Rehana Rossouw and Marion Edmunds
THE Middle Eastern country to which Denel is trying to sell arms worth R7-billion was publicly named in Cape Town last week – by Kader Asmal, the minister whose words were quoted by Denel in a successful high court bid to prevent the Mail & Guardian from identifying its client.
Asmal, Minister of Water and Forestry Affairs and chair of the Cabinet’s National Conventional Arms Control Committee, told a public conference that he could justify Denel dealing with CENSORED, and that the United States also sold huge amounts of arms to CENSORED.
Less than 24 hours earlier, Denel had successfully interdicted the M&G from naming the country to which it proposes to sell the G6 cannons. On the same day that Asmal named the country in public, Denel successfully interdicted Independent Newspapers.
In argument before Judge Willem de Villiers in the Pretoria High Court, Denel’s lawyers extensively quoted Asmal’s comments when he announced a “new Cabinet-approved policy on transparency or openness in arms transfer matters” at a media conference last Wednesday.
“At the end of the day there are such things as commercial confidentiality and trade secrets. There is such a thing as the genuine national interest,” Denel lawyers quoted Asmal as saying.
Judge de Villiers agreed. In his reasons for granting the urgent interdict he said: “No other facts have been placed before me to indicate that it is in the public interest that confidential parts of the instant transaction should be made public. To my mind, the applicant [Denel] has shown not only a prima facie right, but indeed a clear right that the confidential information should not be published.”
Yet, the following day, Asmal showed no hesitation in discussing the deal in public, says the director of the Washington-based Human Rights Watch Arms Project, Joost Hiltermann. The lobbyist for transparency in the arms trade was at a Cape Town conference organised by the Centre for Conflict Resolution, along with at least one journalist.
“Kader Asmal gave a lengthy presentation, and there was an opportunity for questions afterwards. I asked him how he justified the deal currently being discussed by the arms control committee to sell arms to CENSORED,” Hiltermann said.
“I was aware that this was the country to which reference has been made in the South African press. He did not respond, and when a colleague of mine was given an opportunity to ask him a question, I asked her to repeat my question, again explicitly naming CENSORED.
“This time he answered, saying he had no problem in justifying the deal. He said a lot of countries sell arms to CENSORED. He said the United States sold huge amounts of arms to CENSORED. He said they needed the arms from South Africa for self-defence purposes and that if they could prove that, it would be easy to justify.
“I don’t see how papers in South Africa cannot go ahead and publish the name of the country,” Hiltermann said, “quoting Kader Asmal.” A representative of Asmal said Hiltermann was “stretching it” and “confusing the general with the particular.
“Even if a minister says there is no problem selling arms to a particular country, this should not automatically be taken as an announcement confirming any particular contract. Professor Asmal has consistently respected the confidentiality of the country concerned in his utterances.”
The country has also been named on radio stations in South Africa which have not been interdicted by Denel. Newspapers abroad have also named it. Denel declined to say this week whether CENSORED had pulled out of the deal, as the arms dealer had warned in its court argument, as a result of Asmal’s candour and the wide coverage given to the name of the client.
* In its argument before Judge de Villiers, Denel said peace in Angola had severely affected its business, forcing it to retrench workers and contributing to unemployment in South Africa. Ironically, most South Africans were unaware of their country’s devastating war in Angola as the media was censored by the government at the time.
“As a result of the war in Angola, Denel was involved in many armament transactions resulting in a total necessary work force of approximately 28 000 people,” said the acting managing director of the state-owned company, Seshi Chonco, in an affidavit to the court. “As a result of peace in Angola, together with a revised policy in so far as state expenditure on military equipment is concerned, many retrenchments in the work force of Denel were necessitated.”
Calculating that every job at Denel sustains 10 in the private sector, Chonco said that a further 10 000 job losses in the private sector were threatened. However, if the deal went through, Denel could employ an extra 500 people, resulting in the employment of approximately 2 500 people in the private sector.
“Denel’s present situation is that as a result of diminishing arms sales approximately 2 000 workers will have to be disposed of in the very near future,” Chonco said.
“It is in the national interest that nothing should be done to endanger the conclusion of this arms deal.”
The Mail & Guardian will respond to Denel’s argument in the high court on August 19.