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Small Arms, Violence, and War Crimes - UN Security Council - Global Policy Forum Small Arms, Violence, and War Crimes
All Africa
July 18, 2001Two events have dominated the international news sections of British newspapers for the past two weeks: the trial of Milosevic at the Hague for war crimes and this week's UN conference on small arms. None, however, have made the connection between the two, but in fact they are closely related: the crimes for which Milosevic is standing trial were committed, and probably could only be committed, by small arms (the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two of the most dramatic examples of crimes against humanity since they involved the deliberate targeting of civilians, was clearly freakish in the annals of warfare).
Small arms are defined as weapons that can be handled and used by one person, which the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan listed as "revolvers and rifles, machine guns and mortars, hand grenades, anti-tank guns and portable missiles launchers." Probably by coincidence, the UN conference was heralded by the dramatic arrest of one of the most notorious traffickers of small arms, a Ukranian named Leonin Minin, by the Italian police. According to UN investigators, the British government and Italian police, Minin is part of an international arms-smuggling ring involving Russian organised crime; not surprisingly, when police raided the modest two-bedroom apartment he was living in, they found Minin, who had been making more than $160 million dollars a year from his nefarious trade, with nearly $500,000 worth of diamonds, cocaine and photographs of a variety of weapons. Or so London's Sunday Times reported. It was a dramatic scoop, and for the bloody crises in West Africa, a very positive development.
For Minin is also a business partner and confidant of Liberia's disastrous President Charles Taylor, who is so central to the crises. According to UN investigators, in late 1998 Minin ferried 10,500 Kalashnikov rifles to Burkina Faso; most of the weapons were in turn flown to the RUF in Makeni and Kono. Shortly after, the RUF launched the offensive that led to the killing of over 700 Nigerian troops, the near-destruction of Freetown and the killing of 6,000 of the city's residents. That was in January 1999. And that is the perfect definition of war crimes.
Strange to say, however, not everyone accepts the connection between arms and violence, and this 'ideological' stupidity, principally advanced by (who else?) Americans, finally led to the defeat of the global effort to regulate the trade in small arms at the UN. The UN proposals were modest. They called for a universal criteria for small arms exports, for marking and tracing weaponry, and for programmes to advance the management and destruction of stockpiles.
The US--backed by Russia, China and India, all producing nations driven by the profit motive---vetoed the proposals; significantly, the US delegate who vetoed the proposals was accompanied by a board member of the notorious National Rifle Association (NRA), the powerful gun lobby group which argues that guns don't kill people, only people do. (I have heard a slightly different version of this argument, in New York, at a seminar on the Sierra Leone war organised by the United Methodist Church: after a colleague and I gave a talk on the links between diamonds, small arms and the conflict in Sierra Leone, a well-dressed gentleman with a drawling voice objected with the argument that diamonds don't kill people, only weapons do!) The US has half the world's gunmakers, a $1.2 billion share of the $6 billion trade in small arms and 250 million of the world's 550 million firearms. The income derived from weapons is certainly insubstantial in American terms, and the real problem, as the New York Times argued, is the objections of the NRA and George Bush's "political pandering" to them. To say this is unfortunate is to understate the case: small arms are implicated (Annan's word) in 1,300 deaths a day, including teenage murders in the US; and the annual cost of small-arms related violence in Latin America alone has been estimated at $170 billion.
Britain's Guardian newspaper has been carrying a series on the issue, and has been reminding Tony Blair's government that smuggled small arms in Sierra Leone pose a grave threat to British troops there. And so this week the government set aside 19.5 million towards arms stockpile reduction, a decision the Guardian, which warns that "George Bush's recalcitrance does not absolve more responsible governments, including our own, from doing more now to stem this vile trade," hailed as "a step in the right direction." It certainly is, and it is surely one self-interested action that is of absolute merit.
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