Politics of small arms.

Militarizing despair

The conference facilitator was going through the usual plenary ground rules. With an assembly of 300, interventions should be short, focused, and avoid repetition. The purpose of the gathering was to air grievances between the churches and the liberation army within territory in southern Sudan held by the Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M), so there was encouragement to be frank-albeit a frankness tempered by courtesy and a willingness to hear the complaints of others. To foster a climate of openness and to avoid intimidation, the facilitator ruled that no weapons would be allowed within the assembly hall, the "hall" in this case being the shade offered by a small stand of magnificently spreading mango trees. Around the perimeter of the mango grove, soldiers of the SPLA were on guard and equipped with an impressive array of small arms and light weapons-this was, after all, southern Sudan with the war in full swing less than 100 miles to the north near Juba.

As the facilitator was finishing up with his various instructions and announcements, a half-dozen young SPLA soldiers abruptly strode into the "hall," made their way directly in front of the speaker, the ubiquitous AK-47s slung over their shoulders, grenades dangling from their belts, and knives in sheaths strapped to their boots, and undertook an officious rearranging of chairs and tables to ready the scene for their commander-in-chief who was to arrive shortly to address the assembly.

So much for the mango grove weapons-free zone. With the right equipment over your shoulder and around your waist, you get to change the ground rules, and it doesn't much matter whether you are in Los Angeles, Karachi or Yei township in southern Sudan. Around the world, AK-47s and M-16s (respectively Russian and US design assault rifles) are rewriting the rules to tragic effect. At the Yei gathering, the impact of a surfeit of weapons in southern Sudan was reported in all its deadly detail. By the testimony of the locals, even after the war had at least temporarily been won in the SPLA-held areas the killing and harassment refused to end. Villagers told of brash young cadres, flushed with victory, unencumbered by discipline, and emboldened by guns and ammunition belts, entering their compounds and homes at will, demanding food, cattle and, not infrequently, young women. Killings, sometimes from the random shootings of young men showing off their prowess and exuberance, sometimes through deliberate retribution on the uncooperative, were a continuing reality. Sometimes, the gathering was told, the killings and harassment were more a case of young men out on their own, without homes or prospects, finding their only hope in those weapons now in abundant supply.

It is a story of the militarization of despair that resonates around the world. High jobless rates, idle young people desperate for access to the consumption cornucopia thrust in their faces by communications media that know no boundaries, and dealers only to happy to provide the weapons that in Soweto they call the blank cheque-because they pay on demand to the bearer any amount requested.

A gun for every occasion

These blank cheques come in a startling array of shapes and forms, categorized under the rather mundane dual heading of small arms and light weapons-military-style conventional weapons that can be carried by an individual or by a light vehicle. Small arms begin at the revolver end of the spectrum and extend to rifles and machine-guns. The quintessential problem weapon in the small arms crisis is the automatic rifle, of which the AK-47 is the archetype. Firing bursts of deadly rounds that represent an exponential expansion of destructive power over the ordinary sport rifle, they are nevertheless light and as easily operated by barefooted 14 year-olds in the bush as by hi-tech soldiers equipped with night vision technology and riding in million dollar armoured vehicles. They are durable, reliable and cheap. Of the 70 million Russian-design AK-47s produced to date in dozens of countries, most are still in operation. These and other automatic assault rifles are favoured by guerilla armies and increasingly find their way into the arsenals of crime syndicates and common street criminals. Light weapons refer to weapons used almost exclusively in a military context-portable anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns, portable missile launchers, grenades and grenade-launchers, and anti-personnel and anti-tank mines.

It ought to be less than surprising that the chronically marginalised, politically or personally, those driven to political desperation or domestic despair, should find in user-friendly weapons, if not actually hope, at least a kind of dark resolve-or, put another way, that guns significantly expand political and personal options. Parties to intractable political conflict, when they run out of options, don't usually give up. They turn to more dramatic means of gaining access to a credible political process. Former combatants in any of the dozens of recent wars, if they are not effectively reintegrated into post conflict societies, frequently turn to one of the few skills they can claim with confidence, the menacing operation of firearm technology.

The result in both instances is growing insecurity, communal and personal, and the acculturation of violence. In the extremes, states lose their monopoly on the use of force, in political and social contexts-a development invariably accompanied by the progressive privatization of security forces. A political and social climate of instability and insecurity sustains a demand for weapons that, in the final analysis, is accelerated simply by their availability-i.e., in political and social conflict availability advances the military option and expands the options of the disaffected and criminals alike.

As much as the demand persists, the supply is certainly plentiful. There are of course those who make the money-producers, brokers, dealers, corrupt officials-but small arms, in macro-economic terms, are not key to a successful military-industrial complex. For governments, supplying arms is more politics than economics. In the Cold War the super-powers used the supply of major arms, and small arms, to manage security conditions within and between their respective spheres of influence. In the post-Cold War world, virtually any state can use the supply of small arms to manipulate domestic and subregional political/security conditions.

Weakened governments sometimes find it expedient to supply arms to select groups of their own citizens. Communal groups may be armed to combat or discipline their traditional rivals, either because the latter have fallen out of favour with the government of the day or simply as a means of fostering chaos to keep opponents of the government divided and fighting among themselves. Such groups also use their state-supplied weapons for their own purposes, to pursue traditional practices such as cattle raiding or to manage relations with rival communal groups over access to land and resources-and, of course, the supply to one group generates new demand (and a market) in others. Political insurgent groups are often supplied by neighbouring states in destabilisation tactics related to regional dynamics and competition. Of course, insurgent groups also acquire arms from their own governments by theft and capture. Some of the supply becomes available due to a failure to disarm in post-conflict settings, with the inevitable result that surplus weapons find their way into economically depressed and socially unstable environments.

To ban or to regulate

The successful campaign to ban anti-personnel land-mines offers a tempting model for addressing the small arms and light weapons problem, but, as is frequently noted, the differences are considerable. Rifles, even automatic assault rifles, are not indiscriminate weapons. Nor are many military and political leaders likely to be convinced that assault rifles lack military utility. Some researchers are exploring the extent to which some small arms might be regarded as excessively injurious and inhumane in their effects, but in the end there are few practical, legal or political grounds for pursuing universal bans on particular groups or classes of small arms and light weapons. Foreseeable political attention will more likely focus on illegal trafficking, on legislation to restrict civilian access to military-type weapons-notably grenades and assault rifles-and on establishing norms against transfers of small arms to military and other law enforcement forces in states that do not conform to minimum human rights and other international standards.

The pressure to act is building. Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy, in the wake of his high-profile and well-received diplomatic offensive in support of the just signed landmines treaty, has repeatedly called for attention to small arms, which, he told the UN General Assembly this fall, are the weapons "that cause the greatest bloodshed today" ("rather than the weapons targeted by disarmament efforts"). At the Ottawa landmines treaty signing conference, International Committee of the Red Cross President Cornelio Sommarunga also called for a new focus of sustained international diplomatic attention on small arms.

Indeed, considerable attention has already been paid. During 1997 at least four new reports on international initiatives to address small arms became available: the Inter-American Convention Against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives and other Related Materials, the report of the UN Panel of Governmental Experts on Small Arms, the report of the UN (ECOSOC) Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, and the EU Programme for Preventing and Combatting Illicit Trafficking in Conventional Arms. While all of these initiatives have their particular contexts and emphases, it is possible to identify a number of prominent elements that can be taken as a nucleus of international agreement, both that small arms are contributing worldwide to political instability, human insecurity and humanitarian crises, and that there are concerted control actions available to the international community.

The first and most basic agreement that is developing is the recognition that there must be a clear distinction between the kinds of weapons that are legitimately available to military and law enforcement officers and those available to civilians. Just what that distinction should be, however, is less clear. The UN panel, for example, recommends such a distinction but offers no guidance on what it should be (some researchers promote establishing an international norm against civilian possession and use of assault rifles and hand grenades). The matter is further complicated by real concerns that the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate use of military-style small arms is not as simple as distinguishing between official and civilian use. In too many contexts official use of such weapons is far from legitimate-whether that be by undisciplined Canadian peacekeepers in Somalia, corrupt police in Colombia, or repressive Indonesian military forces in East Timor. Others therefore call for a complementary effort to strengthen international norms against the supply of small arms to military and law enforcement agencies in states with significant human rights violations.

Further reading and works consulted

Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy, speech to the United Nations General Assembly, September 25, 1997.

Bonn International Centre for Conversion, "Small Arms and Light Weapons: The Perpetuation of Conflicts," Conversion Survey 1997 (BICC, 1997), pp. 141-173.

Jeffrey Boutwell, Michael T. Klare, Laura W. Reed (eds.), Lethal Commerce: The Global Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Committee on International Security Studies, 1995), 159 pp.

EU Programme for Preventing and Combatting Illicit Trafficking in Conventional Arms.

Natalie J. Goldring, Overcoming Domestic Obstacles to Light Weapon Control (British American Security Information Council, Project on Light Weapons, April 1997), 27 pp.

Owen Greene, Tackling light weapons proliferation: Issues and priorities for the EU (Safeworld Report, April 1997), 30 pp.

Inter-American Convention Against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives and other Related Materials (Permanent Council of the Organization of American States, November 1997).

Edward J. Laurance, Small Arms and Light Weapons as a Development and Disarmament Issue: An Overview (presented to the Conference on Converting Defence Resources to Human Development, Bonn, November 1997), 18 pp.

Report of the UN Panel of Governmental Experts on Small Arms (UN Document A/52/298, August 27, 1997), 37 pp.

Report of the UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice.

Michael Renner, Small Arms, Big Impact: The Next Challenge of Disarmament (WorldWatch Paper 137, October 1997), 77 pp.

Jasjit Singh (ed.), Light Weapons and International Security (British American Security Information Council, Indian Pugwash Society, and Indian Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, 1995), 170 pp.

A second area of broad consensus is the need for adequate state-based licensing arrangements for all weapons, including sporting guns and others that are legitimately owned and used by civilians. In other words, all licit use of guns and weapons should be registered with a public authority, partly in order to facilitate implementation of the third emerging point of consensus, namely that all weapons should be marked (showing, for example, the year and place of manufacture, as well as current ownership) so that records can be maintained and each weapon's movement traced. A fourth widely agreed requirement is that all states establish regulations governing safe and secure storage of weapons, and provide training for their safe operation.

Fifth, the responsibility of states to establish and maintain effective controls over the export of weapons is also widely accepted. While the criteria for such controls are not universally agreed, there is braod recognition that states should apply the greatest constraint in the supply of any weapons to states in conflict and where human rights violations are common. In addition, in the case of small arms, states are understood to have a responsibility not to supply small arms to states which lack adequate provisions for licensing and regulating small arms and for preventing their diversion for illicit purposes. A related sixth feature of emerging international agreement is the need for a high degree of transparency in small arms management and control.

While export controls address the issue of new supplies, with researchers noting that controls on the supply of ammunition bear study and could be particularly important in reducing the impact of weapons that are already in circulation, perhaps the most urgent problem is to find ways of dealing with the more than 100 million small arms that are already out there. Hence, the seventh prominent feature of the currently emerging consensus on measures to control small arms is support for programs to collect and destroy surplus weapons. This measure is particularly urgent in immediate post-conflict situations. It is widely agreed that peacekeeping operations need to be given the necessary training, means and mandates to make disarmament a key element of post-conflict patrols. Amnesty programs and weapons buy-back schemes are also frequently mentioned, with the additional provision that collected weapons must actually be destroyed, not merely stored (with the attending risk of future use or unlawful diversion).

The eighth measure that finds wide agreement is the need to provide support to law enforcement efforts in states where the illicit use of weapons is most severe. Law enforcement training and technical support are frequently noted, and it will most certainly become necessary to include in training attention to the requirements of international humanitarian law and human rights standards.

The security and humanitarian problems related to small arms will not ultimately be solved by controlling supply and regulating use. To be effective, control measures must be but one element in a broad approach to building stable and sustainable societies with social, political and economic conditions that are conducive to a durable peace and which will result in reduced demand. The EU's term is "structural stability," defined "as a situation involving sustainable economic development, democracy and respect for human rights, viable political structures, and healthy social and environmental conditions, with the capacity to manage change without resort to violent conflict." And in addition to stable states, reduced demand will follow on regional structural stability which relies on institutions and habits of cooperative security, common approaches to limiting weapons imports, mutual respect for borders and norms against destabilisation tactics, and co-operation among regional law enforcement and customs officials.

Restoring the ground rules

A key requirement now is to build the political will to give effect to the slowly emerging consensus on how to confront the current and looming small arms crisis. Of course, much remains to be done to better understand the problem and to formulate credible responses, but the point is not that the international community does not know enough to act at all. More information and more research are required, not strictly to fill in significant knowledge gaps, but to contribute to the formation of political will-to generate a process of public debate and inquiry that builds greater awareness of the problem, highlights its security and humanitarian costs, explores new policy options, and creates further pressure to act.

Research and public debate on small arms will be most effective if they work out of the new peacebuilding paradigm. A humanitarian/development approach is suited to a landmines-type campaign calling for the elimination of a particular weapon on grounds of its general inhumanity and its being an impediment to development. A security/arms control response speaks to regulations, controls and verifiable agreements. A peacebuilding paradigm can include elements of both-it engages civil society in formulating policy options, it addresses and seeks to mitigate conditions that promote demand for weapons on a more immediate basis than do long-term development approaches, and it understands control measures as part of the effort to establish conditions conducive to stability and the emergence of a longer-term peace. The peacebuilding paradigm can see arms control measures as part of the process of contributing to a good governance capacity and to building an infrastructure that promotes participatory governance and transparency.

In short, it's about everyone playing by the same ground rules-not one set for the unarmed and quite another for the armed.

This article was prepared for and first published in New Routes: A Journal of Peace Research and Action, Volume 2, Number 4, 1997 (Life and Peace Institute, PO Box 1520, 751 45 Uppsala, Sweden, http://www.nordnet.se/lpi/).