This sort of situation really, really infuriates me. This is slightly out of context but on topic - has anyone seen the film No Man's Land? It's a film set during the Bosnian conflict of the early 90s; it's brilliant and i thoroughly recommend it. Anyway, during this film (i won't give anything away) a soldier comes across one of the enemy's equipment crates. In this area he finds a number of undeployed mines which he appears ecstactic about; not because they are mines, but for the fact that inscribed into the base is, "Made in E.U.".
When I first saw this film, I knew very little about the arms trade, but to this day the circumstance of sending in peacekeepers to prevent civilians, paramilitants and soldiers for dying from exposure to Western equipment confounds me as blatant failure of logic for the bodies that oversee the arms trade. I know it's not quite as simple as, "The UK (and others) are only going to permit the construction of arms for national use, not for export" due to the usual economy ( see
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5262120.stm), politics and even potential moral obligation, but surely there must be a way?
Would it be anti-democratic to not allow sales (for example) of UK produced weapons outside of the commonwealth or the EU?
Sigh... there's no easy answer to a situation like this I guess.