CHINA'S ARMS TRADE A GLOBAL MENACE

From Burma to Nepal, and from Malaysia to Sudan, the Chinese military is engaged in a secret $1 billion a year arms trade that is fueling conflict, according to an extensive investigation by Amnesty International.
In a subsequent report, “Sustaining Conflict and Human Rights Abuses”, Amnesty has provided evidence to show that China, which refuses to divulge details its arms sales, is selling more weapons across the globe than the US and often to the most unsavory regimes in exchange for raw materials needed for rebuilding China’s crumbling infrastructure.
Amnesty says the array of weapons supplied to countries with serious human rights abuses has included combat aircraft, tanks, tanks, missiles, missile launchers and guns of all types. What most surprised Amnesty researchers was that China’s military (PLA) – Peoples Liberation Army – made large profits from the sales, yet kept no records and operated in contravention of US and EU arms sales embargoes imposed following the Tiananmen Square massacre of student protesters in 1989.
Part of the report addressed the issue of China’s expanding influence in regions of Africa and Latin America, echoing the views of some Bush administration critics who have warned that it has ignored China‘s activities in its own back yard, meaning Latin America, where the Chinese have contracts to extract large quantities of minerals from the Amazon Basin. China has also forged relations with other Latin American nations such as Argentina and Venezuela. In terms of its role in Africa, the Pentagon conducted a recent study which warned that its increasing presence on the African continent, dictated by its desperate need for oil, gas, copper wood, iron ore and even diamonds and gold, presented serious problems for US policy in the region. The Amnesty report supported that contention, pointing out that in the past 15 years China has exported large consignments of weapons to nations in the Great Lakes region of Africa where some of the worst human rights violations have occurred. In the Congo, for instance, many of the militias are now armed with the Chinese version of the Ak-47 assault rifle and Chinese small arms. Amnesty added the following footnote to the issue:

“Chinese arms deals often involve an exchange of weapons for raw materials and the increase in the numbers of these barter deals can be linked to China’s rapid economic expansion over the past 25 years and its increasing need to secure raw materials. In the 1990s the PLA actively participated in arms deals with Iran in return for oil. It was a major importer of timber from Liberia and a supplier of weapons to Liberia. It is also a major supplier of weapons to the Sudan and Chinese firms have the largest stake in Sudanese oil fields.”

In light of the fact China is now in the top ten of the world’s leading arms suppliers and a member of the U.N. Security Council, Amnesty argues it is high time the Chinese lived up to international law and were transparent about their arms exports. The Amnesty report noted that despite a Chinese central government directive in the 1990s that the PLA should get out of the export arms business it still controls the China Poly Group Corporation, the country’s largest arms exporter. Much to Amnesty’s concern, Poly Group and similar defense companies in China have managed to establish joint ventures and licensed product agreements with Canadian, Russian, European and US companies. As a result, China has acquired a range of dual use equipment which the PLA has inserted into weapons it exports, thereby making other countries culprits in its secret arms deals.
The UN also has evidence that Chinese guns were traded into conflict zones such as Albania, Zimbabwe, Burma, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, Nepal and Somalia and that, between 2005-2006, China supplied the Nepalese military with 25,000 rifles and 18,000 grenades.
According to the Chinese government, its approach to arms exports is “cautious and responsible” but not so says Amnesty’s leading arms investigator, Helen Hughes. She points out that China has refused to be a signatory to international rules governing arms sales.