Gitau Warigi
4 October 2008
opinion
Nairobi — With all sympathies to Mr Andrew Mwangura of the Seafarers' Association who was arrested for talking "recklessly," arms embargoes are circumvented all the time.
All the countries involved in the drama of the Ukrainian MV Faina hijacked by Somali pirates know this.
You don't have to be a very good detective to suspect where the cargo was destined. Nonetheless, it pays not to drool too much in sentimentality when you are dealing with the murky arms business.
It is a global business with shady characters involved at every corner. The point, though, is that nation states would not allow the continuation of this business if it didn't assist them in projecting their interests clandestinely.
That is why arms dealers are always tolerated and in some instances become celebrities of sorts. Remember the Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi?
WITHOUT NECESSARILY SAYING UN embargoes are a bad thing (their moral purpose cannot be gainsaid), we need to ask how warlords like Liberia's Charles Taylor remained in business.
And who was funding the Angolan renegade Jonas Savimbi other than the same powers who are now huffing and puffing about Ukrainian and Russian arms exports? How many right-wing insurgent movements in Latin America, not to mention left-wing uprisings elsewhere, were armed by the US and the former Soviet Union, respectively, in defiance of UN sanctions?
The bigger picture that is being obscured concerns Kenya's strategic and security interests in this region. Talking about breaching UN embargoes while failing to comprehend where Southern Sudan features in this strategic matrix misses the point entirely.
That is precisely why the arms embargo against lawless Somalia can fit neatly into Kenya's security interests while, with respect to others, it would not.
It should be no secret to anyone that Kenya has quietly backed Southern Sudan over the years and probably not just diplomatically.
That is why the late John Garang was allowed to live here for years. It surely cannot be the case that Kenya's intimate involvement in the diplomatic haggling between Juba and Khartoum that resulted in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 was from the standpoint of a purely disinterested neighbour.
Call it creating a buffer if you will. A civil war had been going on in South Sudan for many years. And from Kenya's standpoint, it is probably not helpful that Khartoum has had a history of occasionally subscribing to radical Islamist tendencies.
Arms embargoes will always be a fact of life, but so will Kenya's interests. It is obviously unlikely that the US is not aware of the strategic issues at work between Nairobi, Juba, Khartoum and most probably involving Addis Ababa and Kampala as well.
Nor would Washington be ignorant of all that which has been allegedly going on behind the scenes, never mind that it took some dumb Somali pirates to blow the lid off by hijacking shipments that were none of their business.
After all, who else has been blowing the whistle against Khartoum other than the US administration? Right now, the US Navy's preoccupation seems to be to ensure the hijacked shipment does not fall into the hands of Somali insurgents.
Even assuming - for the sake of argument - that the cargo was for Kenya, so what? Like any independent country, we have a sovereign right to arm ourselves for our own defence.
Nobody should claim the right to determine our needs except ourselves. If we want to buy Russian, or Ukrainian, or Chinese, that is our prerogative.
I AM NORMALLY ILL-DISPOSED TO a certain category of retired military types who like to grumble anonymously in bars about how we shouldn't be buying "outdated" equipment from China or the former Soviet bloc.
Isolated from the reality of this country's tight budgetary constraints, these chaps have no idea what they're talking about. They want to ignore the aspect of affordability which must rank paramount to poor countries like ours.
This is the same mentality that kept us fixated on expensive Land Rovers for the police when far more cost-effective Land Cruisers would do.
The British-manufactured tanks our military uses are likely of 1970s vintage. Compared to them, a Russian T-72 tank or equivalent is, at least closer to top-of-the-range .
Besides, when we or the Sudanese or the Eritreans purchase weapons, one takes into account the potential enemy and what he owns. I don't think there is anybody in the region buying the T-72 with the intention of fighting NATO, or the US, or Russia, or China.
Certainly we can dream of buying supersonic B2 bombers or Tomahawk missiles or F17A Stealth jet fighters from America. But we simply can't afford them. Period.
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