LONDON – Twenty years ago, not long after the current democratically elected president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, had voluntarily stepped down from his position as the military president, he gave a speech to a conference on disarmament attended by top political leaders from West, East and South. Of all the speakers – and some of them were great reformers like the late prime minister of Sweden Olof Palme, the former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Georgi Arbatov, foreign affairs advisor to the Soviet president, Leonid Brezhnev – Obasanjo was the most outspoken and demanding on his prescriptions for limiting the international arms trade.

“The industrialized countries”, he said,”should not assume too blithely that their policy of selling third World countries more or less whatever they want is universally accepted among developing countries.” For every Zia ul-Haq, Indira Ghandi or Middle East potentate who wanted to buy the latest military hardware, argued Obasanjo, there were Third World leaders who spent a lot of time trying to fend off the pressures from their military establishments to buy whatever baubles the arms salesmen were now dangling before them. Obasanjo went so far as to argue that, with the exception of movements fighting sophisticated, then white-led, South Africa, developing countries “should be limited to the arms they can manufacture themselves”.

If this seemed a way out statement then, today it is perhaps only marginally less so. But Obasanjo is firm in saying this is the position he still adheres to. He is an enthusiast of those western legislators who on both sides of the Atlantic have been pushing, in the face of opposition from President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair in particular, codes of conduct on arms sales. Obasanjo looks aghast at the African wars that rage in Sierra Leone, Angola, the Congo and between Ethiopia and Eritrea and says bluntly they would not be so intense if arms had not been fed to Africa in such profusion by the politically competitive East and West in Cold War days and today by misguided government-sponsored arms selling, and by free lance small arms salesmen who operate without fear of prosecution from their own governments in the industrialized countries.

Obasanjo also makes the valid point that Saddam Hussein would never have had the where-with-all to launch his invasion of Kuwait and fight the UN coalition put together by U.S. president George Bush if he had not been sold sophisticated state-of-the-art weapons by a competitively minded Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Francois Mitterand.

I arrived in London from the Nigerian capital, Abuja, this week with this conversation with Obasanjo still on my mind to find the British parliament locked in a deep struggle on the issue of arms sales with Tony Blair. On Tuesday four parliamentary committees unanimously criticized the Blair administration for “undermining the force” of a European Union resolution which Britain had co-sponsored (after watering down a stronger Nordic version) on limiting arms sales to Africa. Indeed, at one point Blair had overruled his Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, who wanted to refuse Zimbabwe spare parts for its Hawk fighter aircraft it was using in the Congolese civil war.

So intense is the unease about British arms sales policy in parliament, that both the Foreign Secretary and the powerful Trade Secretary Stephen Byers have let it be known to journalists that they are fighting a rearguard action to persuade an unwilling prime minister to introduce legislation before the next election to prevent a repetition of past arms sales fiascos.

Besides Zimbabwe, they are drawing particular attention to the “arms-to-Iraq” scandal during the previous Conservative government, which led to a report by a senior judge Lord Scott that found that the government had misled parliament by not revealing a decision to relax arms sales to Iraq.

In principle, Mr Blair has accepted the case for new legislation – this was promised in a 1998 white paper. In practice he is fighting shy even though it is undermining Mr Cook’s pledge to run an “ethical foreign policy”. Both Mr Cook and Mr Byers are arguing that controls on arms sales would be popular with an electorate that has come to see what damage the present loose arrangements can inflict in fragile parts of the world, such as Sierra Leone where British troops are part of the peacekeeping force.

Nevertheless, the countervailing pressures on Mr Blair are powerful. The arms industry is, as it is in many large western countries, a significant employer and an important contributor to the balance of payments. It is unclear, say defenders of Mr Blair, that if Britain pulls out of the business other industrialized countries won’t simply take their place.

But this is why it is important for Britain to be shown to supporting the modest arms control arrangements voted by the European Union, not undermining them as it did over Zimbabwe. Moreover, Britain should make use of its special relationship with the U.S. to persuade the Clinton Administration to pick up the ball that its Democratic predecessor, the government of Jimmy Carter, dropped after it unilaterally withdrew from negotiations on the subject with the Soviet Union. If there are enough votes in the House of Representatives to pass a code of conduct then clearly there is a sentiment in American public opinion for tougher controls. Indeed, all the industrialized countries should walk in step together, as they have for the most part over land-mines. But someone has to start the ball rolling.

Cynics say that agreements to limit the sale of arms are doomed to failure. Yet as far back as the Middle Ages there were understandings among the Christian nations not to transfer weapons to the “infidel Turks”. Later, in the nineteenth century, the non-slaving nations of Europe signed in Brussels the “general act for the repression of the African slave trade”, which prohibited the introduction of arms and ammunition other than flintlock guns and powder into the vast zone of the African continent. More recently, there was the tripartite declaration of 1950 signed by the U.S., Britain and France to inhibit an arms race between the Arab states and Israel by restraining sales. Tragically for the Middle East, it lasted only five years. It crumbled because the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia concluded a major arms deal with Egypt; and France, unknown to her two partners, signed a secret sales agreement with Israel.

The precedents may not be totally encouraging, yet they show a glimmer of light. A start should be made with Africa, to clamp down both on official arms sales and the activities of free-lance arms salesmen. If the UN Security Council is prepared, as it recently did, to clamp down on the trade in “blood diamonds” this issue should be presented to it as a necessary corollary. Britain, just as it did on the diamond issue, should lead the way.

I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com