Dealers in Death: A Visit to an International Arms Bazaar
By Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent for the London Independent.
A few metres after I clear the security gates at the exhibition centre near Abu
Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, I am being offered a fine Persian silk carpet and a
set of Arab brass cooking utensils and coffee pots. There are tea stands
and flowers, purple and gold and green in the early spring heat.
While the Arabs sport white robes, the Western visitors are in dark blue suits
and ties, their wives in bright, tight-fitting dresses, often with those
slightly silly racing hats which come with fake blooms on top. Several of
the ladies stop off to look at the jewelry store.
Military pipe bands play English and Scottish marches. Smartly attired
Pakistani and Indian workers labour to erect Arab tents before the midday sun
reaches its height.
Silk carpets, coffee pots, flowers, a Highlander's lament, tea, jewelry...
and a game of polo to follow in the evening.
It is as civilised as fine art - which is what the sale of weapons has become
for the world's armourers.
Behind the tents and trinket shops and pipe band, there lies on display the most
sophisticated and lethal ordnance ever made by man, so new you can smell the
fresh paint.
Each time I examine a French missile, a German tank, an American rocket, a
British armoured vehicle, a Dutch self-propelled gun or a Russian automatic
rifle, up comes a charming gentleman in another of those dark blue suits, a
merchant of death brandishing a file of glossy brochures, offering a powerful
handshake and another cup of tea.
Some are a bit portly - selling death on a large scale means a lot of
hospitality - and often they carry a small purple or blue flower in their
buttonhole. Ballistics is their fascination.
"As the day warms up, a bullet flies faster," a cheerful Australian
confides to me. "In the evening, the air grows heavier and the bullet
goes more slowly."
Smiling field marshals and jolly generals from across the Arab world drift
through the arms pavilions, running their hands along the sleek missile tubes,
peering through sniper rifles, clambering like schoolchildren on to howitzers
and tanks.
I have to admit to a grim fascination of my own in all this, a professional
interest. For 25 years now, the crudest and most fabulously designed
bullets, rockets, missiles, tank shells, artillery rounds and grenades have been
hurled in my direction by some of the nastiest and most "moral" armies
on earth.
Israelis with American Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, Syrians with Russian
T-72 tanks, RAF pilots with American cluster bombs, Afghan Mujahiddin with
Russian AK-47 rifles, Russians with Hind helicopter gunships, Iraqis and
Azerbaijanis with Russian-made Scud rockets, Iranians with US-made sniper-rifles
and Americans with Boeing fighter-bombers and battleships whose shells were the
size of Volkswagens... they have all sent their produce swishing in my
direction.
In 25 years as a Middle East correspondent, I've seen thousands of corpses -
women and children as well as men - blasted, shredded, eviscerated,
disembowelled, beheaded, pulverised, lobotomised, castrated and otherwise
annihilated by the multibillion-dollar arms industry.
So I regularly prowl the arms bazaars of the Middle East, seeking an answer to
the same old questions. Who are the men who produce this vile equipment?
How do they justify their trade?
And what language can encompass science and death and capital gains on such a
scale? For there is, as I discover in Abu Dhabi, a frightening correlation
between linguistics and guns, between grammar and rockets. It's all about
words.
I first circle the arms sellers' pavilions with a large canvas bag and a
kleptomaniac's desire to hoard every brochure, pamphlet, book and magazine,
squirreling away thousands of pages of the stuff. Back in my hotel room, I
rifle through the lot. The Russians are the mildest in their language.
"You will feel protected by our smart weapons' shield," promises
Russia's KEP Instrument Design Bureau.
Uralvagoncavod's latest T-90 tank - a descendant of the old Warsaw pact T-55
clunkers - is advertised as "the Best." The State Enterprise
Ulyanovsk Mechanical Plant's anti-aircraft missiles give an "awesome
punch" to their buyers.
The British are smoother. Vickers Defence Systems are trying to flog the
new Challenger 2E, "optimised to represent the best balance of fightability,
firepower and mobility... its ability to deliver combat effectiveness has
been proven."
Australian Defence Industries are selling a "live fire defence training
system" which includes "a ruggedised portable unit." This
is taken to the battlefield so that soldiers can practise shooting computerised
human beings in between killing real ones.
The Italians like their verbal trumpets. Beretta firearms provides
"quality without compromise... experience, innovation, respect for
tradition... the Beretta tradition of excellence."
Finland's Sako 75 hunting-gun manufacturers boast that their designers were
asked a simple question. "What would you do if given the resources to
design the rifle of your dreams, the new ultimate rifle for the new
millennium?"
"Excellence" crops up again and again. Oshkosh of Wilmington
manufactures military trucks with "a tradition of excellence."
Then comes Boeing's Apache Longbow attack helicopter. "It's easy to
talk about performance," their ad runs. "Only Apache Longbow
delivers."
The European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company is among the few to let the
cat out of the bag. "True respect," their advertising brags,
"can only be earned by making superior weapons systems. Only by
owning them." After a while I feel sick. There is something
infinitely sad and impotent about the frightful language of the merchants of
death, their circumlocutions and macho words balanced by the qualities the
weapons are designed to eliminate, their admission that guns mean power turning
into the final definition of "excellence."
The glossy pages pile up on my floor. It's a linguistic journey into a
fantasy world. Half the words used by the arms sellers - protection,
reliability, optimisation, excellence, respect, trust, timelessness, perfection
- hint at human goodness, even the achievements of the spirit.
The other half - punch, gutsy, performance, experience, potency, fightability -
are words of naked aggression, a hopelessly infantile male sexuality aiming to
prove that might is right.
Americans name their weapons - Apache, the Arrowhead navigation system, the
Kiowa multiple launch platform and the Hawkeye infrared sensors - after a native
Indian population that they destroyed. The one thing they don't mention is
death.
The men here to turn a dollar on all these "equipments" are as nice a
bunch of middle-class family men as you could meet.
At the Vickers pavilion stands Derek Turnbull from Blyth in Northumberland,
watching a scale model of the Challenger 2E tank moving round and round on a
plastic stand. Ask him if he ever thinks about what all these weapons do
to human beings and his response is immediate.
"Any civilised person who works in this business knows what the purposes
are. But you have to remember that a tank is to kill tanks, not people.
That's the purpose of it."
Now Turnbull is an intelligent man. Is he really satisfied with a reply
like that? Aren't there humans, some mothers' sons, inside the tank when
it is "killed"? Turnbull thinks about my question, then talks
about the detachment which comes with military information technology.
"Everyone comes to terms with it in their own way," he says.
"Most people talk about the engineering and the technology. It is
mentioned from time to time."
The "it" is the infliction of death, although at no point does the
word cross Turnbull's lips.
Then it turns out that he was in Saudi Arabia for Vickers during the 1991 Gulf
War. Although he was not a soldier, he arrived at the infamous "Road
of Death" by the Mutla Ridge, south of Basra, within two days of the mass
slaughter of fleeing Iraqis by American and British pilots.
"It was horrendous. But in a funny sort of way I didn't have the
reaction I'd expected. You see, we'd driven up through Kuwait, past all
the oil wells that had been set alight by the Iraqis. It was the most
awful thing I'd ever seen. And by the time I'd gone through all this awful
devastation, I wasn't too shocked by the damage at Mutla. "We are
silent for a while. The "damage" at Mutla was human as well as
material. I found an Iraqi soldier squashed flat in the sand, his whole
body just an inch thick, his rifle squashed to the width of a piece of paper
beside him.
The burning oil fields were awesome, but human death is surely something
different. Turnbull then turns into the archetypal arms salesman.
"Look, Robert," he says. "If the world was full of nice
human beings who did civilised things, we wouldn't need all this kit."
I come across two female Ukrainian army students brandishing their new diplomas
in front of some nonplussed Arabs. Maria Verenis and Julia Bartashova are
the very model of a modern major publicity campaign. Ukraine is selling
tanks.
Over in the US pavilion, an even more startling figure is making her way past
the Winchester rifle stand. Ramona Doll (honestly) is advertising body
armour in a skin-tight, thigh-clutching steel blouse and trousers, complete with
handgun and too much lipstick. She is not the flip side but the very
embodiment of all that macho rubbish in the brochures.
In the Lockheed Martin stand is 69-year old John Hurst, 45 years with Lockheed.
He tries to make me understand his creed. "From a religious point of
view, I'm a very strong Christian," he says. "You can look
through the entire New Testament and you won't find anything on defending
yourself by zapping the other guy. But it says the Lord wants us to preach
His gospel - and we can't very well do that if we're dead.
"That's not an aggressive posture... the Lord wants us to defend
ourselves and arm ourselves so that we can spread His Word."
I ask again: what about death?
"Right or wrong, I never associate it with what I'm doing. If I see a
bomb go off and legs flying off, I never