Outgoing Foreign Secretary William Hague admitted this week that in the 1980s British companies sold precursor chemicals to the Syrian government that Damascus used to manufacture lethal sarin.
But even as late as 2012, British firms were planning to honor
Outgoing Foreign Secretary William Hague admitted this week that in the 1980s British companies sold precursor chemicals to the Syrian government that Damascus used to manufacture lethal sarin.
But even as late as 2012, British firms were planning to honor contracts to export dual-use chemicals to Syria — in other words, chemicals that could have civilian or military applications. Pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and medicines all contain agents that could also be weapons.
German and Indian firms also have legally sold dual-use chemicals to Syria in recent years.
Dual-use chemical complicate governments' efforts to limit the spread of chemical weapons. In the early 1990s, the U.S. tried to block the shipping of dual-use products to Iran, Libya, and Syria. Washington had to deal with multiple Southeast Asian firms and Middle Eastern port authorities.
Companies successfully argued that U.S. dual-use standards did not apply to them since they weren't American firms. Some told Washington that it had no case unless it could prove the companies' clients were misusing the materials.
While control mechanisms have improved since the formation of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the OPCW doesn't have absolute jurisdiction over dual-use products.
In 1991, a U.N. dossier outlined years of dual-use sales to Iraq worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Fortunately for the firms involved, the U.N. couldn't positively link these sales to Iraq's work on VX nerve gas.
The U.S. and the U.K. both previously had sold hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of dual-use equipment to Iraq in the early 1980s. But for Baghdad, the foreign suppliers that really counted were German.
By purchasing materials in small amounts through a clandestine global procurement network, Iraq ran rings around non-proliferation laws. West Germany tightened up it chemical export controls in 1984, but the damage was done. In 1992, the U.N. cataloged products from 17 different German companies at Iraq's Al Muthanna chemical-weapons complex.
Aside from Iraq, German suppliers were also active in Libya and Syria. Saddam Hussein, Hafez Al Assad, and Moammar Gadhafi were happy to oblige corporate and military interests in both Germanies. West German corporations mostly dealt in goods and high technology. The East German army supplied training and blueprints.
Firms in the U.S., France, India, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, Malaysia, Italy, Singapore, the USSR, Japan, China, North Korea, the two Germanies, Thailand, The Netherlands, Austria, and the U.K. all were involved in dual-use sales to Iraq, Libya, or Syria. After U.N. inspectors got access to Iraqi records following the 1991 Gulf War, the U.N. didn't publicize who had sold what … in order to avoid embarrassing leading governments.
Syria established its c