Andrew Feinstein: The Shadow World of the Global Arms Trade | Fall 2017 Wall Exchange

[Music] welcome to the wall exchange my name is Nicole Barrett I'm the director of the international justice and human rights clinic an executive director of Allard prize initiatives at the Peter a Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia here in Vancouver at the outset I'd like to say a few words of thanks first thanks to you for coming this evening we're so pleased to have you here tonight thank you also to the straitjackets jazz band Ron McDonald Gerald Bowie and who stack and John's egwin finally I'd like to thank the partners finally I'd like to thank the partners for this event the Vancouver Institute the Georgia Strait and the taiyi we will begin tonight with Andrew Feinstein who will speak for approximately 45 minutes after that Professor James Stewart will moderate a 30-minute question and answer period were you the audience ask questions James Stewart is a law professor at the PTA Allard School of Law originally from New Zealand he began a career as a war crimes prosecutor at the Rwandan and then Yugoslavia NAL's before completing a doctorate at Columbia University in New York James has received numerous awards for his work including the Aurora prize one of Canada's leading prizes for young scholars across all social sciences much of his work focuses on corporate responsibility for international crimes and now it is my pleasure to introduce Andrew Fiennes Dean Andrew is the executive director of corruption watch a non-governmental organisation that exposes the impact of bribery and corruption on democracy governance and development he was an African National Congress Member of Parliament in South Africa under Nelson Mandela and resigned from Parliament in 2001 in protests at the ANC's refusal to allow an independent and comprehensive inquiry into a million built into a multibillion-dollar arms deal that was tainted by allegations of high-level corruption his critically acclaimed book the a world inside the global arms trade reveals the corruption and malfeasance at the heart of the global arms business both formal and illicit with meticulous detail he exposes the shocking and uncomfortable reality of the power politics and corruption that accompany the global weapons industry a documentary film a feature film of his book also called the shadow world premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York last April and has since won several awards before bringing Andrew to the stage we're going to play the short trailer from shadow world I've got nothing against money I don't mind paying bribes to politicians the thing about politicians is that they're very much like prostitutes but only more expensive the heads of government are the salespeople in chief of their country's large arms contractors for the last 50 years at least policy has been made based on the assumption of greed and it's ruined the world this very phrase war on terror it's nonsense it's like saying the war on war you're slipping into this possibility of kind of perpetual war the national security state not only seeks a perpetual state of war it will even go to all ends to create that that make them I feel look like a bunch of schoolboys and it destroys the promisee it destroys the will to diplomacy and it destroys the skill for de plums Bonnie's done like food munitions has got you know cell by that you know Blair came to South Africa to lobby the BAE the british weapons manufacturer one biggest contract ten billion dollars quite scarce public resources on this weaponry that we didn't need and this is the template around the world bae channel international covet payments all over the world to the local politician seems to be a very expensive way of organizing bright payment that's what cuts out the military equipment and just hand out the money it's the disease of permanent war that destroyed the Middle East Islamic fundamentalism companies are not only sort of part of the government but they're effectively above the law it's okay to kill from a distance without a warrant without a trial without a jury and the execution takes place on screen once you start a war do you open a kind of Pandora's box you don't control it it controls you and it propels you in directions you never thought you'd go [Music] [Applause] good evening it's a great pleasure to be here not only because I spend most of my life in the company of people like Ricardo Privitera who you've just seen on the film I'm extremely grateful to the wall Institute and the other partners who invited me to give this lecture tonight and have to start with an apology and that is that as I talk I'm afraid I'm gonna walk around quite a lot because as a recovering politician as Al Gore would have it I very early on in my political career learned to dislike lecterns when we were elected to government in 1994 in South Africa as the African National Congress I was sent on our first delegation as a democracy to the United States of America where we visited Atlanta Georgia symbolic home of Martin Luther King jr. but also home as you probably know to CNN and the coca-cola Corporation and when we arrived at the airport the mayor of Atlanta welcomed us he was a former professional basketball player who to someone of my height seemed to be about seven foot 10 inches and he welcomed us from behind a podium that was an illuminated coke cam my boss a prominent South African politician by the name of Tokyo sequela asked me to say a few remarks in thanks so I walked up the back of this coke can set a few inane things and wandered back down and said to Tokyo so chief was that okay his response was well what you said was fine unfortunately all we could see sticking out of the top of the coke can was an incredibly sweaty bald head so I'm far happier without any encumbrance between myself and yourself thank you too for being here what I would like to do is sketch out the basic contours of the global arms trade a trade that is obviously an important dimension of national defense a tool of foreign policy and a contributor albeit vastly overstated to the economy the arms trade has profound additional impacts on the world from the enabling fuelling and perpetuation of conflict and repression the undermining of development and economic progress to the corrosion of democracy but most fundamental I will argue that the trade in weapons and the way it is structured makes us far less safe we spend about 1.7 trillion dollars a year on defense and national security that's about two hundred and thirty-five dollars for every person on the planet the United States spends well over a trillion 700 billion dollars on average in its defense budget that is greater than the five next largest countries spend on defense combined importantly the trade in conventional arms both big and small is actually only worth about sixty to a hundred and twenty billion dollars a year a fact that I'll ask you to keep in mind unsurprisingly the u.s. produces between one third and 40% in any given year of all weapons produced in the world Canada exports weapons to and imports weapons from the United States of America in a completely uncontrolled and unreported manner so much like China North Korea Myanmar and Israel we actually have no idea about the true size and nature of the Canadian arms trade approximately five hundred and twenty six thousand people died as a consequence of weapons every year five hundred and twenty six thousand and the trade in these weapons takes place across a continuum of legality on the one side of this continuum our our governments and weapons makers would have us believe is the formal legal side of this industry government to government arms deals or company to government arms deals at the other end of the continuum or what our governments and weapons makers described as the black market in weapons or the illegal trade in weapons which are completely illicit in conception and execution in the 17 years that I have by accident been investigating this trade I have yet to come across an arms deal that does not comprise some element of illegalities and the vast majority of deals take place somewhere in the middle of that continuum the gray market where they contain elements of legality and elements of illegality and that is what I describe as the shadow world now the reason that the shadow world is so preponderance is because any arms deal is a consequence of an intertwining of legal affairs of state of covert aspects of foreign and defense policy and of the very people who populate the so-called black market so amongst the arms dealers I've interviewed over the years people who to give you examples have amongst other things suggested that if only Hitler had the opportunity to complete his work the world would be a far better place today these people who will sell arms to anyone who will pay for them regardless of ideology identity or affiliation to a nation-state these same people are the very people used by our governments and our defense contractors to conclude the illicit side of their own arms deals and importantly that illicit side constitutes two key components on the one hand the regular violation of United Nations arms embargoes and professor James Stewart who you will meet a little bit later on with a research team here at UBC calculated up until early 2011 that there had been around 502 violations of such arms embargoes of which two led to any form of legal accountability one led to a prosecution and conviction and what this tells you is that this trade operates in something of a parallel legal universe where those engaged in it seldom face the legal consequences of their actions and the primary reason for that which is crucial to an understanding of this trade is it the manufacture buying and selling of weaponry is a consequence of remarkable collusion between our governments often publicly listed corporations as most of the weapons manufacturers are other arms of state including the military and intelligence services often Foreign Affairs departments the intermediaries but you and I understand as arms dealers agents or brokers and crucially everything that they do in this trade takes place behind a national security imposed veil of secrecy meaning they will do things in this trade that they wouldn't dare do in any other sector of the economy and it is partly as a consequence of this collusion but the buying and selling of weapons accounts for 40% of all corruption in world trade so in industry that in its best years is selling a hundred and twenty billion dollars worth of goods accounts for 40% of all corruption in all global trade this figure was identified by Joe roba a former oil industry intermediary who able to retire quite early as a consequence of the work that he had done wanted to shed a light on the opaque trade in natural resources but when he started this work what he discovered was that the trade in weapons accounted for far more corruption than the natural resource deals in which he had witnessed corruption at first hand so with access to national Treasuries to some intelligence agencies he'd worked with while in the oil business he managed to get hold of the real statistics of corruption in the defense industry and that's where he produced this figure of 40% he wasn't alone the US Department of Commerce decided to take an arbitrary five years of economic activity and identify all of the corrupt transactions which involved American companies during this five-year period 53% of those transactions were in the defense sector the IMF has identified a strong and robust correlation between levels of defense spending and levels of corruption in a society the first question that arises from these extraordinary statistics is why this trade would be so susceptible and robot argues compellingly that given these figures corruption in this industry is not the consequence of occasional rotten apples occasional executives or arms arms dealers or corrupt politicians and government officials but rather it is the consequence of the very structure of the arms trade the very DNA of this unique and unaccountable industry so let me try and describe it to you very simply there are in any given year between maybe six and fifteen major weapons deals in the world each of which is likely to be worth tens of billions of dollars to the companies involved and to the countries involved so vast amounts of money on a very small number of transactions hide with that is that the decisions about what equipment to buy and who to buy it from are taken by a remarkably small number of people so on the deal that I looked into as a member of parliament there were six ministers who made every decision about what to buy and who to buy it from and then this very small circle is hidden behind the veil of national security imposed secrecy so nothing that the company does nothing that the ministers do is going to find its way into the public domain until well after the transaction has taken place and then still the amount of information that is made public is minuscule I argue that this corruption as well as the efforts to conceal it undermine the rule of law not just in buying countries but as much in selling countries they distort the market and pollute the business environment the political process and the functioning of the state I experienced this firsthand I had joined the ANC in my late teens in South Africa in townships outside Cape Town and was a very young member of parliament one of not many people in the ANC who in 1994 at the point of our liberation from a party had an academic background in economics and Finance I found myself having chaired the subcommittee in Parliament that drafted all of the public financial management legislation as the ranking ANC member on the main financial oversight committee a committee called the Public Accounts Committee in Westminster systems of government a report came to our committee about an arms deal undertaken by our extremely young democracy a democracy that faced no enemies a democracy that faced no traditional narrowly defined security threat we decided to spend ten billion dollars on weapons weapons we didn't use and weapons we have barely used on call today why would we do that 300 million dollars of bribes is why we did it senior politicians including some of the six people who made the decision the head of the National Defense Force the head of procurement in the National Defence Force other state officials senior executives at the State Arms Company all the beneficiaries of this corruption this was at a time when six million South Africans were living with HIV or AIDS where over two million South Africans had no roof over their head at a time like today where South Africa suffers from a formal unemployment rate of almost 30 percent but according to our then president Thabo Mbeki nelson mandela's successor we could not afford the fiscal resources to provide antiretroviral medication for those people living with AIDS who couldn't afford private health care south africa's current President Jacob Zuma faced 783 counts of corruption fraud and racketeering in relation to the deal the charges were dropped by an acting head of prosecutions in the country a few weeks before Zuma was elected president a few weeks after the election that same person was made a High Court judge it was the moment at which the ANC a remarkable extraordinary liberation movement that had countered Chief Albert literally the first African recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize amongst its leaders that had seen Oliver Tambo lead the organization Walter Sisulu Nelson Mandela that organization since that point has been engulfed in corruption as has the South African state at every level these leaders of our liberation struggle were prepared to undermine the institutions of our democracy that we had fought so long to bring about in order to hide the corruption in this deal so when I try to investigate it to cut a very long story short I was threatened with removal from Parliament and the night before I was to be removed from Parliament I resigned my first book after the party dealt with that deal and its consequences of the 24 jet trainers bought from the British company BAE Systems which paid a hundred and fifteen million pounds of bribes eleven have left the ground of the 26 jet fighters bought from the Swedish company Saab in partnership with BAE 14 have never left the ground because we can't afford to fuel them to train the pilots to fly them and because we have absolutely no need of them but far worse than that is the reality according to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard that in the five years following that arms deal because of the policy choice that was made 362,000 South Africans a conservative estimate died avoidable deaths from HIV or AIDS 52,000 babies every year were born HIV positive because we would rather have rusting Gripen jet fighters then provide mother-to-child transmission treatment and what of what of the companies who corrupted this young naive democracy BAE Systems the pride and joy of British manufacturing Tony Blair himself made three visits to South Africa to persuade our government to buy the Jets that our Air Force said they would only take if forced to do so by the politicians and which were two and a half times more expensive than the Jets the Air Force actually wanted the royal family headed by the Queen who we found out two days ago stashes at least 10 million pounds in offshore secrecy jurisdictions sailed the then Royal Yacht Britannia to Cape Town Harbor and invited those six ministers to dinner to persuade them of the value of these planes or maybe to explain to them what a hundred and fifteen million pounds look like the United Kingdom Serious Fraud Office investigated BAE on that and eight other deals where they were paying bribes of similar proportions at virtually the same time all of those deals having been personally championed by Prime Minister Tony Blair the Serious Fraud Office settled with BAE who had to admit to one count of accounting irregularities in the smallest deal find half a million pounds and contracts that they made billions of pounds of profit in and the main law enforcement agent of the British government agreed not to allege corruption against that company or any of its agents in any of those deals or in any related deals effectively closing down investigations across all eight of those countries this came in the wake of Tony Blair in the latter stages of his esteemed Premiership closing down the Serious Fraud officers investigation into the most corrupt commercial transaction in history an arms deal between the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia in which six billion that's with a be six billion pounds of unauthorized commissions what you myself and most normal people on the planet understand as bribes six billion pounds of bribes were paid through a labyrinthine maze of offshore jurisdictions like of those revealed in the paradise papers the other day the investigation was closed down on national security grounds which meant that the Saudi government informed number 10 Downing Street that unless they closed down this investigation which was extremely embarrassing to the Saudis because of an in addition to the six billion pounds of bribes there was a hundred and seventy eight million pound slush fund in which drugs alcohol yachts and women were bought for the use of senior members of the Saudi royal family those Paragons of virtue who are amongst our greatest allies mark Thatcher the son of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who negotiated the deal made 12 million pounds out of the AL Yamamah deal the u.s. system very briefly is a system of legalized bribery unlike the European systems to some extent the Canadian system in the u.s. the companies just pay campaign contributions direct to politicians campaigns and then you can track the weapons projects that those politicians support once in Congress that go back to those very same companies the extraordinary thing is every year on average 84% of retiring generals at the Pentagon go into senior executive positions in the very defense companies to whom they've given contracts throughout their careers earning salaries that dwarf their earnings often of their entire military careers so while they're in those careers it's fairly important to keep those contractors sweet and this is why we have extraordinary weapons projects like the f-35 jet fighter which has recently been offered to Canada a jet that pierre sprey a former pentagon aerospace design engineer who appears in the film describes and excuse his language as the biggest piece of crap of any jet fighter produced for the United States military but it'll cost the American taxpayer one and a half trillion dollars and is of no value to the US in any conflict that it is currently engaged in or likely to be engaged in for generations to come and this is the first way in which the trade makes us less safe spending gargantuan amounts of money on equipment we don't need which means we're spending on what we do need this could in a narrow understanding of national security be more appropriate better equipment that we need to defend ourselves or it could if one takes a broader approach to sustainable security include vastly increased expenditure on climate change on inequality and all of its myriad consequences both at home and around the world but second the nature of the trade and the enormous bribes that it pays and remember these aren't just paid to the politicians making the decision because when an executive at a large arms company agrees to pay a bribe he unit almost always as he is taking a legal risk and his return for that legal risk is that a part of the bribe comes back to him so on the AL Yamamah deal Sir Richard Evans chairman of BAE Systems at the time was given through one of the intermediaries the finance minister of Lebanon at the time two luxury apartments in Mayfair in London with approximately six and a half million pounds and the problem here is that an executive who's earning a fairly good salary and bonus can earn multiples of his remuneration just by bribing one country so while he might have gone into his position with the intention of being the best business person he could in creating the best company he could after the first bribe and its rewards to him personally what he lands up doing in the words of Pierre sprey he's not looking for people to whom he can sell weapons but looking for people he can bribe but the size of these bribes ensure that war is always the preferred option to diplomacy in resolving disputes and conflicts because war is just so damn profitable for the individuals making the decisions we show in the film how Dick Cheney's personal wealth increased exponentially as a consequence of the invasion of Iraq because of the shares he held in Halliburton the company of which he had been chief executive officer between serving as Secretary of Defense and vice president a position for which you might recall he nominated himself he chaired president george w bush's search committee for a vice presidential candidate and resolved that he in fact was the best candidate something that must have thrilled his accountant this is reflected in the reality that the United States of America employs more people the state to run one aircraft carrier than it has diplomats across the entire world and the United States of America today has 11 aircraft carriers but thirdly the arms trade is particularly susceptible to what the brilliant and sadly late scholar Chalmers Johnson described as blowback the unintended consequences of our actions so perhaps the primary example of blowback in the world was America's funding of the Mujahideen liberation fighters as they were called in Afghanistan during the time of the Soviet occupation of that country it's estimated that the United States of America gave around 11 billion dollars of cash and weapons to the Mujahideen the mujahideen you might recall were really the core elements in the formation of the Taliban and certain parts of the al Qaeda Network so on 9/11 the congressman the Democrat who had done more than any other to ensure the black operations that supported the Mujahideen took place and kept going colorful character by the name of Charlie Wilson you might remember the film Charlie Wilson's War well on the morning of 9/11 Charlie Wilson nude already started drinking stood on his balcony watching inside his lounge what was happening to the World Trade Center in New York and watching the flames and smoke from the Pentagon across the Potomac River and he said Oh F those are my mudge even he knew that his and the actions of the United States government were a contributor to the tragedy of 9/11 let's take a look for a moment at Libya another example of this phenomenon of blowback so NATO countries provided Colonel Muammar Gaddafi along with Russia of tens of billions of dollars worth of weaponry so much weaponry in fact that Libya couldn't use a lot of it and simply stored it in not particularly secure warehouses across the country they also paid Colonel Gaddafi over 330 million euros and bribes to buy the weapons from them when the resistance against Gaddafi started and it got to a point where the NATO powers had to accept that his demise was a foregone conclusion NATO embarked on airstrikes to support the rebels what was their first task in those airstrikes it was to take out the very anti-aircraft installations that they had sold to Colonel Gaddafi and unfortunately literally within hours of Gaddafi's ignominious demise the warehouses containing the balance of the NATO munitions were looted not just by the rebel militias not just by elements of the Armed Forces still loyal to Qadhafi but by ordinary citizens so that within days of the fall of Muammar Gaddafi the amount of weaponry available in the MENA region increased exponentially at ridiculously low prices but if you couldn't make it to the outskirts of Egypt or Libya you could also buy a whole lot of the equipment on the internet including surface-to-air MANPAD missiles which are capable of taking down commercial jet airliners the reality the Libyan case reinforces is that there is no control over weapons once you've sold them even in the so-called formal legal government-to-government sales once you've delivered them they are out of your hands and it doesn't matter what anybody has signed up to what they've promised you on the Royal Yacht Britannia or in their desert tents over illicit liquor of course the way in which countries swamp conflict zones with weaponry doesn't exactly help weapons from cold war proxy conflicts in Angola Latin America and elsewhere are still circulating around these regions making weapons unbelievably cheap and easily accessible in South Africa today one can go to a township drinking hall known as a shebeen and along with your poison of choice you can buy an ak-47 it's a bit pricier than your drink and I would argue even more harmful add to this the almost complete lack of control of US weaponry in Afghanistan and Iraq for instance where a thousand beretta handguns were sent from Italy to the US forces in Iraq never arrived and were soon being used against US military personnel in Iraq it's therefore little surprise that virtually any group of whatever size as long as it has some ready cash can access weapons pretty much anywhere in the world and this is exacerbated by the reality that many arms dealers both the Friends of presidents and prime ministers as well as the so-called bottom feeders the less sophisticated thugs like mr. Privitera who you saw earlier most of them are intelligence assets not just for one country but for numerous countries often countries in conflict so when I sit with some of these arms dealers I initially used to say to them first of all are you sure I can quote you on this because you do not want to get on their wrong side when they say of course you can I would initially ask but why but how and they would say well do you think if the world's biggest defense companies if the world's biggest weapons producers wanted me in jail I'd be sitting here talking to you today I'm far too valuable to them both in the weapons transactions I do and the information I can provide to them the ultimate blowback though is the war on terror as it was once called as an arms dealer in the film again Ricardo Privitera says what better way to sell weapons than to have a perpetual war against an ever-changing enemy that can never be won the defense contractors simply identify how their current equipment their current weapon systems are absolutely essential for the new war on terror and then they'll develop a few new usually fairly expensive weapon systems for a few of the new tasks and as usual they are not usually fit for purpose so after the tragedy of 9/11 one of the big weaknesses of US homeland security that was identified was the equipment and readiness levels of the US Coast Guard so a ten billion dollar contract was given to Lockheed Martin to produce a whole range of new equipment for the Coast Guard in the ten years that followed for the just over ten billion dollars they managed to produce one vessel and when they launched said vessel its hull cracked so 10 years on over ten billion dollars of public money later the US Coast Guard was in no better position than it had been on the morning of 9/11 but the very notion of a war in terror is an oxymoron our greatest ally in the Middle East you have a choice of two Israel or Saudi Arabia I don't have time to look at Israel but we can certainly do so in questions if you would like but what about Saudi Arabia one of the most corrupt countries on the planet Prince Bandar son of the Saudi defense minister at the time and Saudis ambassador to America at the time of the AL Yamamah deal received just over 1 billion pounds in bribes from BAE Systems and the gift of an Airbus jet painted in the colours of his favorite American football team for his personal use some of that money found its way into the accounts of his wife at Riggs Bank in Washington DC Oh opposite the White House and into the accounts of two of the 9/11 hijackers Saudi Arabia beheads more people than al Qaeda Isis ISIL combined every year commits horrific human rights abuses against its own people and its Wahhabi ideology which it propagates around the world at great cost is the cornerstone of Islamic extremism in cahoots with radical Islam the bin Laden family is the biggest construction firm in Saudi Arabia and the understanding between radical groups many of whom have their roots in Saudi Arabia and the royal family is as long as the royal family supports them they weren't turned their ire on that royal family in Saudi Arabia we sell this fine nation more weaponry than anyone else besides ourselves on the planet over 10 billion dollars since the indefensible war in Yemen started replenishing the missiles and bombs that are killing thousands of Yemeni civilians and targeted airstrikes not as collateral damage but as actual civilian targets in defiance of international humanitarian in law and war crimes in this all-encompassing war figuring out who we are and are not at war with is extremely difficult iraq was invaded because it was a supporter of al-qaeda and had weapons of mass destruction both patently false in fact outright lies to justify a war that has brought even greater immiseration and suffering to that country but after the invasion al-qaeda developed and grew a substantial presence in Iraq in Syria al-qaeda groups on the one hand are supported by the US and the US as proxies such as Saudi Arabia and the Emiratis and change their names regularly to distance themselves from al-qaeda but retain their links to the network and their modus operandi and like in Afghanistan their allegiances change so we have given money and weapons to groups who then turn on us laughably we have provided weapons to some elements in al Qaeda who we are supporting who are associated with other elements of al Qaeda in Yemen who we are fighting and we cannot understand how the weapons get from Syria to Yemen because nobody would accept a few dollars to transport weaponry across that inhospitable terrain the elision of farcical geopolitics and an out of control arms trade ensure that these conflicts endure are excessively bloody and make us not just in the world at large but at home as well no more safe as I conclude let me give you just one more example and it relates back to Libya during the recent British election a young man of Libyan descent exploded a bomb in a music concert in Manchester killing a number mainly young concert girls he was well-known to British intelligence because British intelligence had worked with his father in establishing a militia in Libya to fight Muammar Gaddafi to whom we were selling weapons and father and son traveled regularly between the United Kingdom and Libya the son was radicalized by this very militia if this confuses you you are not alone but for many this confusion is deadly what we are doing in Yemen today and I say we because the country where I live the United Kingdom the United States of America and Canada continue to provide weapons to the saudi-led coalition that is killed according to the United Nations over 13,000 innocent civilians and when the bombs and missiles are dropped it is us our weapons companies who are making the billions by replenishing them and finally just bear in mind that these companies engaged in these actions are subsidized by our tax dollars in fact most of them would not survive in business as going concerns if it wasn't for the state subsidies because they are appalling Lee run companies and it costs so much state subsidy to employ a single person in the defense sector that we could create between three and seven equivalent level jobs in more productive more socially acceptable manufacturing sectors if there was the political will to do so and what is next as Tony's in former Central Command commander said if you liked Iraq you'll love Iran according to Lawrence Wilkerson chief of staff to : Powell that is a 10 to 14 year three to four trillion dollar invasion at the end of which the world Western Asia we'll look not much different than it does right now it'll still be in turmoil still be in chaos and 70 plus million Iranians will hate our living guts what's not to love and the irony is that reforming this trade would be incredibly easy if only there was the political will to do so but with a combination of pressure from ordinary citizens like you and I we can change this industry that is undertaken in our names and with our tax dollars an industry that counts its profits and billions and its costs in human lives for unless we do the trade and weapons will continue to make the world a poorer place a less democratic place a far more corrupt place and most bizarre and tragic of all a far far more dangerous place thank you very much [Applause] ladies and gentlemen my name is James Stewart and I have the great privilege to moderate a conversation with Andrew Feinstein now over the next 35 minutes there are two ways in which you can participate in this conversation because it's a an audience initiated discussion the first is by coming and forming cues at the two microphones here on my left and on my right and the second is online if you're watching live using the hashtag Wall X and I have a screen here which I can ask the questions from now the rules of the road of these please make your questions brief and what that means is if at any point you find yourself inhaling while I ask an question you've gone too long the difficulty about this rule is that I probably have to adhere to it myself and asking the first question so here it is and given the very serious consequences you point to in the global trade and weapons why is there so little attention paid to it do you think well first of all in terms of the attention paid to it one of the reasons I wrote the shadow world is because while I was writing after the party which obviously came out of my own personal experience of the impact of the trade on one country one very young democracy I discovered extraordinarily that there hadn't been a book written on the global trade in arms since 1979 when a brilliant British writer by the name of Anthony Sampson wrote a book called the arms bazaar and there are a number of reasons for that first of all the information is incredibly difficult to access because so much of it is covered by national security secrecy so we've probably over the years made twelve thirteen thousand freedom of information submissions around the world we've never got any other answer other than this is a matter of national security therefore we can't provide the information you request the second is the companies and individuals involved tend to be quite tedious and have very deep pockets so publishers and even editors and proprietors of newspapers are very wary of stuff being written about this and the political agenda for quite a while there was obviously during the 60s and 70s a very real concern with nuclear disarmament quite correctly and a lot of the activists around conventional weapons got involved in that and this became a somewhat neglected field but I'm hopeful in that over the 17 years I've been doing this work initially involuntarily I have seen a significant increase in the amount that is being written that is being spoken and that is being shown about the global arms trade wonderful well thank you I see we have a queue of people here on our right please hi thank you for your talk I have a question you've talked about arms trade that's a very general concept I was wondering if you can say a little bit more about how nuclear weapons play a part in what you've seen in what you've researched and also a brief second question because my research is going into that very area very much I was wondering if you can give me a heads-up about what sort of emotional toll this can take on a researcher I think you better speak to my wife and children about this in terms of the first part let me make the caveat that I don't research the nuclear trade and I'm not an expert in it by any means and having written a book with almost 3000 footnotes I'm very loath to say anything publicly about something that I haven't researched quite comprehensively but a lot of the characteristics of the global trade in weapons and I've been talking about conventional weapons apply as much to the nuclear trade with the one difference or the two differences actually that the nuclear trade if anything is even more opaque than the conventional trade and secondly that I mean quite obviously the consequences of the nuclear trade are so much more devastating than the consequences of the conventional trade but I would say that they are both deeply corrupt there was a story that if we had the time I would I would tell you from the book about a nuclear transaction that ended rather tragically for everyone involved but at bottom the perpetuation of the myth of nuclear deterrence and the buildup of nuclear weapons in the world is a consequence of the same lack of political will that has resulted in the unregulated incomprehensible nature of the trade in conventional arms that we have in terms of the second question I often feel on a Friday night when I come home from the office that I need take a very vigorous sanitizing shower both because of the information that I'm looking at and because of a lot of the people that I interact with but and I don't mean my colleagues I think that the emotional and psychological toll would be far greater if I knew what I know from my own personal experience and the years of Investigation and was doing something completely unrelated I think I would find that far more difficult to live with so the act of engaging in this ongoing investigative work is I suppose what keeps me going and I would like to say what keeps me sane but there are many people who would question that assumption thank you all so as to remain neutral between the left and the right I think we'll swim to the side okay first of all please keep up the good work appreciate thank you secondly my newspapers which I subscribe often has these stories about people who make good cookies or muffins and they open up a shop and everybody pitches in yeah but they can't find the weapons business yeah they can't find their weapons business news broadcasts speed people supposedly who understand the financial world can't find a trillion and a half dollar business and yet there must be stocked evidence there must be investors it is a business does is there anywhere where people talk openly about this well I would imagine in certain corridors of power but the reality is it's incredibly easy to not notice the trade in weapons unless you unless you live in Yemen or Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan many other places around the world and the extraordinary thing is you will probably find that your own pension funds are invested in defense companies not just in Canada but around the world and there are also individual investors I happen to own a single share in BAE Systems which enables me to attend the annual general meeting every year where I have a delightful exchange with the chairman of the company who is a great fan of my work as you can imagine the the troubling thing is that more and more now there is information out there and available and in part it's incumbent upon us who do this work to ensure it is more accessible perhaps than it is hence books and films and I'm trying to write a crime novel at the moment probably very badly but it's also far more comfortable not to look that for journalists for newspaper editors and for each one of us and part of what I spend my life traveling around the world talking about the subject doing is to say to people I know it's not easy but please get out of your comfort zone because there are others who dying as a consequence of our apathy and perhaps we have a new book out called indefensible 7 myths that sustain the global arms trade that you can read for free online at a website called project indefensible dot org use that and start conversations with friends with family with people you don't yet know and it'll contribute to greater awareness about the realities of this business thank you thank you very much for your talk tonight my name is Joseph Roberts I published common ground magazine and we covered these topics I love to have you in at some time back in 1982 I organized the first walk for peace one thing I've been coming across now of now that I'm a grandfather with grandchildren is how little discussion and how little naming there is of the people that actually handle the money the Goldman Sachs's of the world the city banks these people would you please talk about the fire industry finance insurance real estate and how that all ties in with the arms trade settlement first of all I'm a big fan of common ground keep up the good work and write even more about the arms trade and its connections those who facilitate this trade are an incredibly important piece and I would very much like at some point in the future when I recover from having written this book and making the film I would like to do a piece on those facilitators and I why I hope I don't offend anyone here by naming a few institutions here but the bank of choice for arms dealers Barclays Bank HSBC HSBC to me is more a criminal enterprise than a financial institution not a month goes by not a month goes by in which it is not linked with some new criminal activity and not only does it still have a license to engage in its activities around the world but it gets bigger and bigger management consultancies auditing firms who develop the most remarkable myopia when it comes to looking at the accounts of this camp they missed six billion pounds of bribes on the AL Yamamah deal now that is an achievement do their oversight bodies take any action against them hell no and what is the bottom line of all of this is that there is good money to be made and I would ask yourselves to ask your local officials in the city that we are currently in how transparent the money that has increased property prices in Vancouver is where does that money come from who does it really belonged to and what suffering is it causing around the world so thank you very much for raising that thank you so you have a microphone my name's when I went to your film shadow well everyone should see this online my question is are you directly related to Dianne Feinstein to say oh you just happen to be just the same name coincident and my question second question is second question is we currently have just little secrets about direct energy weapons major push is the people actually because we have a missile crisis with the North Koreans and the direct energy weapons this will be the the one of the third triad on the space missile defense network and I rather Trey in the nuclear weapons is the defense of the new Direct Energy weapons more precise and less mass destructive and well what they could do is undermine the current strategic triads so they may not be willing to give up the nuclear weapons but you and just pass to ban nuclear weapon now what's the position on that what do you have any input so to answer your first question I have a confession to make I had to leave South Africa in the mid 80s for fairly obvious political reasons and I went to UC Berkeley as Nicole mentioned in the introduction and I used to claim that I was related to Dianne Feinstein who was at the time the mayor of San Francisco I thought it would be a good thing on a campus like Berkeley it wasn't that greatest thing what was very interesting to me which relates to your second question is that this campus that I was arriving at thinking it was a radical campus and where Sproul Plaza had recently been renamed Biko Plaza informally in honor of Steve Biko the extraordinary South African liberation leader who'd been killed by the apartheid state I discovered that the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory was at the center of Reagan's Star Wars initiative which brought quite literally billions and billions of dollars into the Bay Area and was about as effective as my abilities on a tennis court but nobody pays me for that there are a plethora of new weapons being developed I am really concerned about the efficacy of international agreements and treaties in controlling existing weapons and in controlling future types of weapons systems and the reason I say that is an international arms trade treaty was passed at the UN in 2014 the champion of that treaty was the government of the United Kingdom which has violated virtually every article of that treaty by selling almost 4 billion pounds of weaponry to Saudi Arabia that has been used in the onslaught against the people of Yemen and [Music] that treaty has made absolutely no difference the key ingredient that is lacking is political will the reason the conflict in Yemen is not being brought to an end is because too many people are making too much money out of that conflict and the people who need to show the political will to make these treaties meaningful and practically enforceable are the very people who unfortunately are benefiting from the trade in the various types of weapons so we find ourselves in a remarkable bind and the only way that I see out of this bind is if we as ordinary citizens hold our politicians to account on these sorts of issues and it's something that we've never done and it's something that we need to start doing thank you so just before we move to the the next speaker I'm going to ask a question from Twitter have you ever been asked to accept money to stop discussing these deals what a great question so two very quick examples a particular arms company that I've mentioned a few times this evening that is based in a place called Farnborough outside London in the United Kingdom asked for a meeting with me and offered to pay me to help them improve their image in South Africa and Tanzania where they'd been engaged in the deals I mentioned I offered to help them for free and suggested to them they take out full-page newspaper advert this whistle in those days in all of the leading papers in those two countries in which they published the names of every politician official and intermediary who they had paid money to and how much they'd paid money to them on those deals and then I started talking what we could do after that but they'd lost interest by that the second time was when we did a report on a particularly egregious deal in which two arms dealers one of whom was a fugitive from justice at the time were inserted into a very straightforward debt deal for the payment on weaponry to divert over 1.7 billion dollars of the five billion dollars that was being transferred most of it back to the politicians in the two countries concerned and this gentleman suggested to me that I would be delighted to hold an extremely large press conference in the most expensive hotel in London to announce to the world that in fact we'd got it all wrong and there was no corruption in these deals and when I inquired as to why I was doing that he said because he was paying me a hundred thousand pounds to do it I mean that would keep my organization running for a few years my wife is still recovering from the fact that I am school 15 years on described as one of the very few people in public life in South Africa who made nothing out of the South African arms deal so clearly my entrepreneurial abilities are not quite as good as my investigative abilities we have time for just two more questions so one here and my question is what can we of course do what you've described has been very moving but it seems to be just a huge massive bleak brick wall that we can't get across what organizations would you recommend that we should be looking into supporting and funding what career choices would you suggest that people actually look into making it they wouldn't have made otherwise to help tackle this problem and especially also for people that don't really have a background in politics what resources should we be looking up on I'm gonna ask if I can answer that question last of course it's a crucially important question thank you for asking it hi thank you so much for your talk I was born in Russia and coming to Canada I think it's amazing that we can actually speak in public about these subjects because you could never do this type of thing there so I'm just really thankful for that it's interesting living in Vancouver because I also believe our local civic government is probably benefiting from the drugs that are coming through the city as well and I've actually tried asking some questions about that and not really gotten very good answers so that's like I think our local way of looking at the corruption that's going on in Vancouver and it's something that people don't really talk about which I'm always shocked at that we have all these people helping solve these problems but not actually going to the source which is our ports but my question was have you ever feared for your life in doing this work sure thank you for the question I'll try and be brief um I was advised by a wonderful wonderful colleague a brilliant brilliant writer if you haven't read him you should Misha Glenny who was the Guardians correspondent in Moscow for many many years and wrote the most extraordinary stuff on the Balkan Wars has recently written on organized crime around the world and when I was just getting started in this work Misha sat down with me gave me some advice and suggested something that a number of other people suggested too because I had already written about mr. Putin and to his wealth some of which was acquired through his cut in arms deals I was advised not to travel to Russia and it's one of the few places I'd don't go and I've never received any direct threat from anybody in or related to Russia only been offered money I've only actually received one meaningful threat from an arms dealer who hand delivered what he didn't personally he had someone hand-deliver his handwritten note to my home address to make the point so no we don't face many physical threats I fear that if we did I don't have much personal physical courage so I'd probably emigrate to an unnamed destination if it ever did happen but we get a huge number of legal threats which have never amounted to anything because we provide evidentiary documents for everything we do the people who are really under meaningful threat or not people like me I'm the storyteller it's our sources it's the whistleblowers in government and the military in the companies it's the lesson Edward Snowden's and Chelsea Manning's of the world and so the first bit of career advice I'm going to give to anybody who's thinking of a career and anything to do with journalism investigation work your first responsibility is to your sources to ensure their protection because they are the ones taking the risks and I think that is simply a non-negotiable which brings me to what we can do you know I had to leave South Africa in 1986 and I never thought I'd be able to return and if someone then had said to me you know you'll be back in nine years time you'll be an MP in an ANC government and the president Nelson Mandela I would have invoked my first training in clinical psychology and offered them a straitjacket because it seemed absolutely impossible and unthinkable change happens and change happens because of the actions of many ordinary people around the world so first when it comes to your career choices I don't earn a lot of money I probably today earn a fifth or a sixth of what I earned as a member of parliament but every day sometimes even before the sanitizing shower I feel so privileged to be able to do this work and as Chris Hedges says in the film brilliant New York Times war reporter who was fired for publicly opposing the invasion of Iraq you are either on the side of truth and justice or you are on the side of power and you have to make that choice in whatever you do I grew up in a remarkable situation in a highly politicized society so perhaps I'm a little unreal in thinking that people should do this work but you as citizens elect people every four or five years because you're lucky enough to live in a democracy you pay those people's salary they are your representatives if some of the muck that has represented you in this country over the years reflects the people of Canada I would be completely astonished you've thrown some of them out of government don't let the current ones get away with saying while they're campaigning that they will stop selling arms to Saudi Arabia and then they go ahead and do just that before you give anybody your vote before you pay your tax dollars to the state you have the right to demand that they stop selling weapons to those who are killing innocent people in Yemen and other places there are brilliant organizations in Canada I will mention just one project plowshares go online tonight look at Project plowshares and support their work but by raising your voice you can do more and you can remind your leaders of what Margaret Mead said it is not the Justin Trudeau's it is not the Donald Trump's it is not the Teresa maze and it is not the Jacob Zuma's who change history it is according to Margaret Mead groups of thoughtful committed individuals working together it has always been with us and it always will be thank you very much so ladies and gentleman very sadly we have run out time now Andrew just mentioned that he's happy to take questions out the back at the front rather at the end of this I wanted to round things out by reflecting on something though that I think typifies Andrews work the Christian theologian Paul Tillich said courage is the most important value in the world because that base it takes courage to love but as political and moral of values courage embodies everything this man does and it opens up new space to have discussions about something of tremendous importance like the global trade and weaponry so please join me in thanking Andrew for his great [Applause] thank you very much Andrew Feinstein and James Stewart for such a interesting wonderful evening thank you again to this evening sponsors the staff at the Vogue theater and to everyone here for participating in this excellent conversation good night and safe travels home [Music]

Channel: Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies

Views: 47,267

Rating: 4.9288025 out of 5

Keywords: global arms trade, weapons trade, corruption

Id: hCjZXCYD_8c

Length: 88min 14sec (5294 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 22 2017