Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur
The mindless and at times promiscuous rush for weapons and wars by the rulers the world over, is utterly criminal, unjustifiable and indefensible on any grounds whatsoever because it endangers the people?s right to a secure and reasonable existence. The sellers and buyers of deadly arms stand guilty and culpable of horrendous injustice and violations of our rights. The gross immorality of the arms trade and our failure to condemn or stop this abhorrent practice makes us all accomplices in this brazen crime against humanity.
It is understandable that the licentious sellers promote the arms race for the enormous profits they rake in, but it is baffling that the buyers, poor as they may be, are even more enthusiastic and energetic. But then they are goaded on by their motives of sustaining their regimes by oppressing people and by creating tensions. This country is an example for us all to see and rue.
This scandalous and criminal wastage of valuable resources for weapons is indefensible and unacceptable as it diverts precious resources towards producing death and desolation instead of overcoming diseases and providing basic facilities. The poorer the country, the severer its affliction with the arms disease; undeniably such rulers commit a reprehensible crime against their citizens.
The recent news that an arms deal of $ 20 billion for advanced weaponry from the US for Saudi Arabia?s already huge but useless arsenal is being considered, prompted me to write about this problem. Little do these countries realize that it from these deals that the US affords huge grants to Israel. But when the rulers lose touch with reality, they can?t be expected to be prescient and perceptive.
And how do the rulers here compare? They are worse because they do not have the luxury of overflowing coffers. Remember the $ 5 billion AWACs deal with Sweden and the purchase of F-16s soon after the devastating earthquake. Even without the earthquake, if any country where even a single child dies due to preventable diseases or malnutrition or where maternal deaths abound, illiteracy is widespread and people are deprived of very basic facilities decides to buy arms, build A-bombs and missiles, it stands guilty of a horrendous and an inexcusable transgression against the rights of its citizens.
The arms trade is shameful, disgraceful and deplorable for the simple reason that the money spent on useless wars and meaningless conflicts for worthless gains could have been used to wipe out poverty and want from the face of the earth many times over long ago. The rulers and arms industry however, with motives of their own, prefer to stockpile nuclear and non-nuclear weapons that could destroy the earth many, many times over.
To grasp the magnitude of the problem that this diversion of precious resources creates, we only need to look at these figures. More than 80 million children and mothers will needlessly die in the developing world by 2015 unless the Millennium Development Goals aim to cut child mortality by two thirds and maternal death rates by three quarters by 2015 are met. A disaster of Biblical proportions is in the making but the world seems oblivious to it.
According to experts, more than six million children under the age of five needlessly die around the world each year. Diarrhoea kills over 2 million, Pneumonia 2 million, Malaria 1 million, AIDS about 0.3 million and Measles 0.1 million.
All these deaths are preventable. The rulers everywhere instead of spending money on health, education and development, rush to buy the latest weapons and fancy hardware to kill, maim and destroy. The rulers the world over it seems are wilfully putting the Malthusian theory into practice.
Overall, 10 million children die every year before they are five years-old. Most deaths occur in just six countries ? China, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria and Pakistan.
Although most deaths occur in the Subcontinent, yet if one looks at the defence budgets of India, $ 22.1 billion, which is 2.57 percent of GDP (2006), and Pakistan, $ 4.54 billion, which is 3.14 percent of GDP (2007), one would think they have all the money in the world for the luxury of maintaining nuclear weapons and huge armies. The rulers with their warped priorities continue to wilfully neglect the people?s welfare. These huge expenditures on weapons and wars are indefensible and intolerable when people live in wretched poverty.
A look at the amount of money being used to destroy Iraq will help the readers grasp the criminality, injustice, and downright unfairness of the reprehensible business of weapons and wars. Millions of Iraqis have been displaced and a million or more have died since the first Gulf War.
A December 2006 report said it has cost the US over $ 350 billion since the March 2003 invasion. This was before the surge began. Recently a Quaker pacifist group has given figures that the daily cost of the Iraq war is $ 720 million, or $ 500,000 a minute. The UK spends $ 8 billion there. The champions of democracy want death and destruction for their arms industry to prosper.
The Defence Bill for the fiscal year 2008 for the Godfather of death and destruction, the US, is $ 459 billion. This bill is minus the cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The total global military spending in year 2004, according to the Stockholm Peace Research Institute, was $ 1,000 billion. For a moment imagine this sum being spent on health, education, poverty relief, scientific research for peaceful purposes and the impact it would have on the quality of life on earth for all.
The oil-rich countries certainly help the West in their sinister designs by fuelling their economies by buying arms. Robert Fisk, in his book The Great War for Civilization, which is an absolute ?must read? for anyone who wants to understand the Middle East, says, ?In 1998 and 1999 alone, Gulf Arab military spending came to $ 92 billion. Since 1997 the UAE alone had signed contracts worth more than $ 11 billion. The figures are staggering, revolting. Between 1991 and 1993, the US Military Training Mission was administering more than $ 31 billion in Saudi arms procurement from Washington and $ 27 billion in new US acquisitions.?
He adds, in 1993, ?Kuwait was buying 236 US MI A2 tanks at a cost of two billion. Saudi Arab was buying $ 7.5 billion worth of British Tornadoes and was spending a further $ 3.9 billion on French frigates after the previous year?s awesome $ 9 billion purchase of American F-15XP fighter jets.
To understand these figures one has to remember the total Saudi financial support for the Palestinian-Israeli, Gaza-Jericho accord: a mere $ 100 million. The UAE, which was buying $ 3.5 billion French Leclerc tanks had pledged just $ 25 million to the Palestinians. The US sold well over $ 28 billion of arms in two years following the Gulf War, of which the Saudis accounted for $ 17 billion. Sale of weapons to the Middle East in 1993 was running at $ 46 million a day.?
These figures tell their own story. Fisk also exposes the double standards and downright fraud and trickery that the West practices. He says when the West was supporting Saddam, they allowed the export of thiodiglycol and thionyl chloride, two important chemicals of mustard gas. Their export was defended on the grounds that they had civilian use like making ballpoint ink. Saddam freely used mustard gas against the Kurds and Iranians and the West chose to ignore it.
Interestingly, when the West imposed sanctions on Iraq and millions suffered terribly; Britain blocked the sale of diphtheria vaccine meant for children, on the plea that this could be used to make biological weapons. Included in the sanctions list were pencils, medical swabs, gauze, medical syringes, disposable surgical gloves, medication for epilepsy, surgical instruments, dialysis equipment, etc. The sanctions then were as genocidal as is the war now.
Deception, duplicity and downright dishonesty surpassing this have hardly ever been seen in the world. And then they were surprised that the Iraqis welcomed them with suicide bombs and roadside bombs!
When Robert Fisk?s mother died of Parkinson?s disease, he said, ?Why do we not rage against those who accept the shameful idea that sickness must be ?incurable?, that our betters know what they are doing when they prefer missiles to medicine? I asked. If resources had been better spent, I said, Peggy would not have been in the coffin in front of the altar.? Watching his mother dying he remembered that, ?the US government spent $ 100 million in five minutes firing those cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan.? He lamented that the total annual expenditure on neurological research in the West was less than $ 100 million.
This business of death, destruction and desolation has been going on for ages and it has numbed our senses; we hardly notice it. This dishonourable business is never going to be curbed voluntarily. A worldwide movement like the movement against ?globalization? needs to be launched to inform the people about how their futures are being jeopardized.
After all the facts above, if you still think that we are living in a just and civilized world which is doing enough to fight disease and poverty, then just let me tell you that each year, malaria makes 300 million people ill and causes a million deaths worldwide. Some 90 percent of cases are in sub-Saharan Africa, where a child dies of malaria every 30 seconds.
In a world where a child dies every 30 seconds from preventable disease in a single region, a world where countries and regions prefer to spend millions of dollars every second on war and arms, it becomes morally indefensible to call oneself civilized.
The writer has been associated with the Baloch national struggle |
