Pakistan bought the Erieye system from Sweden, for $10 billion: Photo © Saab AB.

Anna Ek — President, Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society (Svenskafreds) — on Sweden’s role in India-Pakistan arms race.

The Millennium Declaration, adopted by the United Nations Millennium Summit, in September 2000, proclaims: “We will spare no effort to free our peoples from the scourge of war, whether within or between states, which has claimed more than five million lives in the past decade.”

The declaration contains commitments to peace, security, disarmament, environment, democracy and human rights. The best-known goals of the declaration are those relating to development and poverty reduction. The declaration evolved into the Millennium Development Goals, in which eight concrete and measurable goals are set, to be achieved by 2015.

In 2008, the world spent $1464 billion on military expenditures — that is $217 per person. Since 2001, the year after the UN adopted the Millennium Declaration, global military expenditure has, rather than decreasing, increased by 37%.

According to the UN, armed conflicts remain among the major obstacles towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals. There is a direct connection between the level of development in a country and the risk of armed conflicts: the poorer the country, the greater the risk that it will become embroiled in armed conflicts. The fact is that poor countries tend to have weaker governments, making it easier for armed groups to destabilise the nation or the region. Countries involved in armed conflicts rarely manage to achieve sustainable development.

The global arms trade is a major engine behind military escalations and, thus, a key contributor to conflicts. Disarmament, on the other hand, has often been a crucial instrument in processes that has led to lasting peace between states. The European Union is an example of this. However, the member states of the EU are not always working for peace and stability in other countries or regions. Rather, these states are engaged in exploiting the conflicts and unstable regions for the sole purpose of scoring export deals for their own arms industries.

An example of this is South Asia.

South Asia — Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka — is a diverse region. Some of the countries in this part of the world are among the poorest of nations. In some countries, political instability, absence of democracy, and serious human rights violations are part of everyday life. Some are also affected by internal and regional conflicts, many of which have been going on for a long time and have already taken thousands of lives.

Despite the gripping poverty in the region, countries like India and Pakistan allot large sums to their defence budgets, year after year. In its 2006 report, the United Nations Development Programme emphasised that military investments in poor countries often come at the expense of life-saving investments in clean water and sanitation. Pakistan was given particular attention since it spent forty-seven times more on its military than it did on water and sanitation, with 1,18,000 people dying there each year of diarrhoea.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, India is the second largest arms importing country in the world, just after China. Meanwhile, Pakistan plays the role of a strategic partner in the US-led war on terror. The country has been, for a long time, a standing customer of European arms, making it the eleventh largest arms importer in the world. Given this, the region is indeed a lucrative market for the arms industry to engage in, which it certainly does.

The Kashmir dispute is probably the most widely known story of conflict between India and Pakistan, though these countries have a history of skirmishes and outright war, on and off, since their independence from British rule in 1947 — 1965 in Kashmir, 1971 in then East Pakistan that became Bangladesh, and so on. These armed conflicts between the two nations have been used by eager European arms producers, aided by their governments. This goes back to 1948 when a deal was first signed with Pakistan.

Swedish arms trade with India and Pakistan is an illustrative example of such war-profiteering. Here, to begin with, we have the Swedish howitzers that were reportedly used by India against Pakistan — first in 1989, and then in 1999 during the Kargil war, when the world held its breath as one million soldiers were standing along the frontiers between two nuclear powers.

Around the same time, in a very interesting twist, the Swedish government authorised the export of a defence system to Pakistan that would detect attacks from the Indian side, using those very howitzers. How are we supposed to explain this? Was it out of concern for Pakistan’s safety, or, efficient exploitation of a conflict for business gains?

This became even more interesting as it was revealed that just a month before the howitzer export deal with India was authorised, Sweden sold the surface-to-air Robot 70 system to Pakistan, that was to be used for shooting down Indian aircrafts.

Meanwhile, India was sold the infamous Carl Gustav grenade rifle — one of the most widely used weapons in conflict zones — in large quantities. It is manufactured by Saab Bofors Dynamics and has been sold to more than forty countries, and has been used in numerous wars — in Burma, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, India, Iraq.

To this day, Sweden is selling spare parts and updates to those weapons systems, both to India and Pakistan.

And, within a few years, India will decide from which country it will buy its new batch of fighter jets. Of course, Sweden will be there to compete with other arms exporting nations.

Now, over the border in Pakistan, in 2006, the military bought an airborne radar surveillance system — Erieye — from, well, guess from where… Sweden! This was, actually, one of the largest Swedish arms export in recent years. The deal saw Pakistan spending about $10 billion, an amount twelve times its yearly budget for water and sanitation.

This, however, will not go on unchallenged. This February, as the largest arms fair in India — Defexpo 2010 — is set to open in New Delhi, Indian peace and disarmament groups are organising protests against the shameless culture of war-profiteering. The Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society will be in New Delhi from February 14 to February 18, to join hands with our fellow South Asian peace activists. The madness of global arms trade must stop, and that is why we need to challenge the arms industry in Sweden, India, and Pakistan.♦

Anna Ek is President, Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society.