Global Policy Forum

By Alan Boyd*

An ambitious arms-control initiative is under the gun from a new generation of manufacturers as negotiators race the clock to secure a global agreement that will keep conventional weapons out of the hands of extremists. A deadline for the adoption of the United Nations' Arms Trade Treaty expires on Monday, with China expected to lead a Third World revolt against tougher controls. And it may have found an unlikely ally in the United States.

When support for the pact was first tested in the UN General Assembly in December, the US was the only one of 178 participating countries opposed. China and 24 other countries abstained. Under a compromise deal, negotiators were given until April 30 to present their cases for a treaty that would impose a more responsible marketing code on arms manufacturers and distributors, especially in volatile developing countries.

Britain, France, Germany and Spain, four of the biggest weapons dealers, have said they will vote in favor. But the coalition of non-government organizations (NGOs) and human-rights activists behind the treaty is more worried about the emerging proliferation of smaller producers.

There are an estimated 1,300 arms companies in almost 100 countries vying for a US$1 trillion market that sells eight million new weapons each year. A decade ago there were far fewer manufacturers, and they had a totally different motivation. "Arms sales have traditionally been packaged as part of foreign-policy or national-security objectives ... this was certainly the case during the Cold War years, but now there is more of an economic motivation," said a diplomat involved in arms-control negotiations.

"Naturally, it becomes harder to find common ground for a treaty when you have so many countries with an economic stake. This is a situation that is harder to control, as there is the risk they may have fewer scruples in selling to what I would consider to be unstable regimes."

The US, Britain, France, Germany and Russia collectively account for about 85% of global arms sales, with China next in the rankings. US firms alone cornered $14 billion of the market in 2005, three times more than any other country. But since 1990 the number of new firms in the top 100 manufacturers has more than doubled. India and South Korea now have three companies each on the list, Israel four and Singapore one. Data on Chinese producers are not released, but three are believed to be of this scale.

Arms Without Borders, a study released by non-government organizations last year, reported that participation of Asian countries at a regional defense exhibition between 1999 and 2006, one gauge of increased production activity, rose threefold. There were 17 Indian manufacturers at the Kuala Lumpur show in 2006, up from zero in 1999. Malaysia had 55 representatives (increasing from 36 in 1996) and South Korea 15 (eight in 1996).

"While these figures do not necessarily equate to increased defense sales from emerging producers, they do clearly show a trend of increasing numbers of companies from non-traditional arms exporting countries seeking a foothold in the global arms market," the report noted. What worries arms-control advocates is that many of the Third World countries lack explicit criteria or guidelines for authorizing arms transfers that comply with the source nation's obligations under international law.

A raft of UN legislation negotiated since the 1990s with support from the European Union, Organization of American States and other bodies already bans the sale of weapons to countries with records of human-rights abuses. Regional codes of conduct specifically blacklist unstable regimes such as Myanmar and North Korea. But the standards are not binding and are applied inconsistently. Often they are not incorporated into national laws, while some emerging arms-exporting countries have not signed up to any of the measures.

Sophisticated weapons are still reaching pariah countries. A report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute on arms sales between 1995 and 2005 reveals that North Korea was supplied by Russia, China and Kazakhstan in defiance of US and European embargoes. The North Koreans then adapted and modified these technologies for their own defense industries, making shipments in the same period to Yemen, Pakistan, Iran, Libya and Myanmar.

Pakistan was able to secure tons of weapons in the same period from no fewer than 14 countries, including China, Indonesia, the US, France, Germany, Russia and Sweden, despite concerns that many would be positioned on the tense Kashmiri frontier with India. Included in the shipments were surface-to-air and anti-ship missiles, frigates, helicopters, fighter jets, heavy artillery and torpedoes.

India was the world's biggest recipient of arms in 1975-2005, ahead of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Turkey, Japan, Iran, Taiwan, Egypt, Libya and Greece. And it had some of the same suppliers as Pakistan - the US, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Russia - as well as Israel, Singapore, South Africa, Italy, South Korea and Poland.

About 40% of Asia's $8 billion worth of weapons came from the US in 2005, with Russia supplying 24%, France 17%, Britain 7% and China 3%. In the Middle East, which got $12 billion of arms in the same year, the US supplied 46%, Britain 27%, France 11%, Russia 4% and China 0.8%.

India became one of the first suppliers to break openly with global arms controls when it scrapped a blacklist of "sensitive" states in 2002. Its manufacturers have since started exporting to Myanmar and Sudan, which are both under UN and European Union arms embargoes. However, it is not only unscrupulous Third World countries that are adding to the stockpile of 640 million weapons. Nearly half of all weapons sold to developing countries come from the US, compared with 15% for Russia and 13% for Britain.

A study by the World Policy Institute found that the United States had transferred weaponry to 18 of the 25 countries involved in an ongoing war, while more than half of the buyers were defined as undemocratic by the US State Department's annual Human Rights Report. Washington usually justifies the sales as part of its "war on terrorism", though many suspect it has a deeper goal of checking the expanding military power of China.

Significantly, the Pentagon is selling the F-16 fighter jet - a weapon that is regarded as having a strategic role in arsenals and is usually made available only to close allies - to both Pakistan and its bitter rival India. "F-16s with advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles are not for fighting al-Qaeda. They are for fighting India," Wade Bouse, research director at the Arms Control Association, said after the Pakistani deal went through. "We are creating our own market by selling to both sides of regional conflicts."

Nonetheless, the US is likely to continue blocking arms-control initiatives as long as the anti-terrorism campaign and containment of China form the basis of its foreign-policy strategy. There is also a domestic agenda at play: Americans own 220 million guns, nearly enough for every man, woman and child in the country and one-third of all small arms in circulation. Political leaders are unwilling to support controls that might undermine electoral support.

The UN treaty seeks to plug loopholes that allow suppliers to circumvent shipment rules by simply changing a product's specifications or sending it from an offshore distributor. Selling weapons as unassembled kits or in a piecemeal fashion is legal, while manufacturers often supply blacklisted countries by allowing others to assemble them under license. They are marked as originating from the country of the assembler.

Legal frameworks have not kept pace with technical advances in weaponry, with essentials such as engines and electronics often not appearing on exporters' lists of sensitive equipment that is banned from sale. In the study Arms Without Borders, it was reported that China was able to skirt a European and North American ban on the supply of military helicopters because the prohibition only referred to the shipment of "whole" units. Now known as the Z-10, the helicopter was manufactured from components built at separate plants in the US, Britain and Canada.

Tellingly, only a third of the weapons in circulation are being used by armed services or law-enforcement agencies in the countries that buy them. As many as 6.4 million weapons are in the hands of militants, including terrorists, with some put to use in the two dozen conflicts under way throughout the world, including ethnic strife in Sri Lanka, the Indonesian archipelago and Myanmar, and insurgencies in the Philippines and southern Thailand.

The main victims are civilians: Oxfam, a British NGO, has estimated that at least 300,000 people a year are killed by portable weapons such as handguns, rifles, grenades and bombs. "We are at a point in history where many of these sales are not essential for the self-defense of these countries and the arms being sold continue to fuel conflicts and tensions in unstable areas," Daryl G Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington, said in a 2006 report. "It doesn't make much sense over the long term."

About the Author: Alan Boyd, now based in Sydney, has reported on Asia for more than two decades.