IN 1992 Turkey was the second largest arms importer in the industrialised world. Its defence spending over the last seven ' years has reached US$10.5 billion.
The sales potential was thought to be so great that in 1988 Turkey became the sixth country where an overseas office of the Defence Export Services Organisation (DESO) was established. The DESO is the part of the Ministry of Defence responsible for promoting British arms exports.
The build up is linked both to territorial disputes with Greece and the strategic importance ascribed to Turkey by the US and its NATO allies in relation to the Middle East. Turkish airfields were extensively used by western forces during the Gulf War.
The British American Security Information Council report 'Fuelling Balkan Fires - the Arms Race between Greece and Turkey' states: back repression 'Such is the value the west is attaching to Turkey's importance that it is prepared to ignore Ankara's well documented record of human rights abuses...the struggle against the Kurd separatists is on the verge of degenerating into a full-scale civil war...one-third of the 600,000 Turkish army is deployed in the south eastern part of the country to fight the Kurdish guerrillas'.
Secrecy
British arms sales are shrouded in secrecy. An MP enquiring about military hardware sales to Turkey was told: 'It has been the practice of successive Administrations not to give details of defence sales business with other countries.' The Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) lists reported arms sales since 1983, including British Aerospace surface-to-air missiles worth £150 million, 7,000 Marconi high frequency hopping vehicle and backpack radio systems worth £200 million and chemical agent monitors and spares worth £200,000 from Graseby lonics Ltd.
The Parliamentary Human Rights Group visited Kurdistan in 1992 and subsequently called on the British Government and the EC to stop arms sales to Turkey. The predictable response from Foreign Office Minister Tristam-Garel Jones was, 'We are not considering an embargo on arms sales to Turkey. Turkey is a NATO ally...Arms sales to Turkey are subject to the standard export licence procedure...all applications are scrutinized in accordance with stringent criteria. These include an assessment of the recipient country's human rights record."!
Further information from: CAAT, 11 Goodwin St, London, N4 3HQ. Tel: 071-281 0927