Sierra Leone, the UK has led the way in paying for demobilising ex-combatants. What is good for development is good for peace. The decision by Gordon Brown and Clare Short on debt will help make a number of countries, from Uganda to Mozambique, more stable as well as less poor. As a motor for peaceful development, universal primary education could also help reduce conflicts.
The spending review is an opportunity to increase funds. Whitehall departments are already involved in promoting human rights and the democratic control of some armies in Africa. The treasury should allow them more money to carry on the work.
The review has its limits. It is not tackling tension between spending on Africa and commercial policy. Despite Robin Cook's assertion about the coincidence of global and national interests, the maxim is being taken to heart in some departments more than others, notably the department of trade and industry. The trade secretary, Stephen Byers, won praise from African governments in December for seeking to make the World Trade Organisation more open to their opinions. But there are too many counter-examples showing the DTI promoting exports or investment oblivious to the fact that there are wars going on. In 1998, Clare Short and the foreign office were calling for peace in Sudan. The DTI's best advice to British companies was that "the oil sector in Sudan is one of tremendous opportunity", failing to mention that the Sudan government depends on oil to pay for its wars. Two years later, the DTI's website is still offers similar advice.
The problem is that trade and investment are promoted with little or no regard for their impact on conflict. The problem is not the arms trade as such. We see it that way because defence exports are big and comparatively speaking the UK economy depends heavily on the manufacture and sale of arms. Commercial policy, most evidently on arms, is too rarely based on stabilising large potential markets in the future. Maintaining the defence sector sometimes rides roughshod over the government's own criteria for licensing arms exports.
Such tensions show up clearly in Africa policy, to which senior government ministers give far less attention than their counterparts in the US or France. The debate is whether ministers focus more on the arms the UK wants to sell today or on the peace and markets it might want in 10 or 20 years. They should choose the latter and start rowing in the same direction.
Edmund Cairns is a senior policy adviser at Oxfam
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