"European Times, Ankara: Hypocrisy goes on display with the battle tanks

IT TOOK a while to find the British guns at Turkey's premier arms fair yesterday. They were not on display at the British stands that huddled round the official Ministry of Defence mission.

Instead, they were tucked away on a Turkish company's stand. Just as they have been surreptitiously exported to one of the world's most notorious human rights abusers through a loophole in British arms export law, they were surreptitiously on display: not something for Britain to boast about.

Despite the battle tanks on podiums, and the Russian helicopter gunship looping overhead there were plenty of British items to see. Somebody had even brought a kilted bagpiper along to serenade the gold-encrusted generals in attendance. But nothing was on display so much as the British Government's hypocrisy.

Turkey's human rights record is abysmal, and the Government regularly refuses British arms manufacturers export licences. Strange then, that I found rifles designed by Heckler and Koch, a subsidiary of British Aerospace, in a show cabinet.

They had been ordered by the Turkish armed forces, which have spent the last 15 years forcibly evacuating thousands of Kurdish villages in a brutal attempt to suppress rebellion. On the next display case was a Heckler and Koch machine gun used by Turkish police.

The guns got here through a loophole. They are produced by a Turkish company, Makina ve Kimya Endustri, under licence from Heckler and Koch. The deal was signed at the end of last year, long after Robin Cook promised his brave new "ethical foreign policy".

Because the guns are not produced in Britain, they do not need an export licence. The Turks can make guns to Heckler and Koch's specification and sell them anywhere they want. All British Aerospace has to do is count the profits.

At least the guns were on a Turkish stand. A British Aerospace salesman talked me through the gleaming new Rapier Mark II missile. Only weeks ago, British Aerospace signed a joint production deal with a Turkish company to share the manufacture of Rapier missiles for Turkish and British armed forces. That did require a licence.

The Government defended the decision on the grounds that Rapier was a fixed missile system, and can only be used to defend an established airbase. But BAe was openly promoting the missile for its mobility. It can, according to BAe's salesman, be used to protect an army on the move.

There was something familiar about the vehicles on the next stand. They were all variations on the British Land Rover, built with Land Rover's permission by a Turkish company, Otokar.

"We abide by the export licence scheme and we fully support it," the Land Rover spokesman on the stand told me. All that Land Rover exports is the chassis: as a civilian vehicle, it requires no export licence. But on the stand was Otokar's development of the model: an assault vehicle armed to the teeth.

Otokar wants the Turkish army to buy some. And there are reports that Otokar-built Land Rovers have turned up in Algeria, a country in the midst of a brutal civil war.

Nor are these sales the machinations of the private sector. The MoD had sent a mission. Shortly after he became Foreign Secretary, Mr Cook rebuked the Malaysian government for human rights abuses. That did not stop a British general springing to his feet to tug his forelock at a Malaysian party yesterday.

One stall belonged to Dera, a British government agency founded to advise the British armed forces on defence, particularly on purchasing arms and other equipment. But, the salesman told me, Dera has been hit by cuts and is turning to "commercial" enterprise.

So selling to Turkey keeps the British arms industry alive without costing Britain too much. And that, not Nato alliances, is why Turkey's arms fair was full of British arms."