Weapons from China have surfaced in a string of U.N. investigations in war zones stretching from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Ivory Coast, Somalia and Sudan.
...China has stood apart from other major arms exporters, including Russia, for its assertive challenge to U.N. authority, routinely refusing to cooperate with U.N. arms experts and flexing its diplomatic muscle to protect its allies and curtail investigations that may shed light on its own secretive arms industry.
The stance highlights the tensions between China’s
responsibilities as a global power and its interests in exploiting new markets.
It has also raised questions about whether Chinese diplomats have a grip on the
reach of the country’s influence in the arms industry beyond its borders.
Beijing has responded to the disclosures not by enforcing
regulations at home but by using its clout within the Security Council to claw
back the powers of independent U.N. arms investigators. Those efforts have
helped undercut the independence of U.N. panels that track arms trading with
Iran and North Korea.
...China has blocked the release of embarrassing U.N.
revelations of illicit arms transfers, stopped the reappointment of an arms
expert who uncovered Chinese weapons and sought to restrict the budget to fund
investigations. It has also consistently refused to allow U.N. investigators to
trace the origin of Chinese weapons discovered in war zones.
Now remind me again why Alberta and Ottawa are falling all over themselves to give China priority access to Athabasca tar, why they're even willing to wreak ecological devastation on British Columbia to do it? Is it any wonder that a lot of British Columbians feel caught between a rock of petro-authoritarianism on our eastern flank and free-market totalitarianism on our western flank? I suppose they've got a lot in common.
