Arms and the ban – anachronistic or apposite?

Date: 07/10/04

CAMPAIGNERS against the arms trade do not normally consider the White House as an ally.

Yet the Bush administration has been opposing attempts to have the weapons embargo imposed by the EU on China following the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre lifted.

Admittedly, however, the two sides are coming from a different perspective. Human rights campaigners are outraged by the prospect of selling weapons to a regime that, according to an Amnesty International statement last Friday (1 October), has prisoners executed in front of children on their school excursions. The US has no principled objection to arms sales to repressive regimes but it is perturbed by the prospect of weapons supplies exacerbating regional tensions in east Asia, where the Taiwan dispute remains an open sore.

Beijing's demand - backed by France and Germany - to scrap the ban is expected to be the hottest topic at the EU-China summit in early December. Yet it appears unlikely that the consensus needed for the Union to do so will emerge before the Netherlands' stint at the Union's rotating presidency ends on 31 December.

Among those who have intimated that the 15-year-old ban is anachronistic is External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten. He has voiced doubts about why China is subject to the same sanctions as pariah states such as Burma and North Korea.

The French, who, ironically, were the EU state to outrage China the most in the 1990s by selling Mirage jets and Lafayette frigates to Taiwan, argue that weapons sales to China would still be subject to the EU's 1998 code of conduct on the arms trade.

That code rules out military supplies to states which may use them for internal repression or threaten to use force over territorial claims. Theoretically, arms should not be sold to China because of such issues as its crackdown on Tibetan Buddhists and Uighur Muslims and its fraught relations with the Taiwanese authorities.

But a study from non-governmental organizations, including Amnesty, Oxfam, Saferworld and Pax Christi, describes the controls that the code is supposed to guarantee as "flimsy".

A similar complaint has been made about the terms of the China-specific arms embargo. Campaigners say it has been interpreted in such a way that budding suppliers believe only entire weapons systems are covered by it, rather than their components or dual-use technology (with both civilian and military applications). They cite reports that the new WZ 5516 range of Chinese armoured personnel carriers contains German-made Deutz engines as proof of how it is being bypassed. The UK, Austria, Finland and Spain are all also known to have sold components for military hardware to China since 1989.

"The UK has decided that weapons platforms - finished systems and combat aircraft - are subject to the embargo but that exports of components are not," says Roy Isbister from Saferworld in London. "In theory, you can export all the components and a spanner to China and let the Chinese build the stuff themselves. This is getting around the spirit, if not the letter of the embargo.

"Human rights are still intensely problematic in China. And with the [2008 Beijing] Olympics coming up and the new security framework surrounding the Olympics with the threat of terrorism, there is a real worry that China will get access to surveillance technology on the back of a claim that this is necessary for security. With these serious concerns, the embargo should be kept as strong as possible."

The Finnish centre-right MEP Piia-Noora Kauppi, a member of the EU-China joint Parliamentary committee, says it would be improper to end the embargo while Beijing refuses to accept EU demands on trade.

"Why should we do something just because Jacques Chirac wants to sell weapons to China?" she asks. "If we lift the arms embargo, that doesn't send a good signal. China doesn't behave; it doesn't fulfil its obligations to the WTO [World Trade Organization]. Every month there is a promise it will open up some of its financial services market. But development is either very slow or there is no development at all."

A Chinese diplomat claims that there is "too much talk about it [the embargo] in the media". "We don't want it to be the subject of a big public debate. It is a bilateral question between the EU and China."

One of the most persistent criticisms against China is that it is believed to have one of the highest execution rates in the world. There have been allegations too that many of those executed have confessed to crimes under duress, that they have been denied access to lawyers and hindered from appealing against their convictions.

But the diplomat signals that China will retain the death penalty for some time: "You shouldn't always measure China by Western criteria. For us, the priority is economic modernization. To have that we need strong social and political stabilization. When we have economic development comparable to yours in the West, then we will be ready to do what you want on the death penalty."

Despite France and Germany's support for a lifting of the EU weapons embargo imposed on China, the US Bush administration remains opposed. A consensus is unlikely to emerge in the near future, author says.