“Move on, there's nothing to see here. It's all under control.” That, in essence, is the government's response – that, or the fact that it is “top secret” - when you ask questions about one of the jewels of the French economy which also happens to be one of the murkiest aspects of the French Republic: arms sales, and in particular arms sales to repressive regimes.
The Ministry of the Armed Forces defends what it insists is a policy that has the “strictest respect for the requirements associated with arms exports, fully conforming to our values and international commitments”.
Yet for years the media – in particular Mediapart – and non-governmental organisations have gathered evidence that paints an entirely different picture; one in which French-made weaponry is used for political repression in several countries, and involved in murdering civilians in the worst conflicts in the world. And all this is with scant regard for the values and international commitments of a country supposedly synonymous with human rights. Compromising deals have taken place in the shadows, with France being one of the most reticent countries when it comes to transparency; it is the only Western nation not to have Parliamentary oversight over arms exports. A year ago a Parliamentary report from Jacques Maire, an MP in the Paris region from the ruling centrist party La République en Marche, and Michèle Tabarot, an MP from south-east France for the conservative Les Républicains, called for Parliamentary control over French arms exports and there were hopes of progress on the issue. But the initiative came to nothing.
“We've made progress at the margins,” said Aymeric Elluin, from Amnesty International France who is co-author of 'Ventes d’armes, une honte française' ('Arms sales, a French disgrace') published by Le Passager Clandestin in 2021. “There's an effort at transparency over the narrative, over how one oversees it, but we're still pussy footing around. The system is still designed to be opaque. We don't know how the CIEEMG [editor's note, the inter-ministerial war equipment export committee the Commission Interministérielle pour l'Étude des Exportations de Matériels de Guerre] functions, how it evaluates export risk. We're still faced with a lack of precise information about the equipment exported, to whom, and how? In short, we're still deprived of basic information,” he said.
On the eve of President Emmanuel Macron's tour of the Gulf region on 3rd and 4th December, during which a contract for several dozen Rafale jet fighters could be signed between the French company Dassault and the United Arab Emirates, and when the investigative media organisation Disclose has just shed fresh light on France's involvement in the crimes committed by Egypt's dictatorship (see article here, in French, and here in English), Mediapart sets out a non-exhaustive list of the abuses carried out around the world using French-made arms.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
French weapons kill in Yemen
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are among the French arms industry's best customers, in a partnership worth tens of billions of euros over the last decade. The huge fighter jet contract in the pipeline between Dassault and the UAE is further illustration of this.
However, the sale of arms to these two countries poses a problem, because both are involved in the war in Yemen, which has dragged on for more than seven years and which, according to the United Nations, will have caused more than 377,000 deaths directly or indirectly by the end of this year. The UN sees this war, in which rebel Houthis, supported by Iran, are fighting against the forces of the Yemeni government backed by an international coalition led by Saudi Arabia and which includes the UAE, as the greatest humanitarian catastrophe in the world. “In 2021, a Yemeni child under the age of five dies every nine minutes because of the conflict,” the UN said in a recent report.
The number of reports, warnings and investigations have increased since 2015, highlighting the war crimes committed in Yemen and the use of Western weapons by the various parties involved in the conflict. Several states have reacted to the issue, including the world's leading arms exporter, the United States, which in January 2021 announced it was suspending the sale of weapons to those involved in the fighting in Yemen. Another example is Italy, which cancelled the delivery of several thousand bombs and missiles to the coalition. France, however, has continued to send armaments to the countries involved.
Several journalistic investigations have revealed the presence of French arms in the war in Yemen, contradicting of the official line of the French government which insists that the armaments are being used just for defensive purposes.
One such investigation was carried out by Disclose, who in April 2019 made use of “classified” documents to reveal that Leclerc tanks, armour-piercing shells, Mirage 2000-9 jet fighters, Aravis armoured vehicles and many other French-made weapons were used by the Saudis and the UAE in Yemen. The publication of this investigation led to the journalists Mathias Destal and Geoffroy Livolsi being hauled in by the French domestic intelligence agency the DGSI.
In September this year Disclose, Amnesty International France and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) went to the administrative court in Paris in a bid to force the French customs authorities to provide documents on France's export of war materials, including for maintenance and training, in particular to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
After sales service: the export grey area
After sales service - ongoing maintenance work, for example – is one of the grey areas in the arms export trade and it largely avoids any controls. As there are no precise laws covering this kind of service French companies continue to provide indirect support to conflicts around the world, in the Yemen, Libya and so on. And, despite the deep suspicions it engenders, France continues to train the Saudi army.
In September 2019 the joint investigation 'French Arms', in which Mediapart joined forces with the Dutch collaborative media organisation Lighthouse Reports and French-German TV channel Arte, revealed the scale of French involvement in the Yemen conflict. For the first time videos showed that ships sold by France to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were taking part in the maritime blockade of Yemen, a country hit by the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
In Libya, which has been subject to an arms embargo since 2011 – arms cannot be sent there and Libyans do not have the right to import them – French-made Rafale jets which had been sold to Egypt, France's third biggest customer after Saudi Arabia and India, were used to help the cause of Libya's 'Field Marshal' Khalifa Haftar. In April 2019 Haftar, who is a candidate in Libya's presidential elections this December, torpedoed years of laborious attempts at a peace process by launching an attack on Tripoli in a bid to topple the internationally-recognised regime there.
Some French companies have meanwhile contributed indirectly to the breach of the Libyan arms embargo. While Turkey, which has established a foothold in Libya, was identified as one of the main countries supplying arms there, it was teams from Airbus – whose headquarters are in Toulouse in south-west France – who looked after the maintenance of the Turkish transport planes.
Two months after the French Arms revelations, The New York Times revealed that anti-tank missiles belonging to France had been found at Gharyan, in north-west Libya, at a military base recaptured by the official army from General Haftar's rebel forces. Gharyan, which is around 60 kilometres south of Tripoli, had been Haftar's main base for his assault on the capital.
These are not the only conflicts in which French weaponry has been implicated. French Airbus helicopters have helped the repression by the Indonesian authorities in West Papua, a region that was annexed and subsequently occupied for half a century, in a forgotten conflict which has led to 100,000 deaths since 1962. In Cameroon in West Africa an elite unit of 5,000 soldiers is suspected of carrying out terrible abuses in “secret torture chambers”. These special forces were equipped and trained by France.
In order to monitor the rich fishing waters off Western Sahara, which is designated by the UN as a “non-self-governing territory” and which is at the centre of an interminable conflict between Morocco and the separatist Polisario Front, the Moroccan military are using fighter and patrol aircraft supplied by France. In 2020 Morocco bought 425.9 million euros worth of French armaments, mostly anti-aircraft defence systems, Caesar artillery guns and light tactical vehicles.
In Lebanon, where huge protests broke out in the autumn of 2019 and were violently repressed, Amnesty International identified the presence of French security equipment, particularly several types of tear-gas grenades made by the companies Nobel Sport Sécurité and SAE Alsetex, as well as different types of grenade launchers produced by Alsetex. In June 2021, ten years after a formal complaint filed by the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), four French sellers of digital weaponry from the companies Nexa Technologies and Amesys were placed under investigation for “involvement in acts of torture” for having sold surveillance equipment to the dictatorships in Egypt and Libya. According to the daily newspaper Libération, Nexa also reportedly illegally sold cutting-edge surveillance equipment to General Haftar, in breach of the UN arms embargo.
France complicit in Egypt's terror
In Egypt French weapons are being used to repress and to kill, in a state scandal which is becoming ever more documented. A recent investigation by Disclose, the publication Télérama and the television programme 'Complément d’enquête' showed the extent to which the Egyptian dictatorship has misused antiterrorist intelligence provided by France in order to target civilians.
Back in 2018 Mediapart's French Arms investigation had shown that French armoured vehicles sold to Egypt were used to equip units in charge of fighting the jihadist insurrection in the Sinai, where the Egyptian army has been accused of serious human rights violations.
Thanks to the work of Amnesty International we also know that from 2012 to 2015 French security equipment was used in the terrible repression of demonstrations in Egypt, in particular the massacres at Rabaa al-Adawiya Square and al-Nahda Square in Cairo in August 2013, where close to 1,000 people were killed in a single day.
Since Field Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to power, Egypt has become one of France's greatest allies, and is one the French arms industry's best clients; it alone is responsible for more than a quarter of the total sales of Rafale jets and warships. This close bond was forged under the presidency of François Hollande (2012-2017) thanks to the unflagging efforts of France's top arms salesperson Jean-Yves Le Drian, who was then defence minister and who is today foreign affairs minister under President Emmanuel Macron.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter