Den britiske NGO Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) har gennemgået tal for den amerikanske stats våbenkontrakter.
Den viser blandt meget andet, at Irak og Afghanistan mellem 2001 og 2015 har modtaget milliarder af håndvåben, herunder pistoler, rifler og lette maskingevær, fra USA.
Gennemgangen viser samtidigt, at det amerikanske Forsvarsministerium (Department of Defense) har meget lidt styr over, hvor våbnene ender.
Her lidt udpluk fra omtalen på organisationens hjemmeside:
AOAV found 412 contracts relating to the purchase of small arms, small arms ammunition and related gun attachments.
These contracts revealed three things:
– they provided figures on the huge amount spent by the Department of Defense (DoD) on small arms;
– they revealed the errors, omissions and differences that exist between the DoD’s contract announcements and the US government’s own Federal Procurement Database;
– and they offered an insight into the lack of transparency surrounding small arms bought by the US government and given to Iraq and Afghanistan – many of which the US government has lost track of.
Significant differences
There were significant differences found between the DoD announcements and the Federal Procurement Database System (FPDS).
A comparison of the two datasets showed that mis-numbered contracts, errors or discrepancies in listed contract payments, and other misalignments were found in 33 percent of all published contracts.
Of these, 12 percent had a DoD contract number which did not align with the FPDS’s contract listings. 83 percent showed the DoD figure that was stated as having been paid did not match that listed by the FPDS.
Details of these inconsistencies can be read here, and a case study of such discrepancies can be read here.
A huge amount
Iain Overton, Action on Armed Violence’s Director of Investigations, said of the findings:
“We conducted this review after a Freedom of Information request to the US Department of Defence, asking for details on AK-47 sales to Iraq and Afghanistan, was returned completely redacted.”
“We did not anticipate, though, finding so much money having been spent by the Department of Defence on small arms, ammunition and attachments. We are not talking aircraft carriers here; $40 billion is a huge amount of issued contracts just for guns, attachments and ammo, even over 14 years of warfare.”
Concerns about transparency and accountability
“More importantly, our findings raise concerns about the DoD’s own transparency and accountability when it comes to issuing contracts. It highlights the fact that significant numbers of small arms, for instance, are sent to foreign governments but are never publicly recorded by the DoD publicly. We know by looking at other US government records, that at least 1,452,910 small arms have been sent to Iraq and Afghanistan in the last 14 years. The DoD contract database appears to list as little as 3% of these. We also know the US government has acknowledged they don’t know where many of these weapons now are.”
“We hope our findings and database summaries will inform the US debate on seemingly unchecked and military expenditure and highlight concerns about the US government’s oversupply of arms to unstable states.”
Find data og yderligere omtale i nedenstående link.
