Nammo does not mention in a single word the problematic aspect of contributing to a particularly cruel war contrary to international law.
Published: 24/04/2024 06:30
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Nammo has received a lot of criticism lately. The subsidiary Nammo Talley, Inc. in Arizona is subject to US law and sells weapons to the US government, which can use or forward the weapons at its discretion. No end-user declarations apply here to control where the weapons end up. Some of them have gone to Israel for use in Gaza.
On one important point, the criticism is undeserved. It is the government that bears the primary responsibility in such a case, not the arms manufacturer. As far as I know, Nammo has not broken any rules, but on two other points the criticism is justified.
As Mats Harlem and Gina Ekholt in Redd Barna wrote in Aftenposten on 22 January, companies have an independent responsibility to make risk assessments for violations of humanitarian law in addition to complying with national legislation in the country where production takes place.
There are international guidelines for this. When Nammo took over Talley, Inc. they bought the entire stock portfolio, and today they are established in several locations.
The second concerns the reaction to the critical posts that have arrived, including my own. Instead of dealing with the subsidiary’s role, which I concentrated on, and Nammo’s independent responsibility in that regard – information director Thorstein Korsvold tries to obscure the whole thing by interpreting certain words and sentences in the worst sense and then ascertaining factual errors.
When I wrote the article, I saw from the reaction to previous posts that this was the strategy. Now there was more of the same – bordering on the querulous. Not a word about the problematic nature of the subsidiary, the independent responsibility, or the seriousness of contributing to a particularly cruel war contrary to international law.
It is the latter the case.
