Europe's news in English

COPY LINK

WEAPONS

Saudis second largest Swedish arms buyers

India and Saudi Arabia were the Swedish weapons industry's top clients in 2012, a year which nevertheless saw Sweden's arms exports drop 30 percent from the year before.

Published: 22 February 2013 10:30 CET

Saudis second largest Swedish arms buyers

Overall, Sweden sold 9.8 billion kronor ($1.53 billion) worth of arms in 2012, according to a report from the Swedish Agency for Non-Proliferation and Export Controls (Inspektionen för strategiska produkter, ISP), a state body meant to ensure weapons export follows ethical guidelines set by parliament.

Aside from India and Saudia Arabia, whose governments bought 1.44 million and 922 million kronor worth of Swedish arms last year respectively, other significant clients were France (899 million), Pakistan (615 million), and Thailand (600 million).

Around 56 percent of Swedish arms exports went to other countries in the EU, as well as “established partners” such as Canada, South Africa, and the United States.

Twenty other countries accounted for the rest of Swedish weapons exports.

ISP said exports were down from 2011 because Swedish military vendors had wrapped up several large-scale deals, leaving fewer big sales to bump up figures in 2012.

“Several of these systems have been delivered and therefore the value of Swedish exports has been reduced,” ISP said in a statement.

The Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society (Svenska freds, SPAS) remained critical of the fact that Sweden continues to sell weapons to dictatorships and countries that violate human rights.

It also cited revelations from last year that Swedish weapons sold to India had ended up in Burma “in violation of international weapons embargoes and Sweden’s own rules on weapons exports”.

“That should mean that arms exports should be frozen to the country in question,” SPAS head Anna Ek said in a statement.

TT/The Local/dl

Follow The Local on Twitter

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.

Become a Member to leave a comment.

Erdogan links Swedish Nato approval to Turkish EU membership

“First, open the way to Turkey’s membership of the European Union, and then we will open it for Sweden, just as we had opened it for Finland,” Erdogan told a televised media appearance, before departing for the NATO summit in Lithuania.

Erdogan said “this is what I told” US President Joe Biden when the two leaders spoke by phone on Sunday.

Turkey first applied to be a member of the European Economic Community — a predecessor to the EU — in 1987. It became an EU candidate country in 1999 and formally launched membership negotiations with the bloc in 2005.

The talks stalled in 2016 over European concerns about Turkish human rights violations.

“I would like to underline one reality. Turkey has been waiting at the EU’s front door for 50 years,” Erdogan said. “Almost all the NATO members are EU members. I now am addressing these countries, which are making Turkey wait for more than 50 years, and I will address them again in Vilnius.”

Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, is due to meet Erdogan at 5pm on Monday in a last ditch attempt to win approval for the country’s Nato bid ahead of Nato’s summit in Vilnius on July 11th and 12th.

Turkey has previously explained its refusal to back Swedish membership as motivated by the country’s harbouring of people connected to the PKK, a Kurdish terrorist group, and the Gülen movement, who Erdogan blames for an attempted coup in 2016.

More recently, he has criticised Sweden’s willingness to allow pro-Kurdish groups to protest in Swedish cities and allow anti-Islamic protesters to burn copies of the Quran, the holy book of Islam.

In a sign of the likely reaction of counties which are members both of Nato and the EU, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that the two issues should not be connected.

“Sweden meets all the requirements for Nato membership,” Scholz told reporters in Berlin. “The other question is one that is not connected with it and that is why I do not think it should be seen as a connected issue.”

Malena Britz, Associate Professor in Political Science at the Swedish Defence University, told public broadcaster SVT that Erdogan’s new gambit will have caught Sweden’s negotiators, the EU, and even Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg off guard.

“I think both the member states and Stoltenberg had expected this to be about Nato and not about what the EU is getting up to,” she said. “That’s not something Nato even has any control over. If Erdogan sticks to the idea that Turkey isn’t going to let Sweden into Nato until Turkey’s EU membership talks start again, then Sweden and Nato will need to think about another solution.”

Aras Lindh, a Turkey expert at the Swedish Institute of Foreign Affairs, agreed that the move had taken Nato by surprise.

“This came suddenly. I find it hard to believe that anything like this will become reality, although there could possibly be some sort of joint statement from the EU countries. I don’t think that any of the EU countries which are also Nato members were prepared for this issue.”

Url copied to clipboard!