Published on Saturday, May 12, 2001 in the New Zealand Herald Dealers in Death - A Visit to an Arms Bazaar by Robert Fisk
A few metres after I clear the security gates at the exhibition centre near Abu Dhabi, I am being offered a fine Persian silk carpet and a set of Arab brass cooking utensils and coffee pots. There are tea stands and flowers, purple and gold and green in the early spring heat.
While the Arabs sport white robes, the Western visitors are in dark blue suits and ties, their wives in bright, tight-fitting dresses, often with those slightly silly racing hats which come with fake blooms on top. Several of the ladies stop off to look at the jewellery store.
Military pipe bands play English and Scottish marches. Smartly attired Pakistani and Indian workers labour to erect Arab tents before the midday sun reaches its height.
Silk carpets, coffee pots, flowers, a Highlander's lament, tea, jewellery ... and a game of polo to follow in the evening.
It is as civilised as fine art - which is what the sale of weapons has become for the world's armourers.
Behind the tents and trinket shops and pipe band, there lies on display the most sophisticated and lethal ordnance ever made by man, so new you can smell the fresh paint.
Each time I examine a French missile, a German tank, an American rocket, a British armoured vehicle, a Dutch self-propelled gun or a Russian automatic rifle, up comes a charming gentleman in another of those dark blue suits, a merchant of death brandishing a file of glossy brochures, offering a powerful handshake and another cup of tea.
Some are a bit portly - selling death on a large scale means a lot of hospitality - and often they carry a small purple or blue flower in their buttonhole. Ballistics is their fascination.
"As the day warms up, a bullet flies faster," a cheerful Australian confides to me. "In the evening, the air grows heavier and the bullet goes more slowly."
Smiling field marshals and jolly generals from across the Arab world drift through the arms pavilions, running their hands along the sleek missile tubes, peering through sniper rifles, clambering like schoolchildren on to howitzers and tanks.
I have to admit to a grim fascination of my own in all this, a professional interest. For 25 years now, the crudest and most fabulously designed bullets, rockets, missiles, tank shells, artillery rounds and grenades have been hurled in my direction by some of the nastiest and most "moral" armies on earth.
Israelis with American Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, Syrians with Russian T-72 tanks, RAF pilots with American cluster bombs, Afghan Mujahiddin with Russian AK-47 rifles, Russians with Hind helicopter gunships, Iraqis and Azerbaijanis with Russian-made Scud rockets, Iranians with US-made sniper-rifles and Americans with Boeing fighter-bombers and battleships whose shells were the size of Volkswagens ... they have all sent their produce swishing in my direction.
In 25 years as a Middle East correspondent I've seen thousands of corpses - women and children as well as men - blasted, shredded, eviscerated, disembowelled, beheaded, pulverised, lobotomised, castrated and otherwise annihilated by the multibillion-dollar arms industry.
So I regularly prowl the arms bazaars of the Middle East, seeking an answer to the same old questions. Who are the men who produce this vile equipment? How do they justify their trade?
And what language can encompass science and death and capital gains on such a scale? For there is, as I discover in Abu Dhabi, a frightening correlation between linguistics and guns, between grammar and rockets. It's all about words.
I first circle the arms sellers' pavilions with a large canvas bag and a kleptomaniac's desire to hoard every brochure, pamphlet, book and magazine, squirrelling away thousands of pages of the stuff.
Back in my hotel room, I rifle through the lot. The Russians are the mildest in their language. "You will feel protected by our smart weapons' shield," promises Russia's KEP Instrument Design Bureau.
Uralvagoncavod's latest T-90 tank - a descendant of the old Warsaw pact T-55 clunkers - is advertised as "the Best."
The State Enterprise Ulyanovsk Mechanical Plant's anti-aircraft missiles give an "awesome punch" to their buyers.
The British are smoother. Vickers Defence Systems are trying to flog the new Challenger 2E, "optimised to represent the best balance of fightability, firepower and mobility ... its ability to deliver combat effectiveness has been proven."
Australian Defence Industries are selling a "live fire defence training system" which includes "a ruggedised portable unit." This is taken to the battlefield so that soldiers can practise shooting computerised human beings in between killing real ones.
The Italians like their verbal trumpets. Beretta firearms provides "quality without compromise ... experience, innovation, respect for tradition ... the Beretta tradition of excellence."
Finland's Sako 75 hunting-gun manufacturers boast that their designers were asked a simple question. "What would you do if given the resources to design the rifle of your dreams, the new ultimate rifle for the new millennium?"
"Excellence" crops up again and again. Oshkosh of Wilmington manufactures military trucks with "a tradition of excellence."
Then comes Boeing's Apache Longbow attack helicopter. "It's easy to talk about performance," their ad runs. "Only Apache Longbow delivers."
The European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company is among the few to let the cat out of the bag. "True respect," their advertising brags, "can only be earned by making superior weapons systems. Only by owning them." After a while I feel sick. There is something infinitely sad and impotent about the frightful language of the merchants of death, their circumlocutions and macho words balanced by the qualities the weapons are designed to eliminate, their admission that guns mean power turning into the final definition of "excellence."
The glossy pages pile up on my floor. It's a linguistic journey into a fantasy world. Half the words used by the arms sellers - protection, reliability, optimisation, excellence, respect, trust, timelessness, perfection - hint at human goodness, even the achievements of the spirit.
The other half - punch, gutsy, performance, experience, potency, fightability - are words of naked aggression, a hopelessly infantile male sexuality aiming to prove that might is right.
Americans name their weapons - Apache, the Arrowhead navigation system, the Kiowa multiple launch platform and the Hawkeye infrared sensors - after a native Indian population that they destroyed. The one thing they don't mention is death.
The men here to turn a dollar on all these "equipments" are as nice a bunch of middle-class family men as you could meet.
At the Vickers pavilion stands Derek Turnbull from Blyth in Northumberland, watching a scale model of the Challenger 2E tank moving round and round on a plastic stand. Ask him if he ever thinks about what all these weapons do to human beings and his response is immediate.
"Any civilised person who works in this business knows what the purposes are. But you have to remember that a tank is to kill tanks, not people. That's the purpose of it."
Now Turnbull is an intelligent man. Is he really satisfied with a reply like that? Aren't there humans, some mothers' sons, inside the tank when it is "killed"? Turnbull thinks about my question, then talks about the detachment which comes with military information technology.
"Everyone comes to terms with it in their own way," he says. "Most people talk about the engineering and the technology. It is mentioned from time to time."
The "it" is the infliction of death, although at no point does the word cross Turnbull's lips.
Then it turns out that he was in Saudi Arabia for Vickers during the 1991 Gulf War. Although he was not a soldier, he arrived at the infamous "Road of Death" by the Mutla Ridge, south of Basra, within two days of the mass slaughter of fleeing Iraqis by American and British pilots.
"It was horrendous. But in a funny sort of way I didn't have the reaction I'd expected. You see, we'd driven up through Kuwait, past all the oil wells that had been set alight by the Iraqis. It was the most awful thing I'd ever seen. And by the time I'd gone through all this awful devastation, I wasn't too shocked by the damage at Mutla."We are silent for a while. The "damage" at Mutla was human as well as material. I found an Iraqi soldier squashed flat in the sand, his whole body just an inch thick, his rifle squashed to the width of a piece of paper beside him.
The burning oil fields were awesome, but human death is surely something different. Turnbull then turns into the archetypal arms salesman.
"Look, Robert," he says. "If the world was full of nice human beings who did civilised things, we wouldn't need all this kit."
I come across two female Ukrainian army students brandishing their new diplomas in front of some nonplussed Arabs. Maria Verenis and Julia Bartashova are the very model of a modern major publicity campaign. Ukraine is selling tanks.
Over in the US pavilion, an even more startling figure is making her way past the Winchester rifle stand. Ramona Doll (honestly) is advertising body armour in a skin-tight, thigh-clutching steel blouse and trousers, complete with handgun and too much lipstick. She is not the flip side but the very embodiment of all that macho rubbish in the brochures.
In the Lockheed Martin stand is 69-year old John Hurst, 45 years with Lockheed. He tries to make me understand his creed.
"From a religious point of view, I'm a very strong Christian," he says. "You can look through the entire New Testament and you won't find anything on defending yourself by zapping the other guy. But it says the Lord wants us to preach His gospel - and we can't very well do that if we're dead.
"That's not an aggressive posture ... the Lord wants us to defend ourselves and arm ourselves so that we can spread His Word."
I ask again: what about death?
"Right or wrong, I never associate it with what I'm doing. If I see a bomb go off and legs flying off, I never say to myself, 'I could have been the cause of that.' Because we're trying to prevent that."
But the gospel preached at Abu Dhabi has nothing to do with John Hurst's God. It is about fear and threats; the fear of Iraq and Iran, the threat of Saddam's aggression, the constant, reiterated Western warnings that these gentle, soft, sandy, unspeakably wealthy oil states must arm and re-arm to defend themselves.
What is being preached is the new Bush doctrine: the threat comes from warmonger Saddam Hussein, not peaceful Israel. The Arabs need to defend themselves - necessitating the wholesale milking of Arab Gulf wealth, the squandering of billions on Western arms to protect the Gulf from the wreckage of Iraq and the chaos of Iran.
The statistics tell it all. In 1998 and 1999 alone, Gulf Arab military spending came to £57 ($186) billion.
" In despair, I walk to the Russian pavilion. It is a sign of Russian times that to sell their tanks and MiGs, they have enlisted the 81-year old inventor of the world's best known notorious rifle. I found him there, Mikhail Kalashnikov, small with grey hair and a few gold teeth, hands unsteady but Siberian eyes alert as a wolf, wearing his two Heroes of Soviet Labour medals.
He is at least one of the few arms sellers to have experienced war. Born in 1919, one of 18 children of whom only six survived, he was a Soviet T-38 tank commander in 1941. He tells how he was wounded in the shoulder and back when a German shell smashed part of the tank's armour into his body.
"I was in hospital, and a soldier there asked, 'Why do our soldiers have only one rifle for two or three of our men when the Germans have automatics?' So I designed one. I was a soldier and I created a machinegun for a soldier. It was called Automat Kalashnikova, the automatic weapon of Kalashnikov - AK - and it carried the date of its first manufacture, 1947."
The AK-47 became the symbol of revolution - Palestinian, Angolan, Vietnamese, Algerian, Afghan, Hezballah, the battle rifle of the Warsaw Pact.
I ask Kalashnikov how he can justify all the blood, all those corpses torn to bits by his invention.
"You see, maybe all these feelings come about because one side wants to liberate itself with arms. But it is the good that prevails. You may live to see the day when good prevails. The time will come when my weapons are no longer necessary."
This is incredible, preposterous. The AK-47 has mythic status. Kalashnikov admits at least that.
"When I met the Mozambique minister of defence, he presented me with his country's national banner which carries the image of a Kalashnikov sub-machinegun. And he told me that when all the liberation soldiers went home to their villages, they named their sons 'Kalash."' There is no point in asking the old man what his children think of him. His 57-year old son, Viktor, a small-arms designer, is part of the Russian arms delegation to Abu Dhabi.
So we embark on the Russian version of a familiar moral track. "My aim was to create armaments to protect the borders of my motherland. It is not my fault that the Kalashnikov became very well known in the world, that it was used in many troubled places. I think the policies of these countries are to blame, not the designers."
There is only one other place to find an answer. I walk over to a small stand hidden away in the corner of one of the farthest pavilions, where brown-painted models of mobile-launched rockets lie along a shelf. This is the Iranian arms bazaar.
Most of their missiles are called "Dawn" or "Morning Sunrise," but one caught my eye, a big 125km-range monster, produced by the SB Industrial Group of Tehran and called the "Nazeat." It's a Persian word meaning "Horror of Death."
Yes, Iran - the only nation in all of the world arms market to tell the true purpose of a weapon - has actually named a missile after the extinction of life. Does the answer to my question lie here?
These missiles are not for sale, I am solemnly informed by Morteza Khosravi, a young man from the Iranian ministry of defence with an intense expression. They are only to show Iran's "capabilities." He swiftly adds that Iran sells arms only according to strict rules under the UN's Defence Control Act.
I know all this. What I want to hear about is the immorality of arms production.
Morteza Khosravi seems puzzled. Is it not perfectly clear? "There are two main purposes for the production of weapons," he says. "Some provide them for aggression, others for self-defence. The latter is the case for our country. We always had a policy of defending ourselves."
There is another long pause. Then Khosravi utters the mantra of every arms seller: "It is a fact that each human being must defend himself."
I had heard this from Derek Turnbull, from Mikhail Kalashnikov, from John Hurst. If only the world was full of nice human beings who did civilised things ... The Lord wants us to defend ourselves. Man is born to protect his family. Protection, respect, trust, history, timelessness ...
It seems useless to listen any more. They are unstoppable, unarguable, impossible.
The merchants sell death in the form of protection, killing as defence, as God's will, human destiny, patriotic duty. The bills - human and financial - come later.