If a task team’s recommendations are adopted, the Cabinet will continue to decide behind closed doors to whom the arms industry sells. Marion Edmunds reports
THE government plans to keep secret its most sensitive arms sales, such as the recent proposed Syrian arms deal, despite calls for greater transparency.
A governmental task team will advise the Cabinet before April that in cases in which a client requests confidentiality, or when a deal may jeopardise South Africa’s foreign relations, it should not reveal details of the sale to the public or to Parliament.
The task team, which is reporting to Water and Forestry Affairs Minister Kader Asmal in his capacity as chairman of the National Conventional Arms Control Committee (NCACC), suggests that all other deals – those guaranteed not to cause a stir – can be reported to Parliament in reports twice a year.
Members of the team, which has been working on the issue for a year, long before the Syrian arms debacle, include representatives from the Foreign Affairs Department, the National Intelligence Agency, Armscor and the defence industry.
The proposed policy, dubbed the pragmatic/discretionary approach, is being hailed as a new policy on arms sales.
In reality, however, the policy endorses the system adopted by the NCACC last year in which Cabinet secretly decides to whom the South African armaments industry can sell, without submitting marketing or export permits for parliamentary or public scrutiny.
Task team chairman and director of logistic policy in the defence secretariat, Chippy Shaikh, said this week: “The new policy will be, when adopted by the Cabinet, the best system of transparency and accountability that currently exists internationally.”
This has been challenged by the director of the Centre of Conflict Resolution, Laurie Nathan, who participated in the task team’s discussions.
While Nathan said the new policy was “positive” in that the arms control committee’s report would now go to Parliament and be made available to the public, it was “problematic in that it does not indicate what criteria Cabinet will use in exercising their discretion”.
He also pointed out that the qualifications were not, in fact, consistent with the requirements of the United Nations register of conventional armaments.
“It would therefore be incorrect to say that the new policy is the best system of transparency and accountability internationally. It is likely that those arms sales that Cabinet wishes to keep secret are those which have political or military sensitivities,” said Nathan.
Government has been left red-faced in recent months by the leak of details of a proposed R3-billion arms deal to Syria, which soured relations with the United States. Under the proposed new system, human rights organisations will have to continue to rely on such leaks to monitor the most sensitive South African arms sales.
The proposed policy also weakens the separation of powers in Parliament, which is enshrined in the new Constitution, by preventing MPs from acting as a check on the Cabinet decision-making on arms exports.
The Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Defence has already been seriously weakened in its ability to take on the Cabinet, with the deployment of its three most powerful and articulate MPs to other positions.
Former committee chairman Tony Yengeni is said to have an ambassadorial posting, ANC MP Dr Ian Phillips, an avid defence analyst, has been deployed as adviser to Public Works Minister Jeff Radebe, and the outspoken ANC MP Tengiwe Mtintso has left Parliament to serve on the Gender Commission. With the departure of those MPs, the committee is expected to lose most of its clout.