The controversial Syrian arms deal seems to have been leaked in an attempt to scupper it, reports Stefaans Brmmer
THE government’s handling of the partially approved R3-billion arms deal with Syria has exposed deep divisions in official thinking on the crucial foreign policy area of arms control – and the leak of Cabinet minutes appeared a deliberate attempt to scupper the deal.
Fingers were pointed this week at the Department of Foreign Affairs as the source of the leak as it is one of the few parties, apart from the Cabinet ministers themselves, to have had close enough knowledge of the process to supply the information, first published in the Sunday press.
The department this week stood by an official statement issued on Tuesday which sought to downplay the significance of the conditional “contracting approval” given by Cabinet on December 4 to state-owned arms conglomerate Denel. A representative said there was nothing to add for now.
But a senior foreign affairs official said privately that while he did not agree with the tactic used to try to scupper the deal, the “time-buying” exercise signalled by the statement meant that “the leakage, in my view, has been successful”.
Some foreign affairs officials are known to have been upset with what they regard as an erratic government approach to foreign policy. Said one this week: “Foreign affairs makes an input in such matters. Ours is perhaps more directed to political consequences than other [departments] … We have to accept a decision, but if something goes wrong we have to carry the can.”
The Tuesday statement – issued by foreign affairs but understood to have been a “collective effort” in which Deputy President Thabo Mbeki played a significant role, and ultimately approved by President Nelson Mandela – sought to portray the deal as being in its infancy, saying that a Syrian tender for the tank firing control systems would probably go out only in 1999 or 2000, and that South Africa would have to make a final decision only then.
This came amid pressure from the United States and renewed reports of tension between Syria and Israel, still a military ally of South Africa. The US is obliged in terms of its own anti-terrorism legislation to reconsider aid to states which sell lethal military equipment to the countries, including Syria, which it brands “state sponsors of terrorism”.
But the statement appeared to contradict other government comments, including one by President Nelson Mandela on Wednesday, confirming that the “conditional” nature of the approval would be reconsidered by cabinet “soon” – according to some officials when the Cabinet meets on January 22. The December 4 decision was reportedly made conditional to allow Mbeki, who was in India at the time, the opportunity to study the implications of approval in terms of US law.
The statement also sought to portray the conditional “contracting approval” as a mechanism enabling Denel to market its product in Syria. But experts on South Africa’s conventional arms control regime this week pointed out that a contracting permit – which allows South African arms companies to enter contractual negotiations with client states – was the second of three tiers of approval, after the first-tier marketing permit had already been issued.
In practice the final tier of approval, that of the export permit, would not be withheld lightly once the contracting permit had been issued.
For the process to have reached the stage of an application for a contracting permit means that talks between Denel and Syria would have reached an advanced stage. A government official has been quoted as saying the request from Syria came in May or June last year. The marketing permit would have been given by the National Conventional Arms Control Committee, chaired by Water and Forestry Minister Kader Asmal, as early as the middle of last year. This would have allowed Denel to conduct demonstrations of the arms system to Syria.
To some, both the Syrian and the earlier Rwandan deal signal an unannounced shift away from South Africa’s widely hailed human rights oriented arms control regime. When Essop Pahad, deputy minister in Mbeki’s office, told SABC television on Tuesday that South Africa “is not a pacifist country”, it reinforced that view. Insiders say the committee from time to time finds itself deadlocked between the “doves”, including Asmal, and the “hawks”, who include Defence Minister Joe Modise, who tends to defend arms industry interests aggressively. The fact that the committee, in response to Denel’s Syria application, referred the matter to Cabinet for a decision may signal that it was trying to absolve itself of a difficult decision after internal disagreement.
Laurie Nathan, a member of the government- appointed Cameron Commission probe into arms sales, this week slammed the proposed sale as inconsistent with the government’s own policy.