OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Tuesday
US-BASED watchdog group Human Rights Watch has slammed South Africa for exporting weapons to countries where they risk fuelling conflicts.
The group said in a report that half of the 10 top destinations for South African arms between 1996 and 1998 – India, Algeria, Colombia, Pakistan and Congo (Brazzaville) – had during that time experienced conflict.
Pretoria has rejected the report, which condemns South Africa for providing military help to participants in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1998, in particular to Rwanda, which is supporting rebels in the DRC.
South Africa slapped an arms embargo on Rwanda in 1996, then let it slip in 1997, giving, the report says, “a green light to arms transfers despite flare-ups in the fighting in western Rwanda and the involvement of Rwandan troops in a series of atrocities.”
It seems, it says, that South Africa adopted rights-friendly arms policies following the “immorality” of the apartheid era, but failed to stick to them.
The report concludes that South Africa’s choice of arms customers “has revealed a gap between the principles professed by the NCACC (the country’s National Conventional Arms Control Committee) and practice, and appears to be based more on considerations of realpolitik and economics”.
It urges the government to address the inconsistencies between its arms export policies and practices, and deny weapons to all human rights abusers.
It also calls on the government to give parliament a bigger say in arms exports and to publish full details of arms sales as the current system of giving the destination and the category of weapons “militates against full accountability.”
Education Minister Kader Asmal, who heads the NCACC, said South Africa took “strong exception” to the report.
His adviser, Fred Maree, added that the authors had relied on “inaccurate” news reports as sources.
“Government is proud of the integrity of the arms control regulatory process. It does not need any backhanded compliments and rejects the slur Human Rights Watch has cast on the application of its principles,” Maree said.
He said the arms sold to Rwanda were mainly armoured vehicles and that government allowed the transfers in a bid to help the Rwandan government stop the genocide in that country. – AFP