MILITARY HARDWARE
Can We Peep into the Shopping Bag?
A famous writer once wrote a novel titled "No one writes to the Colonel any more". Probably my memory is not serving me right and it may have been a short story. Come to think of it, may be I did not even get the title right. Can't seem to find anything with a similar title in my bookshelves. It is not impossible that the whole thing is my imagination. Whatever.
The point is that I want to write to a Colonel of our armed services, but I don't know whom to write to. May be I should try the Prime Minister who is also in charge of the Ministry of Defence. Probably the President would be the right person as he, according to our Constitution, is the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. I don't think there is any point in writing to the Secretary, Ministry of Defence, as government officials do not respond to any query from a citizen. They probably think that they are prohibited from doing so under the Official Secrecy Act or some other similar childish imagination; letting a citizen know about aspects of governance, they probably think, is a major crime. Whatever.
The thing is we, as citizens, need to know. Need to know how many MIG 29s the government is buying, from whom and for how much. The Prime Minister, according to the TV news telecast of the 10th January and also as reported in the daily Sangbad on the 11th January (last page, column 7), has informed (I take it, us) that besides the MIG 29s, the government is also buying C-130 cargo aircraft and helicopters. One can easily assume that the MIGs would come from Russia, the C-130 from the US and the helicopters - well let's not indulge in wild guesses. We know that far, but we do want to know more.
Courtesy the Prime Minister, we do know that we are buying these, I think, very sophisticated and costly military hardware. Is there any thing wrong if we, the citizens, want to know more about these hardware? After all these things will be bought with our money and presumably for our 'defence'.
Most people who are interested in these things, i.e. which country is buying what type of military hardware from whom and for how much, and if such people reside or work in the West, can easily find these detail from a good library. Let me give you an example, though somewhat dated because I haven't been to a good western library in recent years and moreover I did not, until today, felt the urge to update myself about these things. The example in the table below depicts the number of aircraft we have bought from different countries, from 1972 through 1989.
Is the above table a state secret? Certainly not. You see there is, again if I remember right, a central system of registration for sale and purchase of all types of weapon by one country from another. Something similar to, in spirit, our land or vehicle registration system. If you buy a piece of land you to register your purchase with the land registration office. So, if one wants to know about weapon transactions, one can easily dig up the information from those sources. However, there are plenty of secondary sources for these information, the most reliable and also the most widely used is the SIPRI Yearbooks, published annually by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The Yearbooks contain all the information about all the arms transactions, not only about aircraft.
Recently I had checked with the major libraries in Dhaka and no one seems to subscribe to this Yearbook and hence the information is not readily available to the citizens of this country. And that was the reason for my saying earlier that if one were in West one could easily know more about the arms transaction the Honourable Prime Minister so fleetingly mentioned. Needless to say the SIPRI Yearbook is not the only source. Alas, the other relevant publications are also not available locally.
By now, I hope the readers won't think that I am raising questions about state secrets. Because we don't have access to the publications (SIPRI Yearbook costs around $2,000/- and we all know that our libraries have money for salaries and not for books), may I now, very hopefully, request the authorities to provide us with more information about how much money they are spending for these fancy goodies. After all, we do spend three times more on the 120,000 or so members of the armed forces and their equipment than we spend on the health services for all the 120 million or so people of this country.
The city of Dhaka with its eight or more million people, we all know, has only 24 government high schools and not a single new one has been built for almost two decades now. And we have built more cantonments than polytechnic institutions since the liberation. If I take a wild guess and think that each of the MIG-29s costs at least US$20 million, then will you, dear reader, take a guess as to how many new high schools could have been built in Dhaka with that much of money? And how many such institutions if we are buying ten MIG-29s? We have to guess because we don't know. May be our guesses would be wrong. So, will the authorities correct us and tell us why are they spending so much money for MIGs instead of schools and hospitals? We have a right to know and we need to decide whether we want a country which spends hundreds of millions of dollars on military hardware when literally millions of children suffer from malnutrition and are without education, shelter or warm clothes; notwithstanding the recent parody of distribution of a few hundred pieces of warm clothes by the Prime Minister and, almost, her entire Cabinet and farcical shrills of others about 'reduction sale' of our sovereignty.
The writer, an Advocate, is Advisor, Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust (BLAST)
Aircraft procured byBangladesh, 1972-1989
(Compiled from M Brzoska and TOhlson, Arms Transfer to the Third World, 1971-1985, Oxford,1987; and SIPRI Yearbook, 1984 and 1988 through 1992)
|
Year of order |
Year of delivery |
Seller |
Number ordered |
Number delivered |
Aircraft model |
Aircraft designa-tion |
| 1972 | 1972 | India | 3 | 3 | An-12;Cub-A | Transport |
| 1972 | India | 4 | 4 | DHC-3 Otter | Transport | |
| 1972 | India | 1 | 1 | DHC-4;Caribour | Transport | |
| 1973 | India | 4 | 4 | SA-136B | Helicopter | |
| 1973 | USSR | 1 | 1 | AN-24 | Transport | |
| 1973 | USSR | 10 | 10 | MiG-21MF | Fighter | |
| 1973 | USSR | 2 | 2 | MiG-21 UTI | Trainer | |
| 1973 | 1973 | UK | 2 | 2 | Wessex | Helicopter |
| 1974 | USSR | 6 | 6 | Mi-8Hip | Helicopter | |
| 1974 | USSR | 1 | 1 | Yak-40 | VIP Use | |
| 1974 | 1975-76 | China | 36 | 36 | F-6 | Fighter |
| 1975 | China | 4 | 4 | MiG-15 UTI | Trainer | |
| 1976 | 1977 | USA | 6 | 6 | Model 212 | Helicopter |
| 1977 | 1977 | France | 6 | 6 | Super Magister | Trainer |
| 1979 | 1979 | China | 12 | 12 | BT-6 | Trainer |
| 1983 | China | 10 | 10 | F-6 | Fighter | |
| 1980 | 1980 | France | 4 | 4 | Super Magister | Trainer |
| 1981 | USA | 4 | 4 | Model 212 | Helicopter | |
| 1981 | 1981 | USA | 2 | 2 | Model 206L | Helicopter |
| 1981 | USSR | 3 | 3 | An--26 | Light plane | |
| 1985 | 1985 | France | 5 | 5 | Super Magister | Trainer |
| 1985 | USA | 2 | 2 | Model 337 | Trainer | |
| 1987 | ? | Indonesia | 1 | ? | AS-332 | Helicopter |
| 1989 | 1990-91 | Pakistan | 50 | 50 | F-6 | Fighter |
| 1989-90 | China | 20 | 20 | A-5 | Fighter | |
| 1989 | China | 16 | 16 | F-7 | Fighter |
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