It's a case of the shipment that wasn't - but it's causing endless headaches for a government that is still reeling from the last arms deal fiasco.
In the latest salvo fired, the Democratic Alliance on Monday threatened criminal action and invoked the Promotion of Access to Information Act in trying to force the National Conventional Arms Control Committee (NCACC) to release details of the approval it granted to send arms to Haiti.
The arms never reached Haiti and were turned back from Jamaica after Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide left his country.
James Selfe, chairperson of the DA federal council, said on Monday the party "would not hesitate" to lay a criminal charge if the committee was found to have contravened the National Conventional Arms Control Act.
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| 'This case met the standards of contributing to regional security' |
The DA has asked for minutes of the last three NCACC meetings, a copy of the permit issued authorising the shipment, details of which criteria of the Act were considered when granting approval and a list of people who attended the meeting that authorised the provision of arms.
The NCACC hit back, saying Selfe's "accusations of impropriety" were "simply untrue".
"When we reviewed the request from the Caribbean Community (Caricom), a legitimate regional body representing 15 nations, we applied the relevant criteria of the Act.
"Reviewing arms sales on a case-by-case basis, as the Act requires, we found that this case met the standards of contributing to regional security, which was the basis of the request from Caricom, and the protection of the national sovereignty of a member country of the United Nations with a democratically elected government."
The NCACC said the shipment had included a "modest amount of material" and bullet-proof vests intended to help Haitian police maintain order.
| 'He thinks this provision refers only to conflict between two states' |
The equipment is believed to have included R-1 rifles, bullets and smoke grenades.
Selfe had also said there was nothing in the Act providing for "assisting a sovereign state in maintaining its territorial integrity" - the explanation Asmal had given for the shipment's approval.
But the NCACC said Selfe had hereby narrowed the meaning of the Act which "explicitly requires the NCACC to take into account the inherent right of individual and collective self-defence of all sovereign countries in terms of the United Nations Charter".
"Arbitrarily, he thinks this provision refers only to conflict between two states."
"According to many observers, there has been external interference in the conflict in Haiti. Nevertheless, there is nothing in our Act specifying that self-defence of national sovereignty applied only to situations of direct attack by another sovereign nation," the statement says.
It went on to say that the NCACC had found "no credible evidence of the systematic repression of human rights violations or repression of democracy by the Haitian government", as charged by Selfe.
"Any appearance of the repression of democratic freedoms, of course, is a concern. But the Haitian democratic elections of 2000, in which President Jean-Bertrand Aristide received the support of an overwhelming popular majority, were found by independent monitors to be substantially free and fair."
Selfe said the DA was intent on getting to the bottom of the issue.
"We want to found out whether a criminal act has happened."
"The state has seemed so keen to prosecute people in breach of the Act - there has been a series of prosecutions against mercenaries and other individuals - that we want to know if the state is as keen to uphold the law," Selfe said.
In a statement also released on Monday, Selfe said getting the proper information around the arms approval would clarify conflicting reports about the shipment, referring to comments by NCACC member Fred Marais last Thursday during a radio interview that he had no knowledge of an arms shipment and that a permit would have been needed.
Minister Kader Asmal, chairman of the committee, said on Sunday that the shipment had left South Africa with the committee's full approval.
"If members of the African National Congress government have broken the law by trying to help prop up the Aristide regime, then they must own up to this and face the consequences. If they haven't, then they have nothing to hide," Selfe said.
- This article was originally published on page 2 of Pretoria News on March 09, 2004
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