SMALL ARMS ARE THE REAL WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

By Mark Sommer and - - Reprint | | Print |

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ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Apr 4 2007 (IPS) - While a nervous world focuses on putative terrorist threats and nuclear strikes from Iran and North Korea, small arms are killing far more people than all the bombs and missiles in national arsenals, writes Mark Sommer, host of the internationally-syndicated radio programme, A World of Possibilities . In this article, Sommer writes that small arms are the real weapons of mass destruction and are undermining the stability and security of whole societies in the process. A prime contributor to the phenomenon of failed states, small arms are a pre-eminent threat to global security and public health. Yet uprooting the virus of small arms trafficking will be dauntingly difficult precisely because they are cheap, easy to fire and conceal, and everywhere available. Unlike landmines, they move readily from hand to hand and can be aimed at any target for any purpose. Efforts to track and curtail the trade have long been thwarted by well-organised private gun lobbies and powerful nations that make use of small arms to fuel counterinsurgencies or proxy wars. After years of ignoring the problem, the UN General Assembly recently launched an effort to enact a treaty that would regulate trade in small arms. Yet many governments, including that of the United States, are reluctant to allow the enactment of a regime that would constrain their ability to freely distribute them. Not until the global public demands the imposition of constraints on the small arms trade will governments rein it in, albeit reluctantly. And not until that public fully realises that small arms in the wrong hands are the ultimate terror weapon will we give this public health pandemic the priority it deserves.

Small arms are the real weapons of mass destruction and are undermining the stability and security of whole societies in the process. The global gun trade, ranging from official transactions to illicit and grey markets for small arms and light weapons of every kind, has become a coercive and intimidating force in both political and personal relations, between rival groups as between the sexes, in failed or failing states in Africa and lawless neighborhoods of Latin American and Asian cities. Not least of all, the toxic mix of guns and drugs on the mean streets of some American inner cities leaves many residents cowering in their apartments under a self-imposed curfew.

In unstable societies like Liberia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, as in Palestine and Iraq, the widespread availability of AK-47s has greatly exacerbated the lethality of political and ethnic conflicts. On the streets of Kinshasa, you can pick up a knock-off Kalashnikov for as little as 30 dollars. In the hands of child soldiers so young that by all rights they should be playing with squirt guns, wielding a military assault rifle provides an initial illusion of omnipotence and invulnerability but in reality produce mayhem and self-destruction.

Ninety percent or more of the deaths in wars today occur among civilians who have no stake in the quarrel. A hundred million Kalashnikovs flow through the global bloodstream, toted not only or even primarily by soldiers but by thieves, thugs, men trying to prove their manhood or children abducted and pressed into service to warlords. Among some desperate subcultures, the AK-47 has taken on an almost mythic status. Young boys are nicknamed ”Kalash” and Hezbollah’s flag features a Kalashnikov.

The insurgent’s weapon of choice, the AK-47, was first developed for a far different purpose. Designed by the Soviet Army for use against the Nazis, the design wasn’t finished until the war’s end. During the cold war the Soviet Union exported Kalashnikovs to its Eastern European allies. After the collapse of the Eastern bloc, these small arms stockpiles began to leak into zones of conflict from the Balkans to Central Africa, showing up in places like Rwanda, where they complemented the machetes that slaughtered 900,000 civilians between April and July of 1994. Now the AK-47 has become the killing machine of choice for warlords, rebel leaders and even some governments around the world. Replicas of the original are now being produced in some sixty countries, the best of them in Russia and China.

The amoral nature of the small arms trade is best demonstrated in the tale of Russian weapons broker Victor Bout, a young post-Soviet entrepreneur. Bout gained notoriety in the past decade for operating a highly-profitable business shuttling small arms around the world on a fleet of sixty former Soviet transport planes, often accompanied by fresh flowers, disaster relief supplies, and even UN peacekeepers. The redoubtable Bout so consistently undersold his competitors that even after the UN caught on to his gun-running ways, it continued to utilise his services when others were either unavailable or unaffordable. Bout’s success in weaving seamlessly between licit and illicit worlds and his tacit protection by Russian authorities demonstrate how hard it is to curtail a trade that is so intimately woven into both legitimate business transactions and the undercover operations of national intelligence and security operations.

Even when small arms aren’t actually fired, they wreak havoc on women and children when wielded by men who use them to impose their will. Police in countries with weak central authority find themselves outgunned in urban jungles where every man who can packs heat. Small arms undermine the rule of law and the patience to resolve conflicts by means other than violence. A prime contributor to the phenomenon of failed states, small arms are a pre-eminent threat to global security and public health.

Yet uprooting the virus of small arms trafficking will be dauntingly difficult precisely because they are cheap, easy to fire and conceal, and everywhere available. Unlike landmines, they move readily from hand to hand and can be aimed at any target for any purpose. Efforts to track and curtail the trade have long been thwarted by well-organised private gun lobbies and powerful nations that make use of small arms to fuel counterinsurgencies or proxy wars.

After years of ignoring the problem, the UN General Assembly recently launched an effort to enact a treaty that would regulate trade in small arms. Yet despite their destructiveness, many governments, including that of the United States, are reluctant to allow the enactment of a regime that would constrain their ability to freely distribute them. Not until the global public demands the imposition of constraints on the small arms trade will governments rein it in, albeit reluctantly. And not until that public fully realises that small arms in the wrong hands are the ultimate terror weapon will we give this public health pandemic the priority it deserves. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)