Fri 18 Apr 2008
Upon hearing that the London Times had an article today that cited the Wassenaar Arrangement, I thought, “maybe now we can start getting some properly researched journalism on the Arrangement.” Maybe, but not likely.
The basics of the story are that South Africa is allowing a shipment of weapons from China to pass through its territory to reach Zimbabwe, which, as most people know, is currently in a state of turmoil over its recent election. The government is claiming this is a “normal transaction between two sovereign states and we don’t have to interfere.”
While it may be true (I’m no expert on internal South African bureaucracy) that allowing such transhipment is counter to the National Convention on Arms Control, it is not, as the authors (Phillipe Naughton and Jane Macartney) go on to say, violating “South Africa’s international commitments under a range of agreements including the 1996 Wassenaar Arrangement.”
The Wassenaar Arrangement does not prevent such shipments from happening. It only states that, if countries choose to make such shipments, they should report it to the other members of the Arrangement. In a way, then, the article itself serves to fulfil South Africa’s international obligations, at least to Wassenaar.
Having read that article, I decided to do my monthly troll through other news sources to see who else is concerned about the Arrangement lately. And to my surprise I found an article in the Taipei Times that actually got it right. At just over 300 words, the author (a ’staff writer’) did so succinctly, too. The article discusses the fact that Taiwan’s new President-elect, Ma Ying-jeou, has said he will try to relax national export controls to China if he thinks they are too strict, after listening to experts. In particular, Taiwanese companies are not allowed to export computer chip manufacturing facilities of the same calibre that the US are exporting to China.
Taiwan is not a member of the Wassenaar Arrangement, which the author stated, but does (or at least will upon Ma taking office) use the Lists as a standard. The author even correctly stated the founding of the Arrangement (mid-1996) and its initial number of members (33). Finding all of this out probably took the author all of 30 minutes, at most. I applaud such effort. It is small, but as we can see, more that the Times does.
April 19th, 2008 at 3.33 pm
It looks like the source of misunderstanding on the South African arms issue may be the Kallie Kriel, CEO of Afriforum, a South African civil rights group. In a press statement (picked up in the South African Times) he states the following:
Putting aside for the moment that he said it was the “Wassenaar Agreement” instead of the Wassenaar Arrangement, his statement is incorrect. The Arrangement does not “stipulate that arms may not be transported to areas where they will be used to repress people or to commit human rights violations.” To show this, I turn to Section II.3. of the Initial Elements:
Whether or not South Africa allowed the transhipment, as I said above, is solely its decision. To be clear, it would have had to answer to questions from other countries on whether it should have done so, but that is as far as it would have gone.
As a side note, I found it interesting that the press statement also contained a very thorough description of the Wassenaar Arrangement (correctly spelt) after the main body of the statement. In this, they describe in detail the process that South Africa went through to join. Given such knowledge, I find it extraordinary that they could have misrepresented the Arrangement so much in the body of the statement.