Swedish government accused of assisting the sales of weapons to the dictatorships

Wednesday, 25 September 2013
The Swedish government has been accused of secret dealing by facilitating the weapons industry sell arms to blacklisted dictatorships such as the United Arab Emirates.

The United Arab Emirates with laws that usually leads to the whipping of people and where raped women are thrown into jail for extramarital sexual activities has been condemned as practicing massive human rights violations. However, that does not deter the Swedish authorities from selling weapons of mass killing to those countries, which they could, used on their people.

The Swedish tabloid paper, Expressen today revealed how the Swedish authorities are secretly aiding the arms industry by selling machine guns and weapons platforms for machine guns to the blacklisted dictatorship.
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“It is simply wrong. I do not want to send weapons to be used by a non-democratic country against its own population,” says Urban Ahlin, Social Democrats  foreign policy spokesperson and member of the military investigation committee in the Swedish parliament to Expressen.

According to the tabloid paper, as early as 2011, the Swedish parliament decided to develop a new law change on arms sales to dictatorships. However, while the investigation in the parliament working to tighten that law is on going, sales of Swedish weapons to dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa continues with undiminished intensity.
The Swedish arms industry and government agencies are working together secretly and are signing major new business deals with the United Arab Emirates and Oman.
Expressen says it has detailed information that describes how BAE Systems Bofors right now, with the support of the Swedish Defence and Security Export Agency FXM, are trying to sell pieces of 57MK3, 40MK4 and Lemur30 to the UAE.
Should such as deal goes ahead, that is to export the above weapons as defined above, to a country like the UAE it would mean to act in the direction opposite to the agreement in parliament. While the investigation is on going, “one should not engage in these type of novel highly controversial export permits,” says Allan Widman, the people’s party’s defence policy spokesperson and member of the investigation committee.
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The documents Expressen got which shows the business, with the UAE also come from the same source which says that BAE Systems Bofors also received help from FMX to invite Sheikh Ahmed Tahnoun Al Nahyan, leading the United Arab Emirates military officials  to Sweden.

The authority are said t have invited the Sheik for test firing. This would, according to Defence and Security Export Agency facilitate BAE Systems and Bofors to also sell different types of guns, machine guns and weapons platforms for machine guns to dictatorship.
“It is outrageous. It’s a very unbelievable that a Statesman is invited here to come and test-fire a system, or to examine our weapons we have in Sweden,” says Anna Ek, president of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society to Expressen.
by Scancomark.com Team