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Small Arms, Large Casualties - UN Security Council - Global Policy Forum Small Arms, Large Casualties
By Samrat Choudhury
Hindustantimes
April 23, 2003
There are so many ways of killing people. Blasting them to bits with million dollar missiles is one. However, as the Iraqi militia has shown, it is possible to achieve the same result with a lot less expenditure.They fought a superpower — and its tail — using little more than guns.
The US may plant its flag in Baghdad, but suicide bombings and urban guerrilla warfare are likely to continue.According to Thorvald Stoltenberg, who worked as a UN peace negotiator in the former Yugoslavia and was later president of the Norwegian Red Cross, “Small arms are believed to be responsible for as much as 90 per cent of the world’s combat-related killing.”
They are also responsible for close to 100 per cent of the world’s murders and violent crimes. Most countries have woken up to these facts. In 2001, the United Nations organised a ‘micro disarmament’ conference to control the proliferation of these little tools of mayhem. It was called the United Nations Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects.
India is a signatory to the UN Programme of Action that emerged from this conference aimed at eradicating the “illicit trade in small arms and light weapons in all its aspects”. Since that document was signed, the illicit trade has done quite well here, if the recent busting of an arms licence racket in Hyderabad is any indication. It was a simple racket, and one that has been around for quite long. Getting an arms licence the regular way means a series of often difficult encounters with the Indian bureaucracy.
One must justify one’s need for a weapon to the local district authorities and prove one’s credentials to the police. This can be quite taxing.The easier way is to pay an agent. The agent gets a licence from wherever it is easy to get one. Since some licences have all-India validity, it hardly matters where it comes from. In the Hyderabad case, the licences, of people who had never been to Nagaland, came from that state.
The Nagaland licence is quite famous. Police in Thane, Maharashtra, had found 54 residents of the district with Nagaland licences in 1999. Most of them had criminal backgrounds and none of them knew where Nagaland is located. Obviously, that bust-up has done nothing to hamper business. The Nagaland gun licence costs over Rs 50,000 — money that the gun can quite easily recover.
But these are times of competition, and the fake arms licence market is no exception. In 2001, the additional district magistrate of Ferozepur in Punjab was investigated by the police in connection with an arms licence racket. He had issued around 1,600 licences in two months. Not all of these were to residents of his district or state. The same year saw the Central Bureau of Investigation arrest the sub-divisional magistrate of Jind, Haryana. He was implicated in an inter-state arms licence racket. The trail led to Jammu and Gurgaon, and district officials in both places were arrested.
All this, of course, only relates to honest POTA-fearing citizens who apply for licences in the first place. And it only relates to regular firearms, not cottage-industry products. The many katta makers and users continue unperturbed. In much of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the katta is as much a symbol of manhood as any other. Students have them, activists have them, even journalists have them. There are villages that thrive on the katta trade.
The village of Bamhaur near Azamgarh in UP earned notoriety for its kattas. These were so good that they had a brand image — they came with “Made in Bamhaur” stamped on them. The sources of weapons go beyond these states. Even Madhya Pradesh, not known for its gun trade, has an unusually large number of firearms stores. Leaks from these have been reported.There are other, more sinister angles to the small arms trade.
In North-east India, the gun business dovetails quite nicely with the drug business. Binalakshmi Nepram, a member of the International Action Network on Small Arms and author of a book on the topic, says that in her native Manipur, militant groups and some members of the Indian security forces are involved in the trade. One can get AKs and hand-grenades in those parts. Even in Shillong, a town far less troubled than Imphal, it is possible to get Chinese-made ‘5-star’ pistols for less than Rs 20,000.The exact number of small arms and light weapons in circulation is not known.
Estimates for the global total run at 500 million. The number of people killed with these weapons is uncertain, but would run into tens of thousands per year. Massacres like the recent one in Kashmir are all carried out using these weapons.India’s home ministry carried out a short-lived drive against illegal and illicit weapons after the UN conference, in June 2001. The drive saw 1,046 cases being registered. Only 30 people were eventually arrested.
Does the availability of these guns cause the deaths? Or would people have killed each other with sticks and stones if they had nothing else to do it with? The expert view is that it’s a bit of both. In other words, the means — and the motive — must both be dealt with to reduce violence. Anyway, eradicating the illicit trade in small arms may be easier than eradicating underlying causes of violence, like unemployment, ethnic tension or militant nation-building.
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