DISARMAMENT: U.N. to Help Albania Retrieve Stolen Weapons

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 14 1998 (IPS) - The United Nations plans to help the government of Albania recover some 650,000 small arms weapons and artillery pieces which have fallen into the hands of the country’s civilian population.

Jayantha Dhanapala, Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs, says that the United Nations and the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) will begin a joint pilot project for arms collection in August.

Under the is project, the collection of weapons will be linked to development programmes in the politically-troubled country. Most of the arms were taken away by Albanians who lost their savings, livestock and homes to buy shares in a failed financial scheme which promised huge returns on their investments.

Dhanapala, who last month led a five-member U.N. evaluation mission to Albania, told reporters the actual collection of arms is being seen as one part of a process which will also provide gainful employment to those who surrender their weapons.

The pilot project will have a five-fold strategy: symbolism; advocacy; community involvement and reward; voluntery surrender; and public destruction of weapons, including ammunition.

The lost weapons include 351,000 rifles, 25,000 machine guns, 226,000 assault rifles, 2,450 grenade launchers and some 1.5 million rounds of small arms ammunition and artillery shells and one million anti-tank mines.

The weapons, mostly of Albanian, Chinese, Italian, Russian and Yugoslav origin, were taken from military depots across the country during an internal unrest in Albania in early 1997. Since an August 1997 amnesty, however, the Albanian government claims to have retrieved about 10 percent of the weapons and about three percent of the ammunition.

The five-member team, which went to Albania on the invitation of the government, has made a series of recommendations in a report released here.

“A nationwide programme of weapons collection from the civilian population in Albania can only be conceived in the context of a continuation of the process of democratisation, better economic climate and greater public confidence in the institutions responsible for the maintenance and enforcement of law and order in the country,” the report said.

The civilian motivations for holding onto these weapons vary: from self-defence to possible use as currency in exchange for reward. The average age of civilians in possession of stolen weapons is between 17 to 55 years, nearly 25 percent to 30 percent of whom are unemployed.

The report says that since the number of weapons in question is so large by any estimate, cash incentives or buy-back schemes would have an inflationary impact beside sending out the wrong message to those who may consider unauthorised weapon possession as a lucrative activity.

“While community based incentives in the form of development projects would be doubly rewarding in promoting both disarmament and development, they should be seen as addition to and not detracting from the resources otherwise allocated to the economic development of Albania,” the report added.

The U.N. mission also has pointed out that, in view of the relatively low incidence of petty criminality and violence committed by the civilian population in possession of unauthorised weapons, the programme should pursue its goal through encouragement or voluntary surrender.

The evolving situation in Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians are in confrontation with the Serbian authorities, is widely seen in Albania as a trigger for some Albanian nationals either to supply weaponry, or find a common cause with their ethnic kin across the frontier, the report noted.

“The Albanian government seems inclined to view the developments in Kosovo as an additional reason to retrieve weapons from the civilian population,” it added.

The U.N. mission also said that to assure those who are concerned that the retreived weapons may be held back by the government to be used for its own purposes, the government has committed itself to destroying most of the weapons it collects partly because it believes that these are outmoded and unsuited for a modernised national security apparatus.

The United Nations has been involved in some earlier weapons collection programmes in countries such as Angola, Cambodia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Mali, Mozambique, Nicaragua and Somalia.