Edited by:
Brid Brennan, Paul Scannell and Pietje Vervest
TRANSNATIONAL INSTITUTE
IN COOPERATION WITH
AMOK, CAAT, FOCUS ON THE GLOBAL SOUTH AND IID
This report asks the questions 'Why is Asia arming
itself?' Why is Europe so eager to help? And what can people do to
support an end to trans-regional and global arms trade? It is timely,
even urgent to examine the arms trade to Asia and more specifically
from Europe. Since Asia's fast growing arms market is second only to
the Middle East in value. As this study notes, while arms to Asia have
overwhelmingly been from the US, the European arms industry is getting
its act together and gaining a larger market share in the region.
On the occasion of the Asia Europe Meeting (ASEM), governments should
initiate substantive security dialogue. However, asEuropeans are eager
to sell, and sooner or later, Asians will want to keep buying, it is
unlikely that the arms trade will be considered a security threat.
Lobbying individual governments, media pressure, and education to
demonstrate the horror arms makers, dealers, and buyers inflict will
eventually make ASEM understand, as US President Eisenhower once did,
that 'the people all over the world want peace and security so much
that one of these days governments better get out of their way'.