Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad today called on all nations to desist from engaging in an armaments race as it would bring about devastating consequences on developing countries in the world..

Speaking at the Kuala Lumpur World Peace Conference, Mahathir said competitive stockpiling has encouraged arms dealers to continue developing newer and more devastating weapons as evident from the range of weapons used in recent wars such as cluster bombs, incendiary bombs, dirty bombs, as well as heat-seeking missiles.

As a result of this, he said that developing countries have had to pay the price in the form of deliberately launched wars for the purposes of weapons testing, as well as the wastage of scarce resources on items which have no return on investment.

"If there is no war then all these very expensive weapons would be a waste...and so, little wars are encouraged so these weapons can be tested," he said during a keynote address to launch the two-day conference organised by the Malaysian World Peace Foundation, headed by entrepreneur Lim Kok Wing.

In addition, the premier said that rich countries "hawk" these weapons to developing countries in order to recover some of their costs.

Buying murder weapons

""Poor countries are advised by high pressure arms salesmen to buy and equip their armed forces with these weapons.

To encourage them, it was pointed out that heir neighbours have already bought or are about to buy these weapons,"" he said.

Mahathir said the arms dealers persuade even friendly neighbours to buy weapons to protect themselves by telling them that if they were attacked by their neighbours, they would suffer huge losses and damages.

"And so the small countries expend huge sums of money, money which they can ill afford on arms, which in most instances they would never use and which would become out of date and would need to be replaced by new state-of-the-art murder weapons," he added.

While recognising that arms spending is a waste of a country's resources, the premier said nevertheless that no country could afford to neglect this area for reasons of national defence.

""Unfortunately, to neglect defence because we believe in peace is likely to invite attacks and war. That is because we still have warlike predators in the world," he said.

Over the past year, Malaysia too made significant purchases to bolster the national land, sea and air defence systems.

Earlier this week, the government inked a deal with visiting Russian President Vladimir Putin to purchase 19 Sukhoi SU-30 M K warplanes at the cost of RM3.42 billion (US$900 million).

Malaysia also signed a 1 billion euro deal last year to buy three French submarines to establish the country's first fleet under a military upgrading programme.

The ''Although'' syndrome

Meanwhile, Mahathir said that the world economic order should include an affirmative action plan to reduce the disparities between rich and poor countries worldwide.

Using the example of Malaysia, the premier said that the country's affirmative action plan or the National Development Plan (NDP) had worked well in reducing tensions between the different communities.

"The disparities in the world today were once reflected in Malaysia. Wealth used to belong only to one community while the other communities remained extremely poor.

"With the reduction in the disparities, the tensions eased over a period of time. And so when the economic crisis of 1997 1998 brought great hardship to the people, there were no race riots as they were in other similarly affected countries," he said.

Mahathir also took the opportunity to criticise the foreign media for being naysayers when it comes to writing about Malaysia's racial balance.

"Almost every report by the foreign media would begin with the famous ''Although'' - that is ''Although Malaysia appears to be peaceful, actually it is not''.

"They suggest that Malaysia is about to burst into flames as the races go at each other's throats.
That it has not done so for years and years does not stop them from predicting violent racial conflicts in Malaysia," he said.

Mahathir has long had a prickly relationship with the foreign media. In the past, he had criticised the foreign press openly for their unfavourable reports on Malaysia, ranging from the country''s handling of the financial crisis to the haze problem.