Marion Edmunds
TWO of the Cameron Commission’s key recommendations to lift the veil of secrecy on South Africa’ s arms export industry failed to find support in Cabinet.
Water Affairs Minister Kader Asmal — who heads the Cabinet committee scrutinising arms trade policy and arms export applications — had already rejected elements of the the Cameron Commissions’s proposals in Parliament by the time the report was officially released and presented to the media.
Asmal had told a Parliamentary Defence Committee his Cabinet committee — the National Conventional Arms Control Committee (NCACC) — disagreed with the report’s proposal that parliamentarians be given the power to review and veto arms sales.
Asmal said he did not think it neccessary for Parliament to have this oversight capacity, because the public should trust “the intuition of the 13 cabinet ministers on the NCACC”.
Cameron Commissioner Laurie Nathan believes parliamentary oversight of arms exports is essential as “an independent evaluation and it is probably the most effective way of safe- guarding human rights and international security concerns”.
Asmal has also rejected the commission’s proposal to classify countries according to their status as potential customers: those to whom arms should not be sold, those to whom arms could be sold and those where the situation is unclear.
Asmal has said that to publish such a list would be to create diplomatic tensions.
The head of the Institute for Defence Policy, Jakkie Cilliers, supports the commission in this instance.
He believes processing arms export permit applications cases by case, as the NCACC is doing, will inevitably lead to inconsistency in decision-making. “This approach becomes a logistical nightmare and creates a logjam in the processing of applications for marketing and export permits.”
Cilliers believes there are some excellent recommendations in the Cameron Commission but his chief criticism is that the report is written from an ideological position.
“It was written … to restrict the sale of weapons.” he says. “If the commission’s recommendation were implemented in their entirety, they would ultimately shut down the defence industry.”