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Burgeoning Small Arms Trade Has High Profits and Losses - UN Security Council - Global Policy Forum Burgeoning Small Arms Trade
Has High Profits and LossesBy Robert E. Sullivan
Earth Times
March 2001
In the last decade a business has developed, worldwide, to which almost everyone even remotely connected makes a handsome profit. With sales between $3 billion and $10 billion a year it has paid for many a mortgage and college education. But this month diplomats and nongovernmental activists are meeting to attempt to control it, simply because it kills about 500,000 people a year.
It is small-arms sales, both legal and illegal. It's like trading bread. It is done everywhere, on a small scale to a large scale. But unlike bread, weapons are not made in small, independent stores. They are almost all made in large, sophisticated factories, almost always licensed by governments.
Which is why the advocates of small arms control are trying to get governments on their side in the newest round of talks, scheduled to begin March 19 in New York, in preparation for an international conference on arms scheduled for July at United Nations Headquarters. According to Pete Abel of the UK-based Omega foundation, the number of registered arms manufacturing companies has increased dramatically in every region of the world since the beginning of the 1990s. It is a booming business.
The United States alone makes small-arms sales of about $400 million a year to more than 100 countries, according to Lora Lumpe of the Arms Sales Monitoring Project. Most other countries' sales are smaller, but some 40 nations make and sell weapons, and it is government officials, not gun-control advocates, who sign treaties. "Gun running contributes to the death of more than half a million people each year," said Wendy Cukier of Canada's Coalition for Gun Control. "For every death many more are injured and traumatized," she said.
According to Scientific American magazine, more than 100 conflicts have erupted since the end of the cold war, killing more than five million people. "Little of the destruction was inflicted by the tanks, artillery or aircraft usually associated with modern warfare," the magazine said. "Rather, most was carried out with pistols, machine guns and grenades ... However beneficial the end of the cold war has been in other respects, it has let loose a global deluge of surplus weapons into a setting in which the risk of local conflict appears to have grown markedly."
Some 90 percent of all wartime casualties in the past 12 years were caused by small arms, according to the British American Information Council, and 90 percent of all war-related casualties are civilians. Since the end of the cold war many nations have started to disarm and, as a result, thousands of weapons are being sold for little money and with even less supervision of those whose hands they are going to. Similarly, if a national police force downsizes and upgrades its forces to become more efficient, that creates an excess of weapons, which find their way into wars. If a nation decides to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), its old, non NATO weapons get sold as excess, to arms dealers.
Small arms are also very easy to use. "Unlike the weapons of earlier eras, which typically required precision aiming and physical strength to be used effectively, ultra-light automatic weapons can be carried and fired by children as young as 9 or 10," wrote arms experts Jeffrey Boutwell and Michael Klare in a recent issue of Scientific American. "A single gunman can slaughter dozens or even hundreds of people in a short time," they added. Witness Liberia, where a very small rebellion with light weapons got enough of a foothold to gain control of timber and natural resources, which were then sold to get even more small arms.
Kathi Austin, Director of the Arms and Conflict Program at the San Francisco-based Fund for Peace, spends about half her time in Africa studying the arms trade. She said that another problem caused by the availability of inexpensive and unprecedented firepower is slaughter at a level and scale unheard of before. "Previously tribes settled some disputes with restitution," she said. "But now they slaughter whole communities, even old men, women and children. They feel they have to completely obliterate communities."
And it is hard to tell the good guys from the bad. The ruthless guerrilla or anti guerrilla in the bush isn't an arms trader. He is the end user. All five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council are up to their armpits in gun exports, according to Joost Hiltermann, of Human Rights Watch, and they will, he said, "play every trick in their procedural bag" to weaken the agreement to be hammered out in New York in July.
The United States alone has arms sales offices in 33 countries, according to the World Policy Institute, including some that make for interesting pairings: Israel and Jordan; India and Pakistan, Greece and Turkey. And those are just direct sales. Most gun running is indirect, according to Austin. "NATO members send arms to Egypt, but they know full well who Egypt is friendly with," she said. "The same with the Israelis. You rarely see a direct Israeli government arms transfer. But they do it. The United States does a brilliant job of this," she added. "You'll rarely see US guns in Africa, but they supply them from other countries."
And that's the simple part. It gets more complicated. For instance, according to Austin, Somalia gets weapons from Yemen, Italy, Russia, Eritrea and Ethiopia. Ethiopia and Eritrea support competing factions in Somalia. Eritrea and Ethiopia buy weapons from the outside--despite a UN arms embargo--for themselves and for Somalia. Somalia also gets other weapons from Kenya. Somalians sell weapons to Kenya, Burundi and Rwanda, and they provide guns to Ugandan rebels and to criminals in Kenya, to clan chiefs in Kenya, criminals in Tanzania and Sudanese rebels and clan chiefs in Uganda. Tanzanians are middlemen for weapons supplies to Uganda and rebels on both sides in Burundi.
West Africa in general gets guns from the former Soviet Union countries, from as far away as Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. The guns are picked up at Kiev, along with cigarettes, and are flown to Africa. The airplanes bring back timber, stolen cars or even legitimate flowers from Kenya. East Europe supplies guns to Paraguay, which are passed on in Latin America, and the IRA gets guns from Iraq.
As hard as it may be for the lay person to understand, governments fully comprehend the implications of the trade, Austin said. "Singapore imports a lot of weapons from the Waassenar group [of largely European nations], which is supposed to be a self-governing group to control arms trade to prevent wrong use," Austin said. "But what do they [in Singapore] want with all those weapons? They are a conduit for third-country transfers, which are illicit because basically a country should carry an end-user certificate and most often that is violated. The weapons are not going to Singapore; they are going to Indonesia, Malaysia and lots of parts of Africa." And if self-regulating groups don't regulate, what's the point?" And then there is the motive. "Most of the time arms supplies go to both sides of a conflict. So China, for example, has a lot of weapons that are moved for profit, rather than political or ideological reasons. They sell to both sides. The best example of this is Rwanda and Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where the Chinese have sold to both sides," Austin said.
Complicated enough? There's more. "China doesn't want to be caught supplying groups in Africa. so it will sell North Korean weapons. And North Korea, for the same reason, will use Chinese makings," Austin said. The issue being so complicated, diplomats have scheduled three preparatory conferences before the July meeting and have set aside two weeks for debate in the March preparatory meeting instead of the usual one week. But the differences among the parties are relatively simple. The latest version of the 13-page draft document aims at tight control of weapons sales. All transactions should be, according to the document, openly and accurately reported, with the weapons going to the end users clearly specified.
Some NGOs want to add is provision for solid, published and signed agreements that the weapons don't end up in the hands of people who "gravely or systematically violate human rights or international humanitarian law," and they want the summer conference to deal with all arms sales, not just "illicit" ones- which is in the title of the meeting.
Insiders, including Human Rights Watch's Hiltermann, believe that their lobbying has been effective and that legal sales will be studied at the summer conference. NGOs and governments are more or less agreed that another extremely difficult aspect is enforcement. According to the draft treaty, national laws would have to be changed to reflect the agreements reached in New York in July, which all agree would be a slow process at best. All governments signing the treaty would also have to agree to imprison violators and cooperate with each other to catch them.
"We have the view that we have the best export control practices in the world," said an American diplomat who is attending the March and July meetings. "We have strengthened export controls, we have stronger controls on brokering, and we would like to see other countries similarly engaged."
Asked about reports from The Fund for Peace on alleged gun runners who described as openly and continually violating the US brokering laws with impunity, the diplomat said, "There are in fact two or three active cases, being worked on very carefully because they will be precedent setting." Asked about an election-campaign brag by the American National Rifle Association--a lobbying group that promotes gun use and opposes gun controls--that under the administration of George W. Bush it would have "an office in the White House," the diplomat said that the US team works with all NGOs, including the NRA. "We talk to them on a regular basis, " he said. "We are very transparent."
According to Austin the NRA lobbied strongly against a plan agreed upon by 16 African states to limit arms imports to Sierra Leone and Liberia after foreign-made weapons killed more than 250,000 people in the area in civil conflicts. The NRA, Austin said, thought such a restriction would set a bad precedent for American sportsmen.
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