DISARMAMENT-AFRICA: Nations Push for Small Arms Moratorium

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 9 1998 (IPS) - The increasing use of small arms to fuel conflicts throughout Africa is prompting the continent’s governments and the United Nations to seek a region-wide moratorium on weapons within the next few months.

Ivor Fung, an expert on disarmament and development projects at the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), told a panel here this week that African governments increasingly were aware that “there can be no development in an insecure environment.”

As a result, he said, West African governments intended to declare by July a three-year moratorium on the export, import and production of light weapons.

Fung said that the chances were “good” that most African nations would support the moratorium although, as he noted, “it is not binding, and is only a political measure.”

Still the push for a moratorium is another indication that African nations were taking seriously the threat to their societies posed by light arms. Fung and other experts contended that there were literally tens of millions of light weapons – rifles and machine guns – flooding Africa, making peace difficult in war-scarred societies from Mali to Mozambique.

The United Nations currently runs programmes to demobilise soldiers and buy back or destroy arms in many African states that have been through recent civil wars, such as Liberia, Angola and Mozambique. But as Fung noted about Liberia’s programme, “What has been collected so far is not even one-tenth of the weapons that have been proliferating.”

Although some U.N. peacekeeping efforts attempt to disarm former combatants, argued Michael Renner, a researcher for the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute, often “there was no mandate to disarm civilian populations…(so) often the weapons were stolen again.” In the end, Renner argued, the United Nations and other groups faced the same problem as the mythical Sisyphus, always having to push the same rock uphill to see it fall again.

In many developing countries, Renner said, “small arms have become a form of currency,” and end up being traded from war zone to war zone as different groups require them.

In some countries, like El Salvador and South Africa, he added, weapons formerly used by combatants have been acquired by criminal elements, while fighters in other countries have sold their weapons to a new batch of combatants – with Rwandan light arms ending up in Burundi, or Angola’s and Mozambique’s weapons stocks entering South Africa.

At the same time, argued Joost Hiltermann, director of the Human Rights Watch Arms Project, it is wrong to believe that trying to cut off weapons transfers is futile because regions like Africa are already awash in arms.

“The influx of weapons itself emboldens the recipients of weapons,” he said, since it helps to imply political support for the combatants. In addition, contended Hiltermann, ever more lethal and sophisticated weapons stocks are moving into the developing world, encouraging dissatisfied parties to turn to violence all the more readily.

Some recent developments, Hiltermann warned, may in fact result in an even greater weapons traffic into Africa and other hot spots.

Chief among them is the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) defense pact to encompass Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Those three countries, he contended, would have to upgrade their weapons stocks to participate in NATO arrangements – and their old arsenals could end up in Central Africa, the Balkans or other major centres of weapons commerces.

“These are very sophisticated weapons, and they’re going to wreak real havoc,” he argued.

At the same time, there are some signs that African governments are concerned about the ruinous effects that small arms traffic has had on their societies.

In Mali, where the government of President Alpha Konare recently held a symbolic conflagration of a few thousand light weapons, officials were aware that civil disturbances resulted in the freezing of some 200 million dollars intended for development aid, Fung noted. Nations like Angola and Mozambique have struggled to rebuild themselves under the constant threat that the proliferation of small arms could fuel renewed civil war.

Last month, in one symbolic step against Africa’s arms traffic, 13 retired generals and admirals around the world met in Arusha, Tanzania, to discuss peace and security in Africa and to sign an agreement pledging to “search for the peaceful settlement of disputes.”

Equally significant, the United Nations had been prompted since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda to investigate how some of its arms embargoes were enforced.

In one case, Hiltermann noted, a South African arms dealer, a major French bank and the government of the Seychelles were all cited in a complex transaction by which Rwandan Hutu militias camped in the former Zaire received small arms shipments – embarrassing France, the main ally of the former Rwandan government.

“What works is not laws and embargoes as such…but embarrassment,” Hiltermann said.