Deadly Arms Sales

by Jose Ramos-Horta, Co-Winner of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize in the July 23, 1997 Washington Times OP-ED section

On May 30, I joined with fourteen other past winners of the Nobel Peace Prize-- including the Dalai Lama, Betty Williams and Ellie Wiesel-- to launch a campaign for an international "Code of Conduct" on Arms Transfers. This initiative is the brain-child of Oscar Arias, the former President of Costa Rica, and winner of the Peace Prize in 1987. The Code would require arms suppliers to certify that all arms recipients meet certain common-sense criteria, such as compliance with internationally recognized human rights and democracy standards, before transferring weapons. We have presented our idea at the European Union and United Nations, and we are encouraging all arms exporting countries of the world to adopt it.

The United States-- the world's leading exporter of weapons-- has an opportunity this week to lead the world in the formulation of responsible arms transfer policy by establishing its own Code of Conduct. Legislation setting democracy, human rights and non-aggression standards for U.S. arms customers is currently pending in a House-Senate conference committee on a State Department funding bill. The conference committee, scheduled to begin meeting this week, should retain the measure, both for practical and moral reasons.

I did not hesitate when President Arias asked me to join him in this effort, since my own family has been on the receiving end of weapons supplied by the Western democracies to one of the most brutal regimes in the world.

In August 1977, Indonesian air force pilots murdered my 21-year old sister, Maria Ortencia, along with at least 20 young children in a remote village in East Timor. My sister and these children were only a few of the more than 200,000 people that were killed in East Timor from December 1975, when Indonesia invaded and illegally annexed the newly independent land, to 1979. Indonesia waged this war, and continues to wage this war, using an arsenal of weapons imported from the United States and Europe.

Sadly, my homeland is not the only place where such repression and destruction takes place, facilitated by the willingness of arms exporters to sell their weapons to murderous regimes. In 1995, exports of "conventional" arms-- bombers, guns, armored personnel carriers and the like-- to the developing world totaled over $21 billion. The majority of these weapons were sold to undemocratic governments. The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, the same countries that are entrusted with upholding peace and security, are the very ones that have contributed most to the devastation of countries and peoples around the world, by arming unelected, abusive or aggressive regimes.

Such transfers not only threaten the lives of innocent people in far off lands but also-- increasingly-- threaten U.S. and other peacekeeping troops sent to restore order. In several recent instances (Haiti and Somalia, for example) previously transferred American arms have been turned on U.S. forces. Arms exports to these governments were made in the context of the Cold War, but as Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a former speech writer for President Reagan and a principal supporter of the U.S. Code of Conduct, said recently in Congress: "The Cold War is over. It is time for us to have a new code of conduct that puts democracy and human rights ahead of a fast buck in selling weapons to the dictators around the world who repress people and violate the very principles which this country is supposed to be all about."

The legislation, whose fate now rests with a small committee of senators and representatives, establishes four eligibility criteria govnerments must meet in order to import American arms: democratic government; respect for widely-accepted norms of human rights; non-aggression against neighboring states; and participation in the U.N. Register of Conventional Arms. These criteria are all tenets of the administration's stated foreign policy, yet the majority of U.S. arms exports continue to go to states-- like Indonesia-- where people are unable to choose their government and/or suffer abuse for trying to obtain the same basic freedoms Americans enjoy.

Undemocratic or repressive governments are by their very nature unstable. To ensure that America's arms do not again outlast its alliances, and to ensure that U.S. weapons are not again used to kill innocent civilians, careful consideration should be given before weapons transfers proceed to such regimes. By writing these four criteria into U.S. law, the code of conduct will bring balance to a review process currently weighted toward short-term economic, strategic and diplomatic considerations.

Opponents of such a policy often claim that other governments will simply step in to fill an arms sales vacuum left by a unilateral U.S. Code of Conduct. However, I believe that if the U.S. leads the way, other exporters will follow, much as they did on American-led efforts to bar sales of ballistic missiles and anti-personnel land mines. In fact, the new British Labor government has announced support for a United Kingdom Code of Conduct. And I-- along with my fellow laureates-- will continue to work to globalize the policy.