DISARMAMENT: U.N. Admits Failure to Curb Conventional Arms

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 2 1995 (IPS) - The United Nations admits it has failed to curb the spread of conventional arms worldwide.

Under-Secretary-General Marrack Goulding says there has been little or no progress in halting the proliferation of these traditional weapons of warfare. The conventional weapons most commonly deployed in current military conflicts include mortars, grenade launchers, light arms and anti-personnel landmines.

“Those are the weapons destablising societies, killing people everyday, and making a mockery of the new world order,” Goulding told delegates here this week. The impact of conventional weapons is devastating because they are “cheap, easy to produce, and difficult to control.”

The military conflicts in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, Liberia, Somalia, and Sierra Leone are being fought with conventional weapons as against weapons of mass destruction (WMD) — nuclear, biological and chemical arms.

Goulding said that although the greatest beneficiaries of the improved state of international relations in the post-Cold War era were the more developed parts of the world, a glaring exception was the “appalling conflicts” in the former Yugoslavia.

“The savagery of those conflicts underline the fact that progress in tackling the problems created by weapons of mass destruction have not been matched by progress in controlling conventional weapons, including light weapons which contributed to the destabilisation of states and the destruction of the very fabric of their societies,” he added.

U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has described landmines — one of the deadliest of the conventional weapons — as “a slow motion weapon of mass destruction” because over a long period of time, they kill or maim a large number of people, mostly civilians.

But despite the Secretary-General’s plea for a total ban on the production and sale of landmines, a U.N. Review Conference in Vienna last month failed to curb the spread of these weapons.

“It is especially disappointing that so little progress has been made on anti-personnel landmines, even amid the rapidly growing conviction worldwide that the suffering of so many innocent civilians is simply not justified by any military value those weapons might have,” Goulding said.

Indian Prime Minister Narasimha Rao told the Non-Aligned summit in Colombia last month the proliferation of small arms “has been largely responsible for sustaining terrorist movements and most of the ethnic conflicts as we see today.”

He said it was paramount that “through consultation and cooperation, we introduce greater transparency and accountability in the manufacture and transfer of such weapons.”

But Ambassador Pak Gil Yon of North Korea argues that Western expressions of concern over the potentially destabilising effect of conventional weapons “are simply an attempt to distract the attention of the world from nuclear weapons.”

The United Nations has also failed in its efforts to convince all of the 185 member-states to voluntarily declare their arms transactions in the United Nations’ annual Register of Conventional Arms.

After three years of cajoling, only 84 of the 185 member-states have volunteered to go public with their sales figures this year. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Iran, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates — described as some of the world’s major arms buyers — have refused to participate in the annual exercise.

Boutros-Ghali has also urged that the Arms Register be developed on a regional basis so that it can become an instrument to build confidence and control the spread of weapons in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Secretary-General has said the United Nations is not doing enough to curb the proliferation of small arms responsible for most of the deaths in the current ethnic conflicts in Asia, Africa, and Europe.

“The world is awash with them and traffic in them is very difficult to monitor, let alone intercept,” he said.

Boutros-Ghali has proposed that the Arms Register be expanded to include the imports and exports of small arms such as handguns, rifles, machine guns, mortars, rocket launchers and anti-personnel landmines.

“It is essential that the Register be developed into a universal and non-discriminatory mechanism,” he said.

The Register currently records arms imports and exports in seven categories: battle tanks, armored combat vehicles, large calibre artillery systems, fighter aircraft, attack helicopters, warships, and missiles and missile launchers.

Goulding told U.N. delegates recently the United Nations may also be forced to close down three regional U.N. Centres for Peace, Disarmament and Development for lack of financial support.

The closure of these centres in Togo, Peru and Nepal would be a blow to U.N. plans for regional disarmament, he said. Goulding added that in contrast to the failure to curb light weapons, the United Nations had been successful in extending the nuclear non- proliferation treaty (NPT).

He said that recent events had strengthened his view that the nuclear-weapons states’ commitment to agreeing to a comprehensive test-ban treaty must be honoured by 1996.

DISARMAMENT: U.N. Admits Failure to Curb Conventional Arms

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 2 1995 (IPS) - The United Nations admits it has failed to curb the spread of conventional arms worldwide.
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