The Dunblanes that are never news
By John Pilger
It is three weeks since Dunblane and the moving tributes delivered by John Major and other politicians to the child victims of guns. "We must keep our anger burning bright", said David Mellor MP. "When the public has forgotten the horror of Dunblane, the gun lobbyists will be coming out with their garbage."
Next week, two Hawk ground-attack aircraft will leave the British Aerospace factory at Warton in Lancashire on their way to Indonesia. They are the first of 24 Hawks that the company is selling to the Suharto dictatorship in Jakarta. To help the Indonesian generals pay for these warplanes, the British government has given them more than £1 billion of taxpayers' money in the form of export credit guarantees and quadrupled "aid".
"These British aircraft", says the Center for Defense Information in Washington, "are designed to be used against guerrillas who come from and move among civilian populations and have no adequate means of response to air attack. In other words, they are there to shoot high-velocity cannon and deliver ordnance (bombs) at low levels against unprotected human beings."
Jose Gusmao, a Timorese now exiled in Australia, saw a Hawk attack on a village in the Matabean mountains of East Timor. "It used its machine guns", he said, "and dropped incendiary bombs. The Hawk is quite different from the American planes; it has a particular noise." Another eyewitness, Jose Amorin, described the distinctive sound of a Hawk as "like a voice wailing". "I first saw the Hawks in action in 1984", he said. "We immediately go into the caves, into the deepest ones. They fly in low ... and attack civilians, because the people in the mountains are civilians. Four of my cousins were killed in Hawk attacks near Los Palos."
Mark Higson, the former Foreign Office official who gave evidence to the Scott inquiry, told me that British ministers and officials routinely lied about the Hawks being "strictly trainers ... just as they lied about arms exports to Iraq. Everyone I worked with [at the Foreign Office] knew exactly what they were for."
British Aerospace secured the contract to build the Hawks with the support of its parliamentary consultant, David Mellor. In the 1996 Register of MPs' Interests, Mellor is listed as a consultant of British Aerospace and Royal Ordnance, which together make up one of the biggest arms companies in the world.
Moreover, as a Foreign Office minister, Mellor was a member of a government that secretly sold lots of weapons to the Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein, with whom, reported the Baghdad Observer, he exchanged "mutual greetings of friendship and cooperation".
In fact, Mellor offered Saddam Hussein £175 million in trade credits, around the same time that his host was ordering the gassing of 5000 Kurds in the town of Halabja.
In the British media, only Private Eye has pointed up the essential, grotesque hypocrisy that has underpinned much of the official mourning for the victims of Dunblane. "Nation stops to mourn", reported the Guardian on March 19. "The Queen knelt and shops fell silent for the dead of Dunblane." And on the same front page: "GEC in £5 billion Middle East arms deal".
Subversive irony? Maybe; but no connections were made and no questions asked about how many times the kneeling queen and her family had gone to the Middle East to promote sales of weapons to some of the world's most distinguished killers of children.
"We're really rather good at making certain kinds of weapons", said Prince Charles at the Dubai arms fair in 1994, where he was promoting British death machines. "If we don't sell them", he explained, "someone else will". The Stirling guns hop owner who sold Thomas Hamilton his guns might have offered the same public justification, but had the common decency not to.
It is instructive to see the way the propaganda of omission works in relation to matters of life and death. A memorable example was a coroner's inquest in Oxford in 1992, when an "unlawful killing" verdict was handed down on the deaths of nine British soldiers killed by US "friendly fire" in the Gulf War. This was front-page news. Newspapers that had supported sending troops to the Gulf and had colluded with the Ministry of Defence in obscuring the true nature of the war attacked the government for "covering up the truth" about the soldiers' deaths.
No irony was noted and no connection made to the blindingly obvious truth that the war had not been a war at all, but, as the US writer Michael Albert described it, "one of the more wanton, cowardly massacres in modern military history". Postwar studies concluded that the US-led attacks on Iraq had caused the deaths of as many as 200,000 people, a disproportionate number of them children — Dunblane over and over.
None of these invisible victims was the subject of a British inquest or an inquiry by the government into the unlawful use of guns: the sort of "review" ordered in the aftermath of Dunblane. The dead children of Iraq simply did not exist, just as the children killed by British Aerospace aircraft in East Timor did not exist.
By one measure, Britain is said to have 20% of the world's arms market, second only to the US. Subsidised by the taxpayer, British arms companies are currently major suppliers to at least five countries where there is internal conflict and where the combined death toll runs to almost 1 million people. When the US Congress enacted a ban on the export of small arms, such as hand guns, to Indonesia, an official in Jakarta said: "We can always turn to Britain".
[There is a picture] of a little boy who was returning to his village in Afghanistan and was so excited to be back that he ran from the side of a grandparent and stepped on a landmine. He died shortly after the photograph was taken. Unlike David Mellor, John Major and other supporters of the profitable export of killing machines, I have seen quite a few children in similar condition. Landmines are no worse than the incendiary bombs dropped by Hawk aircraft — but they help us to peel away the masks of respectability behind which the arms trade is conducted and condoned.
Landmines cause Dunblanes every day. In Cambodia, the most disabled nation in the world, where the British SAS trained the Khmer Rouge coalition to lay landmines, children are most at risk because they are naturally less cautious. In recent years there has been a popular movement, backed by the UN, to ban landmines. The British government has responded by claiming that it has "not produced or exported conventional anti-personnel landmines since 1982".
The word "conventional" is the one to watch. (In fact, quite apart from the SAS training throughout most of the 1980s, a British company, Hunting Engineering, exported "conventional' landmines to Yugoslavia until at least 1985.)
In 1994, a Foreign Office minister, Douglas Hogg, announced that the government supported a UN resolution calling for a moratorium on the export of "anti-personnel mines that pose grave dangers to civilian population". In the same breath he said that Britain would continue exporting landmines "fitted with a self-destructing or self-neutralising mechanism [which means] they do not pose grave dangers to civilian populations". As the excellent Mines Advisory Group has documented: "The failure rate of self-destruct munitions deployed in the Gulf war was as high as 25%".
Major attended an "anti-terrorist summit" in Egypt recently. Under his government, 60% of export credit guarantees for arms sales have gone to the Middle East, the world's tinderbox. Arms sales have been an obsession with this government, which spends 10 times as much on promoting arms sales as it does on civil exports.
There is no suggestion that a Blair Labour government will substantially change this. Although Labour's defence spokesperson, David Clark, says that Labour will ban "all anti-personnel mines", he is less clear on what he will do with so-called air-delivered "sub-munitions", which are mines by another name and are much favoured by the British military.
Indeed, he has offered the British arms industry "a strategy for a secure future", and has boasted that whereas the Tories spend "only" 5.8% of GDP on defence, labour governments have consistently spent 6.45%. "It's no wonder", he said, "that military men throughout the country tell us that they always do better under a Labour government". Or, as David Mellor put it so succinctly: "When the public has forgotten the horror of Dunblane, the gun lobbyists will be coming out with their garbage".
[This article first appeared in the April 5 New Statesman & Society. Reprinted here abridged.]