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Sri Lanka’s slide into war pleases the arms industry

But writing about it again and again, I believe, will help at least cleanse international politics a little bit, though the efforts may not give birth to a just world order overnight.

Two Sundays ago, Sri Lankan newspapers reported that the United States Senate had proposed a freeze of all military aid to Sri Lanka in view of the country’s bleak human rights record.

The proposal to freeze military aid to Sri Lanka is contained in the Senate version of the State Department’s Appropriation Bill. If the human rights record of a country is a criterion to qualify for US military aid, one wonders why there has been no proposals to freeze military aid to Israel. On the contrary, the United States announced 30 billion dollars worth of military aid to the Zionist state, which has been voted as the biggest threat to world peace – followed closely by George W Bush’s Untied States — in polls conducted across the world for the past five years or so.

And no one will dispute with me if I were to say that Israel violates human rights with impunity and cares not two hoots about spurning international law, UN resolutions and decisions of the International Court of Justice. What’s more, Israel even dishonours agreements it has signed with the United States. The Camp David accord is a case in point. Now enlightened former US president, Jimmy Carter, who once defended the Zionist state with religious zeal, in his book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” laments how Israel has not fulfilled its obligations under the Camp David Accord of 1979. Heart-broken, he says if only Israel had honoured the Camp David accord, a Palestinian State would have been long established.

Yet this pariah state is rewarded with US$ 30 billion in military aid or US$ 3 billion a year – up from the present US$ 2.5 billion.

An octogenarian friend, a die hard and dying socialist, once told me that behind all conflicts in the world is the global arms industry – a vital organ of the capitalist body. The Sri Lankan conflict is also being fuelled by the world’s arms industry and their local agents.

When the Sri Lankan conflict was brought to a temporary halt by a ceasefire agreement in 2002, there were hopes that a political solution was on the horizon. Polls conducted by social groups indicated that about 65 per cent of the population supported the peace deal. But suddenly, we saw the situation changing from peace to war – with even people, who had supported the truce, turning into advocates of war. A political analyst told me that he believed ill-gotten millions of the arms dealers, who were gnashing their teeth and fuming at the ceasefire deal, were funding the Mahinda Rajapaksa campaign.

Who knows? The same arms dealers or their international partners might be even arming and funding the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Didn’t the Israelis do it? Former Mossad Agent Victor Ostrovsky in his book ‘By way of Deception’ says that Israel, while selling arms to Sri Lanka and training its armed forces, also trained Tamil separatist rebels.

Now Sri Lanka is once again engulfed in war. Arms dealers are smiling again, thriving on the misery of millions of Sri Lankans living in fear, living in refugee camps, living without hopes.

An article in the latest issue of the London-based Jane’s Defence Weekly says Sri Lanka is set to spend US$ 70 million to bolster its Air Force in the next five months.

This is while the overall cost of war is sending the cost of living to dizzy heights. The economy is virtually in tatters — with inflation currently standing at 20 per cent, lending rates at 19 per cent, tourist arrivals plummeting by 40-60 per cent. The government is unable to provide subsidies and ease the burden on the people. The government’s chief financial officer in an interview says people should learn to live with the rising cost of living, which he describes as a sign of economic progress.

In the ledgers of the arms dealers, there is only profit. There are no columns to enter the cost of human suffering inflicted by the weapons they sell.

The global arms trade stands at one trillion US dollars. The United States accounts for more than 60 per cent of this volume. Canadian author John Ralston Saul in his book The Collapse of Globalism states that the United States is in no position to reduce its arms sales and contribute to global peace because of the consequent fall in its GDP. Arms sales amount to nearly one fifth of the US federal budget. So the logic goes that for the United States to survive economically, there should be wars or war-like situations.

My old socialist friend emerges like a prophet. In the absence of a Cold War between superpowers, the arms industry thrives on civil wars. In West Asia, fear mongering is the main marketing strategy of the US arms industry, one of the main financiers of Bush’s Republican Party. Yes, Iran is the bogey – but how come Israel is not?

Ameen Izzadeen is a Sri Lankan journalist based in Colombo