Anti-war activists angered by rise in German arms exports

Germany’s booming arms exports have drawn an angry reaction from anti-war activities, who have called on country’s economy minister to resign over his failure to reduce “unscrupulous” military deals.

The call came after German newspaper Welt am Sonntag revealed that Berlin almost doubled its weapons export last year to its highest level in nearly 20 years.

According to the report, individual approvals were granted for exports of weapons worth 7.86 billion euros ($8.76 billion) in 2015. 

To justify the surge in arms deals, Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel said on Monday that many of the agreements had been cleared in 2013 by Chancellor Angela Merkel's previous coalition.

Among the deals was the 1.66-billion-euro agreement to sell Leopard tanks to Qatar, which Gabriel claimed he “was not able to reverse.”

Reacting to the comments, Germany’s prominent anti-war activist Jurgen Grasslin said Gabriel was “factually completely wrong,” Deutsche Welle reported.

Germany's arms control law, he said, declares that any “approval can be withdrawn at any time,” especially if there is a danger that the weapons would be used in a “peace-disturbing action.” 

“You’re delivering tankers for bombers that then intervene anywhere they like,” Grasslin said. “Whenever military planes intervene there is a large number of dead civilians.”

Describing the minister’s policies as no less than accessory to murder, the activist’s German Peace Society called on Gabriel to resign for “unscrupulous weapons exports.”

Another activist, Van Aken, said it would have been perfectly valid to cancel Qatar’s tank deal, especially since the country has joined Saudi Arabia's war on Yemen.

Aken said as economy minister, Gabriel is totally responsible for the exports because he “spoke out against weapons exports in his election campaign, and now he’s doubled them.”

“He [Gabriel] has to recognize now that his way has completely failed,” Aken said. “His way was to reduce certain things within the current system. But what we need now is specific, defined bans.”

Germany is one of the world’s main arms exporters to the European Union and the member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It has recently regained its place as the world’s third biggest arms dealer.

Other major destinations of German weapons are Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Arms exports, for the first half of 2015, to Saudi Arabia spanned 66 approvals worth 179 million euros in total, according to a ministry report.

According to the United Nations, Saudi Arabia's military campaign in Yemen has left about 10,000 people dead and thousands of others injured so far. Local Yemeni sources, however, say the fatality figure is much higher.

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