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Originally posted by Webgear:
People’s Republic of China: Sustaining conflict and human rights abuses

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Eerily similar to another paper available from the Amnesty site, the
Control Arms report on G8 arms sales (pdf):

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p. 27:
The USA continues to dominate the international arms market. It is a world leader in both arms exports and production. It ranked first among the world’s conventional arms suppliers between 1996 and 2003... Between 2000 and 2003 Saudi Arabia was the largest purchaser of defence articles from the USA; its purchases totalled US$6.3 billion.

The USA also remains the world’s largest exporter of small arms, light weapons and ammunition...

Significant arms transfers have been made from the USA to recipients in countries where there are major and persistent human rights concerns. These include Colombia, Egypt, India, Israel, Nigeria, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela.

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I think I've quoted part of the section about Canada from that report before.

Of course, there is a difference between China and the United States. The Chinese government controls its arms industry, whereas the US arms industry controls its government.

The end result is the same, though. Rich people get richer and poor people get killed.

I've always found it curious that the US justifies the arms industry by blaming the consumers, while demonifying the cocaine industry by blaming the producers. Surely if the US has the right to fumigate coca crops, then the victims of the arms industry has the right to destroy armament factories.

You cannot talk peace while profiting from conflict, "acá o en la china" ("here or in China", a Spanish idiom which seems particularly apt).

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Many arms producers deserve plenty of blame for making their weapons so easily obtainable by repressive regimes, terrorist groups and gangs of marauding thugs engaged in bloody conflicts and attacks on civilians in Africa, the Middle East and other volatile parts of the world. But as Amnesty International points out in a damning new report, few can hold a candle to China and its state-controlled arms industry.

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At one point in the piece, the Globe's editorialists try to contrast China's lawless arms trade with other nations' law-abiding, responsible practices, thus directly contradicting the organization they cite as an authority to criticize China:

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Yet, contrary to their responsibilities and legal obligations, the G8 countries - Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Russian Federation, the UK and the USA - are still supplying weapons and munitions to irresponsible end users.

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They're following a wellworn path. I'd like to say I expected different but what have we seen from them to suggest that?

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Canada is the fourth-largest exporter of small arms ammunition, according to a report on the bullet trade published Thursday by aid agency Oxfam.

Oxfam's report, Ammunition: the fuel of conflict, concluded that there are 10 to 14 billion bullets made globally each year. That's enough, they said, to shoot every person on the planet twice.

The organization is urging countries to adopt stricter controls on ammunition and for the UN to push for aggressive measures when it holds a conference on the illicit trade of small arms later this month in New York.

"The UN conference must set global standards to prevent weapons from being transferred to places where they might fuel conflict, hinder development or be used in human rights abuses," said Robert Fox, executive director of Oxfam Canada.

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Canada's military-corporate complex

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On the industry side, the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries reports that in 2000 (the latest figures available) there were more than 1,500 firms with significant defence interests (i.e. more than $100,000 in defence revenues) comprising an industry worth roughly $7 billion per year.

A third of the industry's revenues are derived from arms exports, half of that to the United States. As a result, both the Washington-based Congressional Research Service and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute ranked Canada as the sixth largest global arms exporter in 2004.

These companies build everything from wheeled tanks to tactical helicopters.

But most Canadian defence companies are branch plants or subcontractors, building components for U.S. systems, such as gearboxes for the Apache helicopter.

According to Project Ploughshares, the industry is dominated by a handful of companies who typically win the lion's share of Canadian military contracts:

CAE Inc., General Dynamics Canada and General Dynamics Land Systems Canada, SNC-Lavalin Group, Bell Helicopter Textron, and Bombardier. Half of the top 10 companies are foreign owned or controlled, and only six of the top 10 companies actually rely on military contracts for more than 20 per cent of their revenue.

Finally, one cannot exclude the Department of National Defence itself from the military lobby. It spends millions of dollars a year on public relations, including public opinion polling, cultivating favourable coverage from journalists, in addition to funding conservative think tanks and university research institutes.

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