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17 March 2000

An ever-expanding illicit trade in small arms thrives on the backs of Africa's youth. The mounting death toll, which results from large quantities of small arms in circulation, poses one of the great humanitarian challenges of our time. Yet, the international trade in small arms remains mostly unregulated. Future generations will judge us by our response to the challenge posed.

A whole generation of African children is being inducted into a culture of violence marked by violent death and injury. Of the 7-8 million fatalities in Africa's recent regional conflicts, 2 million were children. 4-5 million children have been disabled, another 12 million left homeless. More than 1 million orphaned or separated from their families. This mental militarization will tear apart the last remnants of civility.

Small arms violence undermines good governance. It disrupts trade, tourism and investment. As domestic conditions deteriorate, violent crime and general lawlessness increase exponentially, a phenomenon which has been termed "la criminalisation de l'etat en Afrique." It raises the cost of maintaining order, thus jeopardizing economic development by depleting budget resources. As a result, with human rights abuses on an increase and famine conditions exacerbated, democracy and development are put at risk.

The accumulation of power in the hands of those with guns has led to the collapse of states across the African continent. A dangerous strategic triad has developed between the trade in diamonds, oil and precious metals as means of funding illicit arms purchases. Throughout Africa, conflicts are being fueled in an effort by irresponsible and reckless profiteers to control precious natural resources which, rather than being means for economic and political empowerment end up fueling the engines of war and annihilation.

More and more governments fail in providing for basic human needs. Increasing social iniquities further alienate the disenfranchised and contribute to sudden explosions of violence. Not surprisingly, virtually every low-income country in Africa has either undergone major conflict, or borders on one or more countries in conflict.

The oversupply of inexpensive small arms also heightens inter-state conflict, putting the nation-state system itself under attack. With armed guerilla groups proliferating and often dividing into warring factions internal instabilities, increasingly, tend to evolve into larger regional wars. The conflict in Congo-Kinshasa involves the armed forces of eight countries.

Cross-border support for insurgent movements is also on the rise. As a result, in Africa large-scale wars are ongoing in Angola, Congo-Brazzaville, Congo-Kinshasa, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Rwanda, Somalia, and Sudan. Low intensity conflicts are being waged, inter alia, in Burundi, Chad, Djibouti, Senegal, and Uganda. Of the 25 major conflicts identified worldwide in 1997, all new ones were located in Africa. As a result, of the 22 million refugees globally, 8.1 million are in Africa. Throughout Africa, currently about 20 million people are displaced.

Conflicts have several political, economic, and social causes, but it would be much easier to prevent and resolve them if the availability of small arms were curtailed. For the supply of small arms and light weapons is the most important aggravating factor in conflict situations.

Most small arms originate in the industrialized North. The permanent members of the UN Security Council alone account for around 85% of the global arms trade. With 40% of the worldwide flow of small arms attributed to illicit trafficking and the majority of illicit weapons proven to originate in the licit trade, getting these governments to exercise restraint and to tighten national and international controls on small arms exports should lend itself to reducing supply, significantly.

Measures must be devised to limit access to small arms, to curtail the supply of small arms and to reduce the demand for small arms. The weapons of violence must be brought back into the control of the state, with the state itself being made accountable for its deeds.

This essentially means empowering the state at one level, and using all tools available to induce more responsible behavior on its part, at another. The two approaches must be mutually compatible.

In this complex situation, a sincere abhorrence of covert wars and civilian destruction would prove conducive to putting in place the norms that would regulate state and non-state behavior alike.

Important lessons can be learned from the small arms moratorium of Western African states. As President Alpha Oumar Konare of Mali states: "the moratorium is not a legal impediment intended to restrict the sovereignty of states, nor reduce their freedom to provide for their own defense. Rather it is an act of faith, demonstrating the irreversible political commitment of our states."

Small arms proliferation is not merely a regional problem, germane to Africa, but global in dimension. It is, in the words of UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, "one of the key challenges in preventing conflict in the new century."

In 2001, the United Nations will convene an international conference on illicit small arms trafficking. This past month, the first PrepCom met at UN Headquarters in New York. Unfortunately, precious time is being wasted on modalities. In the interest of saving lives, efforts must be made to define objectives, means and goals for the 2001 conference. A plethora of initiatives notwithstanding concerns persist that political and economic interests of the few may impede humanitarian interests of the many.

Twenty world leaders, including the President of Georgia, the secretary-general of the Organization of African Unity, the former prime minister of India, and foreign and defense ministers of Brazil, Cameroon, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, have joined President Alpha Oumar Konare of Mali and former prime minister Michel Rocard of France to make a specific contribution to the emerging global small arms effort.

The overall objective of the eminent persons group is to assist in efforts to curtail the proliferation and the unlawful use of small arms. Such an objective will require a constructive parallelism between a whole range of politically and legally binding instruments, involving operative and normative measures pertaining to the illicit as well as the licit trade, which must be dealt with both within the context of conflict prevention and conflict resolution.

Within the context of this overall objective, the group's goal is to promote a cooperative disarmament approach built around a small arms control regime (SACR), broad in scope and global in reach and to consist of, on the preventive side, (1) an international transparency regime, (2) strengthened national export controls, and (3) an international code of conduct. On the reduction side, to consist of weapons collection programs as integral to peace agreements, demobilization programs, and post-conflict reconstruction. Cooperative disarmament must address security and developmental concerns as functional corollaries and must be integrated into national programs as well as into international cooperation efforts.

Integral to cooperative disarmament, preventive measures must pursue two objectives: first, to limit and control availability and access to small arms (supply side) and secondly, to reduce the demand for such weapons (demand side). On the supply side such an approach necessitates measures aimed at controlling legal transfers between states, controlling the availability, use and storage of small arms within states, preventing and combating illicit transfers, collecting and removing surplus arms from both civil society and regions of conflict, increasing transparency and accountability, support for research and information sharing. (enhanced accountability, transparency and improved market regulation). Correspondingly, on the demand side the commitment of the international community to reversing cultures of violence, reforming and enhancing the security sector in those states most severely affected, creating norms of non-possession, enhancing demobilization and reintegration programs, halting the use of child combatants, combating impunity, tackling poverty and underdevelopment. (sustainable peace and economic development and promotion of a culture of peace as recommended by the General Assembly of the U.N.)

Also, reduction measures must be devised to secure, destroy or otherwise responsibly dispose of small arms that are already in circulation, inside or outside of legal possession. The international donor community should establish collection and buy-back programs as well as other mechanisms to identify and promote best practices and to ensure adequate financial support. The Organization of African Unity should be supported in its appeal to the international community "to render to affected African countries all necessary assistance to enable them to implement programmes to deal effectively with the problems associated with the proliferation of small arms and light weapons." There are important lessons to be learned from the reintegration of ex-combatants into productive civilian life (Cambodia, Philippines), post-conflict reconstruction (Cambodia, Bougainville) and the reform of police, judicial and penal systems (Cambodia, Papua New Guinea).

What the victims of gun violence need urgently today is the immediate "reduction" of such weapons in the most affected regions of the world, and whatever assistance the UN or the donor countries can come up with in this regard.

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