As the 2006 Small-Arms Survey was being circulated at the United Nations on Monday, Secretary General Kofi Annan accepted a photo petition from one million people worldwide calling for tougher controls over the global arms trade.
The simultaneous circulation of the survey, by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies, and the Million Faces Petition was not a coincidence. This week marked the start of the two-week Small Arms Review Conference aimed at evaluating progress since governments agreed on a programme of action to prevent, combat and eradicate the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons.
The Million Faces Petition symbolised the number of people killed by guns since the programme of action was launched at the last UN small-arms conference in 2001.
“In a world awash with small arms, a quarter of the estimated $4-billion annual global gun trade is believed to be illicit,” said Annan. “Their continued proliferation exacerbates conflicts, sparks refugee flows, undermines the rule of law and spawns a culture of violence and impunity.”
The survey says there are an estimated 200-million modern firearms owned by government armed forces worldwide, but only 16Â 360Â 000, or 8%, have been formally acknowledged. The AK-47 represents the largest portion of the global inventory of military firearms, accounting for a total production of 70-million to 100-million since 1947.
The United States is by far the biggest official importer and exporter of small arms and light weapons, exporting $370-million-worth of small arms in 2003 and importing $623-million-worth.
However, underreporting by governments is prevalent, the survey adds. For example, while official Russian exports were low, at about $40-million, the country does not report many of its exports, and the survey estimated its total small-arms and light-weapons exports for 2003 at $431,8-million.
Of the 26 leading small-arms- and light-weapons-exporting countries detailed in the survey, the US is the number-one recipient of the exports of 20 countries.
The 2006 small-arms trade “transparency barometer” lists the major exporters of small arms and light weapons and rates their overall performance in providing timely and comprehensive reports and customs data to the UN Commodity Trade Statistics Database (Comtrade).
The US and Germany received the highest scores — 20,5 and 19, respectively, out of a possible 25.
On the other hand, North Korea, Israel and Iran all scored zeros, failing to provide any export reports or customs data to UN Comtrade.
Some countries, according to the survey, keep their export and import information classified. The export data on Iran, for example, had to be compiled by looking at the UN Comtrade reports of transparent countries that imported from Iran.
“The entire global arms trade is not sufficiently regulated,” said Anthea Lawson, a spokesperson for the International Action Network on Small Arms.
“As in previous years, there are some exporters, presumed to be important in the authorised small-arms and light-weapons trade, about which relatively little is known,” the survey states. “These include Bulgaria, China, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, the Russian Federation and Singapore. Finding information on the small-arms and light-weight weapons exports of these countries is often very difficult.”
Therein lies a major challenge to the 2001 programme of action, according to some experts who say that preventing and eradicating the illicit small-arms and light-weapons trade will be impossible if some countries insist on maintaining secret export and import records.
Moreover, even where the trade is dominated by rogue arms dealers and corrupt groups, and not the governments themselves, experts argue that individual governments would be better off maintaining a traceable record of small-arms imports and exports.
“Unfortunately, there is no international transparency requirement by which countries must abide,” said Rachel Stohl, a senior analyst at the Centre for Defence Information. “We need to have some kind of transparency regime that will ultimately identify countries that violate UN arms embargoes or even track weapons that are used to violate human rights.”
“Good proposals have been put on the table by NGOs, but governments have not made any real effort to enforce them,” said James Paul, executive director of the Global Policy Forum, an organisation that monitors policy-making at the UN.
Last June, the Open-Ended Working Group on Tracing Illicit Small Arms and Light Weapons (Oweg) successfully negotiated the “International Tracing Instrument”, which was adopted by the General Assembly in December 2005. The fundamental principle of the tracing instrument is to promote international standards for the marking and tracing of all small arms and light weapons.
The instrument “represents a modest, but important, step forward in global efforts to address the small-arms problem”, according to the survey.
However, staunch opposition, led by the US, to the tracing instrument’s adoption as a legal document, as opposed to a political one, delivered a major blow to its overall effectiveness and efforts to trace the origins of illicit small arms and light weapons accurately, according to some experts.
“The tracing instrument is important for marking and tracing of weapons used in committing and atrocities and criminal actions,” noted Lawson.
The US, Egypt, Israel, and Japan all opposed a legally binding tracing instrument, while the European Union member states, the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, and the countries of sub-Saharan Africa all preferred a legal document. Those countries argued that the instrument had to be legal in order for the document to be enforced, and that governments needed a legally binding document to amend national laws accordingly, according to the survey.
“Legally binding documents usually have a little more force behind them than political documents, which rarely have punitive or enforcement measures,” Stohl said. “The US has consistently opposed any document to which it would be legally obligated.”
Paul agreed. “There is a very broad ideological opposition in Washington to measures that would strengthen multilateralism,” he said. “The current government is supported by a conservative coalition that has made it a point to oppose restrictions of arms within the US. They take that same attitude they have within the borders and apply it internationally.”
Paul said that proper regulation and tracing of small arms is not impossible. He likened the steps that could be taken to solve the lingering problem of illicit arms sales to the Kimberly Process, a joint-government international certification process that regulates the trade of diamonds in rebel-held, conflict areas. — IPS