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September 23rd, 2013 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Protests have been a feature all along with activists raising their voices to let everyone know the deadly weapons wrapped in glass cases at ExCel Centre in London are no less objects of bloody crackdown and murder than the ornaments exhibitors tend to display.
The fairs in 2001, 2003, and 2005 were all beset by sizeable protests and Space Hijackers activists make the 2007 event memorable after they distracted the police to drive a tank up near ExCel center before “selling” it to the highest bidder in a mockery of the indiscriminate weapons trade at the fair.
As if the very staging of the DSEi was not enough for protest groups, the fair was entangled with more controversy in 2011.
At the time, DSEi officials had to throw out two exhibitors for promoting cluster munitions, ostensibly condemned by Britain and more than 100 other countries.
The organizers said they were unaware that the material was available but campaigners rounded on the fair, dismissing the scenario by DSEi officials as “unbelievable”.
Protesters also targeted a newly unveiled ‘advanced’ Royal Navy destroyer, HMS Dauntless, as it was docking in London a week ahead of the fair.
Members of the group Disarm Defence and Security Equipment International used inflatable kayaks to try to prevent the vessel from anchoring.
Another disgrace for DSEi triggered protests after Amnesty International said it has obtained brochures, which appear to clearly show illegal torture equipment advertised.
Amnesty said the banned torture-ware were displayed by a company called CTS-Thompson at the Beechwood Equipment stall, despite explicit acknowledgments on the fair’s website that the sale of “leg irons, gang chains, shackles and shackle bracelets” were prohibited.
“With companies openly flogging torture equipment on one side of the counter and delegates from countries like Bahrain on the other, it is hardly the sort of matchmaking that Londoners should be proud to host,” Oliver Sprague, Amnesty International’s Arms Program Director, said in reaction.
Sprague’s comment pointed to a highly-embarrassing fact about the persistent participants in DSEis.
A cross-party committee of senior backbench MPs said back in 2011 that successive governments had allowed British arms supplied to North Africa and the Middle East to be used for internal repression despite official guidelines to the contrary.
To make matters worse, the very repressive regimes, such as Bahrain, the Israeli regime and Saudi Arabia, were, and continue to be, invited to the fair.
In 2011, 14 out of 65 delegations present at the exhibition were from countries defined as “authoritarian regimes” by human rights groups.
In 2013, it appeared that Britain had issued arms exports permits worth £12 billion for some of the world’s most brutal dictatorships, almost all of them on the DSEi guest list while being also listed among countries with “human rights concerns” by the British Foreign Office.
The Israeli regime accounted for well over 50 percent of the value of the licences issued for the mentioned countries with 381 permits worth £7.8 billion and Saudi Arabia came in second with 417 licences worth £1.8 billion. Both were present at DSEi 2013.
The embarrassment over the guest list was such that Sarah Waldron from the Campaign Against Arms Trade said “it reads like a roll call of authoritarian regimes and human rights abusers”, while the House of Commons’ Committees on Arms Export Controls (CAEC) said there is an inherent conflict between strongly promoting arms exports to authoritarian regimes and strongly criticizing their lack of human rights at the same time.
And, the last but not the least, DSEi 2013 faced daily protests including, hundreds of people blockading the fair venue’s gates as well as preventing the entrance of ships and armored vehicles.
As participants in the DSEi 2013 began setting up their stalls on Sunday September 13, hundreds of protesters disrupted their set-up, stopping vehicles carrying military equipment and blocking their access to the eastern entrance of the ExCel center.
Blockades were also in place at the western entrance as priests and activists from Christianity Uncut performed an ‘exorcism’ on the fair.
With a drones conference planned for the following day on the eve of DSEi’s official opening on September 15, campaigners superglued themselves to the gates of the US arms giant Lockheed Martin, impeding the entrance for three hours.
At the ExCel center, campaigners rallied against the drones conference while others prevented an armored vehicle from entering the venue by sitting in the road.
Action on Tuesday started at London City Airport as some 30,000 arms dealers arrived.
The main entrance for visitors to the fair was obstructed by Christian activists for some 40 minutes.
Later, campaigners also blocked all four entrances of the Cutty Sark restaurant where government representatives and a number of arms dealers were marking the first night of the fair.
On Wednesday, government officials faced condemnation of the National Union of Journalists after removal of the press credentials of a journalist who had filmed the protests.
Again, the organizers of the event had to come up with excuses to justify advertisements on illegal weapons inside the fair as campaigners held a wreath-laying ceremony for the victims of arms trade.
On the eve of the fair’s closure, a huge number of cyclers converged with other activists to block a “charity” event for arms dealers, obstructing the venue of the event and rather engaging people with information on the arms fair.
The final day on Friday was also a day of controversy as protesters gathered outside the venue of Business Secretary Vince Cable’s surgery in Twickenham, condemning the government’s role in organizing the arms fair and letting in despots.
Meawhile, Occupy London anti-capitalists, joined by other protesters, set up a 24-hour camp at ExCel’s eastern entrance, for a final showdown with arms dealers as they packed up.
Stop the Arms Fair campaign group, which organized the weeklong protest, summed up its demands as an end to the DSEis though the British government seems all set to push ahead with its death trade, embracing controversies.
AMR/HE
Source Article from http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/09/23/325543/london-arms-fair-sugarcoated-death-trade/
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