Advocates try to prevent US-made weaponry's use as tools of torture

Tag : diamond tools

William Schulz believes that it can be, and that these types ofsales are one of the principal ways in which businesses canentangle themselves with torturers.
Schulz, former executive director of Amnesty International, spokeduring a presentation sponsored by Wharton's Zicklin Center forBusiness Ethics Research.
Seldom are businesses in the developed world implicated directly intorture, but too often they avert their eyes as their products,purchases or independent contractors support abuses, according toSchulz, who is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress,a liberal think tank based in Washington, D.C.
He cited the case of Taser International, the Scottsdale, Ariz.,manufacturer of "stun guns."
Taser's devices, sold domestically to police departments andprivate citizens, shoot electrified barbs that cause a flash ofintense pain and momentary muscle failure. Police use them in placeof pistols and clubs to protect themselves and subdue unrulypeople.
The U.S. Commerce Department has documented the sale of Tasers tocountries, including Saudi Arabia, that are known for usingelectro-shock devices as tools of torture, Schulz said.
He debated Taser's chief executive, Rick Smith, three years ago atClaremont-McKenna College in California. At the time, he askedSmith to stop selling his company's wares to countries that theU.S. State Department had classified as torturers.
Taser's president indicated that the company "would sell to anycountry it pleased," Schulz stated.
[In a response to Schulz's remarks last week, Taser spokesman PeteHolran noted that, "For anything that we sell abroad, we have toget a license from the U.S. Department of Commerce. ... Thatlicensing process has input from the State Department and manyother federal agencies. They are supposed to inform us if there isa region or a regime that should not receive our devices."
In addition, he said, "We don't know of any direct use of ourdevices for torture. Amnesty has never been able to bring thatdirect charge."
Electro-shock devices, including stun guns, stun belts and stunshields, are the most commonly used tools of torture after thehuman fist, Schulz said. As far back as 1994, Amnesty Internationaldocumented their export to repressive foreign regimes.
"Export license records revealed that [the U.S. CommerceDepartment] authorized the sale to Saudi Arabia of handcuffs andstun shields used for torture," Schulz noted. "In 1996, thedepartment approved a shipment of thumb screws -- miniature cuffsthat are attached to the thumbs and are useful for nothing excepttorture -- to Russia."
Selling tools isn't the only way in which firms find themselveslinked to torturers, Schulz said. Sometimes, they hire guards whoend up abusing people while protecting a company's property.Unocal, a California oil-and-gas company, for example, was accusedin U.S. courts of employing soldiers in Myanmar (formerly Burma)who tortured, raped and killed villagers while guarding a pipeline.The villagers sued in the United States under the Alien TortsClaims Act, and Unocal settled in 2004.
As a result of disputes such as this, multinationals have becomemore assiduous in their monitoring of the conduct of securitycontractors abroad, Schulz said. British Petroleum, for example,has entered into an agreement with the governments of Turkey,Georgia and Azerbaijan to allow the oil company to providehuman-rights training to their security forces. A BP oil pipelinetraverses the three countries. The cost of a diamond
Firms sometimes do business directly with repressive regimes orrebel groups and, in effect, fund their practices, according toSchulz. This predicament arises most often in extractive industries-- such as mining, oil and gas -- where the largest remainingreserves tend to be located in developing countries that eitherhave autocratic governments or are embroiled in civil war, henoted.
Perhaps the most notorious example is the diamond industry. InSierra Leone and Angola, diamond sales supported insurgencies tosuch an extent that the United Nations adopted a resolutioncondemning trade in what it called "conflict diamonds."
Liberia's former president, Charles Taylor, has been accused ofsupporting the rebels in neighboring Sierra Leone in exchange fordiamonds. The rebels committed a host of atrocities, includingintimidating civilians by chopping off the hands and feet ofnoncombatants. Today, Taylor faces trial in The Hague for warcrimes and crimes against humanity.
Bad publicity from products tainted by links to torture can reboundto retailers, Schulz pointed out. To underscore the connectionbetween diamonds and brutality, for example, Amnesty Internationaland other human-rights groups launched an anti-conflict-diamondcampaign in the United States. An online video produced as part ofthe effort showed a woman's hand stretched out to receive a diamondring, but then showed her hand being chopped off before the ringcould be slipped on her finger.
"That influenced a bunch of college students to go into their localjewelers and ask how much blood each diamond cost," Schulz said."That was all it took to get the industry to quickly institute newprocedures for monitoring the sources of its diamonds."
A similar conflict rages today in Sudan, fueled by oil revenues,Schulz added. There, crude sales sustain a government that has beenaccused by the United Nations of committing genocide in thecountry's Darfur region. More than 200,000 people have been killedin Darfur and about 2.5 million have been forced from their homes.Many Western oil companies now refuse to do business with theSudanese government, but Chinese oil firms, backed by the Chinesegovernment, have stepped into the void.
According to The New York Times, "Chinese oil purchases havefinanced Sudan's pillage of Darfur, Chinese-made AK-47s have beenthe main weapons used to slaughter several hundred thousand peoplein Darfur so far, and China has protected Sudan in the U.N.Security Council." Grass-roots activists from around the worldattempted to use the Beijing Olympic games as a venue in which topressure China to stop supporting the Sudanese regime through oilpurchases.
Schulz stressed that situations such as Taylor's diamond trade andSudan's oil both demand action because the link between commerceand brutality is so stark. In each case, trade in a commoditydirectly supported, or continues to support, a group or governmentcommitting atrocities.
In contrast, Schulz said he doesn't believe businesses must refuseto operate in any nation with a poor human-rights record.
"If I could get every country that commits torture to change theirstripes by threatening them with the withdrawal of investment, Iwould do it," he said. "But that's not a practical way to bringabout change, and I don't believe that poverty is a friend of humanrights. So we have to make judgments."
The list of the world's top oil producers is crowded with countriesthat have been accused of torture. (Schulz would add the UnitedStates to that group in light of the revelations at the Abu Ghraibmilitary prison in Iraq and the Bush administration's refusal toforswear waterboarding, a form of torture that simulates drowning.)Today's world depends too heavily on oil for companies to refuse todo business in any place where torture has occurred or beenalleged, Schulz said. "We have to be selective. There are somecases in which the connection is very direct. If oil companies aredirectly responsible for human-rights violations -- as it wasalleged that Unocal was -- then they have to be held accountable." Reebok sets a global example
In making judgments about whether to refuse to operate or invest ina country, Schulz said, firms must consider a variety of factors.The most obvious, besides the directness of the link, is theseverity of the abuses. Another is how dependent the country'sgovernment is on the sales of a given commodity. In Sudan, forexample, oil is the country's lifeblood. "I don't pretend that theethical questions are easy. You make judgments where you think youcan have an impact and where the crime is serious enough."
In some cases, home governments may make decisions for companies bybarring activity via sanctions, Schulz pointed out. Again, theutility of sanctions has to be evaluated case by case. Among thecriteria to consider is whether the local activists have asked forsanctions as a way to pressure their government. Schulz alsopointed out that sanctions and boycotts have a mixed record ofeffectiveness.
Declining to do business somewhere or acceding to sanctions isn'tthe only way companies can forestall torture and other human-rightsabuses. They can also take active steps to publicize and preventbad acts -- and many of them do. Paul Fireman, chief executive ofReebok, is a case in point.
"He intervened actively on behalf of the leader of the labororganization in Indonesia that had given Reebok a load of griefabout its factories," Schulz said. In 1999, Fireman wrote toIndonesia's president seeking the release from prison ofhuman-rights activist Dita Sari. Fireman has also refused to dobusiness in Myanmar, as have many companies, and, in 2005, wrote aneditorial in The Wall Street Journal calling on corporatecolleagues to follow Reebok's lead.
"More and more corporations are recognizing that it's in theirinterest to be good global citizens," Schulz added. "One of themost promising developments in the field of human rights during myyears at Amnesty was the growing sense that human rights were goodbusiness and that countries that don't respect the rule of law,don't educate their children and don't use the talents of half oftheir populations because of their gender are unlikely to be placeswhere businesses will prosper in the long run."