Question of Principle: Arms Trade and Human Rights

South Africa is not living up to its own high standards with respect to arms exports, Human Rights Watch charged today. In this report, "A Question of Principle: Arms Trade and Human Rights," Human Rights Watch charged the South African government with selling weapons to countries with serious human rights problems, where an influx of weaponry could significantly worsen ongoing abuses. Human Rights Watch noted that after 1994, South Africa announced more restrictive policies on arms transfers. But the report charges that those policies are not always being followed. In 1994, a scandal erupted involving the sale by Armscor, the apartheid-era governmental arms export agency, of weapons to Yemen for probable on-shipment to the former Yugoslavia, then under U.N. embargo. The Human Rights Watch report cited examples of weapons sales since 1994 to governments engaging in repression against their own people or to countries involved in their own or others' civil wars. These sales clearly violated South Africa's own stated policies. Purchasers of South African arms include Algeria, Angola, Colombia, the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), India, Namibia, Pakistan, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.