Johann Hari – September 11 comes around once every three days. One thousand three hundred innocent people are slaughtered with conventional weapons within 24 hours somewhere in the world: by the middle of a third day, the death toll from 9/11 is surpassed.
This is the practical effect of the vast arms trade that Britain is at the heart of. Not all of the wars in which people are dying are unjust, but that mustn't stop us reeling from the sheer mass of corpses. It's difficult to disagree with Shattered Lives, a report issued today by Amnesty International, Oxfam and the International Action Network on Small Arms, which explains that "the arms trade is out of control".
Democratic countries need to defend themselves. But Britain's share of the arms trade – one-fifth of the entire global industry – is not dedicated to helping democratic regimes. Here is just a taster of the people our Government has recently flogged weapons to (deep breath): the Jamaican police force, which has committed more than 600 improperly investigated killings over the past three years, especially of the gay people it systematically persecutes; the House of Saud, which allows no freedom of speech or thought and routinely tortures democrats; the Tanzanian government, whose military radar system was condemned by those notorious lefties, the World Bank, as a scandalous waste of money in a country where a quarter of all children die before they reach their fifth birthday ... I could go on for a long time.
Most people now see that the British Government was obscenely mistaken throughout the Eighties to arm Saddam Hussein while he committed acts of genocide. How long will it take us to learn that all victims of tyranny and poverty are equally deserving of our sympathy?
The Blair Government claims it has put in place regulations that prevent arms sales to countries which would then use British-supplied weapons to torture or slaughter innocent people. There is some truth in this: the regulations have been tightened, but there are loopholes the size of a Challenger tank in the current system. The main problem lies with the monitoring programmes designed to check whether tyrannical regimes are telling us the truth when they say their stash of British weapons won't be put to horrific ends. They are, in Amnesty's words, "woefully inadequate".
An example of the system's failure can be seen in the arsenal of weapons we have flogged to the Indonesian government. For 26 years there has been an ongoing battle between the Indonesian government and the separatist rebels in Aceh, a northern province. Given Indonesia's history of violent repression and genocide, it probably wasn't too smart to accept their reassurances that no British bullets would be used to suppress Aceh.
True, the Indonesian government has changed and vastly improved since the days of the East Timorese butchery, but we knew at the time of the sales that they still placed a bloody claim on territories that, according to the best evidence we have, would prefer to be self-determining and separate. Now we know for sure how sincere the Indonesian government was: Tapol, the brave Indonesian human rights group, has provided photographs of British tanks and weaponry being used to murder people who were fighting for national liberation.
So much for our regulations. Tony Blair has offered a disturbing argument to justify these loopholes. Asked in 2002 why he tolerated selling weaponry that would target civilians, he said: "What would actually happen if we refused to sell them is not that these parts wouldn't be supplied. It's that you would find every other defence industry in the world rushing in to take the place that we have vacated."
That, of course, could be used as an argument to have no regulation whatsoever, and reveals that his heart was never in even the meagre regulations the Government has introduced. His argument would justify selling freshly polished axes to Fred West – although we should bear in mind that West's decades-long programme of slaughter is merely a day's work for our friends in the Indonesian and Saudi governments.
Yet many people are tempted by the Prime Minister's argument. It's easy for you with a nice comfy job to posture about weapons, the argument goes. Why should a thousand people end up on the dole queue in Newcastle for the sake of a meaningless gesture? There's something in this.
Currently, we have anarchy at an international level when it comes to the arms trade. Even the regulations about testing and selling biological weapons have been trashed by the Bush administration in the past few years. When you have such a disordered system, of course one country acting alone will make no difference.
The solution is not, however, to shrug and continue to jealously guard our own slice of this market. The answer is, as the Control Arms campaign (which you can join at www.controlarms.org) argues, to build an international Arms Trade Treaty to place strict controls on the exchange of weapons between countries.
It cannot be beyond the world's democracies, who almost exclusively arm the world, to decide to sell weapons only to regimes not committing atrocities, and to set up an international body to secure and regulate this. The collapse of the Kyoto Accords on global warming, a matter just as urgent, does not encourage much faith in international agreements to self-regulate – but the status quo is intolerable. Just think of the five people who have been murdered with small arms somewhere in the world since you read the first paragraph of this column.
Are we supposed to tell their family that we're sorry but treaties are terribly fiddly things?
It will obviously be a long fight to stigmatise and ban the provision of weapons that are used to suppress and murder. Yet the fight against slavery was no less difficult nor less moral, and it is now inconceivable for countries to trade slaves across borders. In the meantime, the Government, if it wants to have any moral credibility, needs to look again at its Swiss cheese-like regulations and begin to plug the holes one by one.
All arms sales to Indonesia must be barred immediately and for decades, given the lies they told to get hold of their current stash. A proper and well-funded monitoring process must be put in place to ensure that this does not happen again, and there must be an independent watchdog who can assess the likelihood that an arms-hungry government really won't find a nefarious purpose for its guns further down the line.
Yes, some jobs will be lost if we stop arming butchers. Slave auctioneers lost their jobs too, and a paedophile loses a job every time we shut down a child porn website. Should killing children with weapons in Aceh be any more acceptable than abusing children in London?
The Prime Minister should give some thought to arguing for that international treaty. It's not as implausible as it sounds: just a few years ago, mankind collectively made a decision that landmines were a repulsive and unacceptable technology, and now they are prohibited.
Who seriously doubts that flogging guns to dictators is just as bad as laying a landmine? Already, the governments of Brazil, Finland, the Netherlands, Cambodia and Mali have said they would participate in the Treaty – why not Britain? Oh, another person just got murdered, by the way.