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SPECIAL REPORT: Small Arms Feeding Big Conflicts

Miren Gutierrez*

ROME, Feb 10 2004 (IPS) - A conviction for selling weapons to left-wing guerrillas in Colombia could mean 20 years in prison for Vladimiro Montesinos, who was right-hand man of former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori.

Montesinos’s men posing as Peruvian military representatives had agreed delivery of 50,000 Soviet-era Kalashnikov rifles from Jordan, according to the charges in court. About 10,000 of these were reportedly parachuted onto Colombian territory controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 1999.

A fundamental question in the trial is to determine whether this was a legal government to government sale, as Jordanian authorities maintain.

Montesinos who was then de facto boss of the intelligence service denies involvement. He says on the contrary that he discovered the plot to arm the Colombian rebels and caught the criminals.

Intermittent conflict between left-wing guerrilla groups and the Colombian armed forces has continued for the last 40 years. Increasingly, right-wing paramilitary groups often made up of retired armed forces personnel have entered the conflict to take on the guerrillas. About 35,000 civilians have lost their lives in the conflict since 1990.

The Colombian conflict like others has needed an increased supply of weapons on all sides. The demand for weapons has risen since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and proliferation of small arms is out of control, Amnesty International says in a report ‘Shattered Lives’.

The ‘war on terror’ should have stopped arms falling into the wrong hands, Amnesty says. 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,” it says. “Despite the damage that they cause, there is still no binding, comprehensive, international law to control the export of conventional arms.”

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 U.S. weapons,” Joel Wallman from the New York-based institute researching violence, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation told IPS in a written interview. Often these weapons become “the tools with which they manage suppression of political activity within their own countries.”

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 (ICIJ) in 2002.

Additionally, the military downsizing 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.

Amnesty research 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 around 21 billion dollars 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 are the weapons of choice in 90 percent of conflicts, Amnesty says.

“Many local wars have increased in intensity and duration because of the availability of firearms, often spillovers 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.

New Conflicts

Several long-term conflicts ended last year, but just as many new conflicts started.

The 2003 Armed Conflicts Report of Project Ploughshares, a peace centre set up by the Canadian Council of Churches, is due in June. “In 2002 we listed 37 conflicts in 29 countries,” director of the centre Ernie Regehr told IPS in an email interview. The total number of conflicts last year is expected to be about the same.

The most recent 2002 report shows a large number of conflicts in Africa. The list shows government forces fighting the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in Algeria since 1991, and the Sudanese government struggling against the People’s Liberation Army since 1983. Fighting between the government and rival clans in Somalia has gone on since 1991. The regime in the Democratic Republic of Congo has fought Rwanda, Uganda and indigenous rebels since 1991. The Liberian government has fought the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), and in Uganda government forces have been confronting the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) since 1986.

Conflicts in Rwanda, Guinea, Iran, and Indonesia were dormant last year, and will be removed from the new list. But new ones emerged in Cote d’Ivoire and in Thailand.

On the face of it the border clash between Ethiopia and Eritrea ended, as did the conflict in Sierra Leone. Rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Sudan signed a peace agreement. Liberia’s warmongering former president Charles Taylor was forced into exile. But some conflicts may only be dormant, not over.

In Sierra Leone “history is being revised to present the RUF (Revolutionary United Front) as completely depraved, terrorists, and to minimise the more political aspects of the war,” says Colvard. “Lots of young men with military experience are at odds without anything to do and many people in the country are still living disrupted lives as refugees, particularly women and children.”

A ‘special court’ headed by a prosecutor David Crane is “bent on punishment at all costs, and not the rebuilding of society,” Colvard says. “The TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) is thought to be relatively ineffective. The war could re-emerge.”

The TRC for Sierra Leone was created by the Lomé Peace Agreement in 1999. The mandate of the Commission is to create historical record of violations of human rights. The Special Court was established in 2002.

The RUF, sponsored by Charles Taylor, was seeking to topple the government of Sierra Leone and to retain control of the lucrative diamond-producing regions of the country. The conflict claimed some 75,000 lives.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo rebel leaders have joined a provisional government after some three million deaths between 1998 and 2003. The invaders have mostly pulled out, and elections are due soon. But in the east of the country, dozens of micro-wars go on unrestrained.

Peace talks in Somalia are making progress but “the threat of major reversals is always present,” says Regehr.

The Project Ploughshares report will continue to list Angola because a latent conflict in Cabinda went up in flames again. The Front for the Liberation of the Cabinda Enclave (FLEC) wants the area to be recognised as an independent state. The Angolan government regards the province divided from the rest of Angola by a strip of the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of its territory. The region was ‘added’ to Angola by the Portuguese.

“It is quite possible that Angolan violence has again reached the level that it will be once more counted as an armed conflict,” says Regehr.

New conflicts have surfaced in Sudan and Ethiopia. Internal fighting is growing within Ethiopia in addition to the conflict with Eritrea. This will be listed as a new armed conflict. “The same is true for Cote d’Ivoire,” says Regehr. “A new armed conflict has emerged in the Darfur region of Sudan, and so on.”

Fighting often flares up and then subsides, he says. “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 it institutions.”

The Ploughshares report finds that “as in other recent years, almost all current wars are internal civil wars” with the Eritrea-Ethiopia war and the war on Iraq as exceptions.

“In some instances…other countries are involved, but those are cases of foreign troops becoming involved in a local civil war,” says Regehr. “The Kashmir conflict (India versus Kashmiri separatist groups) is sometimes seen as an India/Pakistan war, but we have characterised it as an Indian civil war in which one of the parties gets support from Pakistan.”

War and Underdevelopment

Is the proliferation of arms the only reason for this deadlock?

Of the 40 wars 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 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.

*Miren Gutierrez is IPS Editor in Chief.