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| NEW INTERNATIONALIST 221 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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| THIS MONTH'S THEME | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Bang
bang you're dead Hungry
for guns Merchants
of death Selling
to Saddam Our
boys, our toys Tyrannosaurus
wrecks Battle
tank blues Does
khaki become you? I
am a dangerous woman Arms
to order Simply - eight steps towards a future
Darkness
at noon |
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THE ARMS TRADE |
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| FROM THIS MONTH'S EDITOR | |||||||||||||||||||||||
We also discuss which themes we should cover in the next 12 months. The list begins with about 90 subjects - many of which will have been suggested by readers. The ensuing debates may be long and heated - but never dull. When finally the 15 or so of us do agree, the 12 subjects are assigned to particular editors and particular months. This one - on the arms trade - was scheduled for January 1992. But when it looked as if the Allied forces really were going to war in the Gulf we decided to bring the issue forward. This shift in priorities reflected what was happening in the wider world as the resort to armed force dominated our lives, seeping into our cultures. One sign was the proliferation of war magazines; a nearby newsagent still has an entire row of them - stacked under the pom. But there is a flip side to the high profile that weapons have been getting. The highly secretive business of arms trading has been thrown into the lime-light. Awkward questions have been asked, like 'How did we come to be selling arms to Saddam in the first place?' Anti-arms-trade campaigners explain that it was done routinely, mainly legally and with ample help from our govemments. Much of the equipment like electronic systems is not classified as arms anyway. Arms companies are, of course, constantly selling their goods to leaders just as ruthless as Saddam Hussein. We just don't hear about how British Aerospace, for example, helps to maintain Indonesia's dictator President Suharto who has killed 200,000 East Timorese people. Anti-arms trade campaigners - who for years have been trying to draw attention to such issues - now find the phone won't stop ringing. Many inquiries come from joumalists like me - and I am particularly indebted to Ann Feltham and Janet Williamson at the Campaign Against the Arms Trade in London for all their help. They dispelled many popular myths - like the one which maintains that Iraq was mainly supplied by the US and the UK. These countries did export equipment for military use until recently but the main suppliers were France and the USSR. While putting together this issue I was confused about what exactly is going on in the arms world. The messages are so mixed. One day you hear that US Defence Chief Dick Cheney is promoting US military hardware in the Middle East; a few days later that President Bush is heading an arms control initiative in the same region. I suspect that we are going to see many more politically motivated smokescreens. And that makes it doubly important that we know what is going on, and what we can do about it. |
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Letters COVER PHOTO: James Nachtway / MAGNUM |
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Vanessa Baird for the New Internationalist Co-operative |
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Once
a year in October, the NI staff lock themselves in a room for two days
and talk about the magazine; its aims, your response to it and about what
changes we could make. 
