Tony Lambert delphine1939@videotron.ca

18 janvier 2008

U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia are unseemly, given the kingdom's rights record

JANET BAGNALL, The Gazette

Published: 13 hours ago

Patriot missiles, precision-guided bombs and "joint direct attack" munitions, all figure in a $20-billion gesture of friendship from the country that likes to think of itself as the world's greatest democracy to what is, no thinking required, one of the world's most autocratic, repressive regimes.

President George W. Bush took hypocrisy to dizzying heights this month, calling for "democratic freedom in the Middle East" in Dubai one day, then arming to the teeth neighbouring Saudi Arabia, a police state, the next.

King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud presides over a state that has no written penal code, no right to free association or free speech. Suspects and detainees are subject to torture.

For "crimes" that included witchcraft and apostasy, 156 beheadings were carried out in Saudi Arabia last year, Human Rights Watch reported in a special investigation. One of the dead was an Egyptian man executed for reading the Quran in a washroom.

While Bush was shuttling among his host's luxurious residences, Rizana Nafeek, a domestic worker from Sri Lanka, was in a Saudi prison waiting to be executed for a crime she is accused of having committed as a 17-year-old. A newborn child, one of 10 she was looking after, choked to death while being bottle-fed.

Bush's dream of democracy in the Middle East is dependent in part on a regime that orders rape victims to be flogged and imprisoned.

Only under pressure from the United States did Saudi Arabia "pardon" a 19-year-old victim of gang rape last month.

Such is the lynchpin in the U.S. campaign for democracy and its battle against tyranny in the Middle East, now one of the largest customers of the politically powerful U.S. arms industry.

According to the 2006 annual report by the Congressional Research Service, the United States is the world's biggest supplier of conventional arms to the developing world.

The United States accounted for almost $17 billion in global arms transfer agreements in 2006, out of a total $40.3 billion. (Russia was second-highest with $8.7 billion and Britain third with $3.1 billion.)

Arms exports often are justified as rewards to allies - as in Saudi Arabia's case - but, in the view of the N.Y. New School's World Policy Institute: "All too often, U.S. arms transfers end up fuelling conflict, arming human rights abusers, or falling into the hands of U.S. adversaries."

In fact, the institute wrote in its report, U.S. Weapons at War 2005: "Perhaps no single policy is more at odds with President Bush's pledge to 'end tyranny in our world' than the United States' role as the world's leading arms exporting nation."

In a 2006 Boston Globe interview, Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington, said, "We are at a point in history where many of these sales are not essential for the self-defence of these countries and the arms being sold continue to fuel conflicts and tensions in unstable areas. It doesn't make much sense over the long term."

The Congressional Research Service, cited in the Boston Globe in 2006, attributed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in part to the presence of an enormous quantity of weaponry in the Gulf region.

The sale of arms in the area continues apace, even though after the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, the the United Nations Security Council voted to limit the sale of arms to the region.

By 2006, the Boston Globe reported, the U.S. was the source of nearly half the weapons sold to armed forces in the developing world, many in conflict areas.

The World Policy Institute concluded, "Far from serving as a force for security and stability, U.S. weapons sales frequently serve to empower unstable, undemocratic regimes to the detriment of U.S. and global security."

To say nothing of the security of Saudi domestic workers and rape victims.

jbagnall@thegazette.canwest.com