Just as anti-communist ideology could once give a country access to Western weapons, ”now a professed allegiance to the ‘war on terror’ is a good strategy for regimes to acquire weapons from the United States”, says Joel Wallman from the New York-based Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, an institute that researches violence.
Often these weapons become ”the tools with which they manage suppression of political activity within their own countries”.
The ”war on terror” should have stopped arms falling into the wrong hands, says human rights organisation Amnesty International. Instead ”some suppliers have relaxed their controls in order to arm new-found allies against ‘terrorism’, irrespective of their disregard for international human rights and humanitarian law”, warns the organisation. ”Despite the damage that they cause, there is still no binding, comprehensive, international law to control the export of conventional arms.”
The superpower ideological divide that ”once gave a strange sort of order to the world’s wars” has been replaced by ”entrepreneurs selling arms or military expertise and support”, says Phillip van Niekerk in the report Making a Killing: The Business of War, published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 2002.
Additionally, the military down-sizing that followed the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union ”flooded the market with surplus arms and trained soldiers looking for a job”, he says in the report.
Research by Amnesty International has identified 1 135 companies manufacturing small arms and ammunition in at least 98 countries. These numbers are increasing: between 1960 and 1999 the number of countries producing small arms doubled. The number of companies manufacturing small arms rose six-fold during this period, it says. Authorised arms sales are worth about $21-billion a year.
Small arms are weapons intended for personal use. They include revolvers and pistols, rifles and carbines, sub-machine guns, assault rifles and light machine guns. At least 550-million light arms are in circulation around the world and they are the weapons of choice in 90% of conflicts, Amnesty says.
”Many local wars have increased in intensity and duration because of the availability of firearms, often spill-overs from other local wars or wars across borders,” says Karen Colvard from the Guggenheim foundation.
”One such circumstance is the transformation of traditional patterns of cattle raiding among the Karamajong in north-eastern Uganda,” says Colvard following a visit to Uganda. ”What they used to accomplish with spears is much more deadly with guns obtained from Sudanese combatants and elsewhere.”
Not all armed conflicts are fed directly by the growth in the manufacture of small weapons. A significant number of available weapons are recycled surpluses from other wars that are acquired legally, and disappear illegally.
The 2003 Armed Conflicts Report of Project Ploughshares, a peace centre set up by the Canadian Council of Churches, is due in June this year. ”In 2002 we listed 37 conflicts in 29 countries,” says centre director Ernie Regehr.
The 2002 report shows a large number of conflicts in Africa. And, it warns that even where peace agreements have been signed, like in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Sudan, the conflicts may only be dormant, not over.
Fighting often flares up and then subsides, says Regehr. ”Sometimes flare-ups are linked to the acquisition of new shipments of arms or ammunition, sometimes it is simply a question of tactics,” he says. ”Sporadic conflict keeps authority off balance and gradually undermines public confidence in the government and its institutions.”
The Ploughshares report finds that ”as in other recent years, almost all current wars are internal civil wars”.
Of the 40 wars occurring globally in 1999, most were in countries in the bottom half of the United Nations human development index. The Project Ploughshares report says poor countries are three times as likely to go through a war as rich ones. ”It is clear that armed conflicts are more likely to emerge in societies in which significant sections of the populations have deep and ongoing grievances and where access to small arms is readily facilitated,” says Regehr. ”But it of course does not follow that all such circumstances inevitably lead to armed conflict.”
One way to break the circle of violence is to ”build the kinds of conditions that are less likely to lead to chronic grievances and to violence,” says Regehr. This would include restrictions on availability of arms, he says.
”The debate is already significantly under way,” he says. ”Certain supplier groups and regions are increasingly trying to develop common standards, and the UN programme of action on small arms agreed in principle that arms transfers should be restricted by existing obligations under international law.”
The UN International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) says ”there is an urgent need for an international arms trade treaty that sets out common core principles to regulate and control international transfers of arms”.
Its proposals include international cooperation to control illicit trade (controlling brokers, eliminating false end-user certificates), greater transparency in arms trading, marking of weapons and destruction of weapons in post-conflict situations.
IANSA, Amnesty and Oxfam are campaigning for a treaty that would restrict transfer of arms. But ”unless such laws are enforceable, they are useless”, says Colvard. — IPS