Small arms diffusion and armed conflict

There are probably more than 500 million military-style small arms in the world. In the more than three dozen current wars, 90 percent of killings are by small arms, and, by some estimates, in the past decade alone they have caused more than 3 million deaths (or almost 6,000 per week). In addition to direct personal death and injury, international peace and stability are undermined, political conflicts in individual states are transformed into armed conflicts, and communities within states are weaponized, their social and economic conflicts escalating out of control. Natural resources are destroyed as populations, forced to flee their homes, eat or burn whatever they can find, producing a social instability that makes protecting the environment essentially impossible.

Some estimates suggest that the illegal trade in small arms and light weapons accounts for one-half of all global light weapons transfers - the most startling implication being that at least half of the devastation, injury, armed conflict, and environmental degradation left in the wake of the continuing worldwide diffusion of small arms is the product of deliberate, legal, government-sanctioned weapons production and trade.

[Sidebar 1: Consider some of the weapons in the arsenal of the Tamil Tigers, the guerrilla army waging a bloody war for an independent state on the tiny island nation of Sri Lanka: surface-to-air missiles from Cambodia, assault rifles from Afghanistan, mortar shells from the former Yugoslavia and Zimbabwe, and 60 tons of explosives from Ukraine. Tamil Tigers have bought arms from dealers in Hong Kong, Singapore, Lebanon and Cyprus; from corrupt military officers in Thailand and Burma, and directly from governments, including Ukraine, Bulgaria and North Korea.]

The political economy of supply

In the Cold War the superpowers used the supply of major arms, and small arms, to manage security conditions within and between their respective spheres or influence. In the post-Cold War world, virtually any state can use the supply of small arms to attempt to manipulate domestic and subregional political/security conditions.

Weakened governments sometimes even 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. 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.

[Sidebar 2: In April Indian troops recovered a large haul of weapons and explosives from a remote region in the Kashmir valley. The haul included two missiles, 137 anti-tank mines, 117 rockets, two mortars, 233 grenades, 20 remote control devices and 13,000 rounds of ammunition. India accuses Pakistan of stoking insurgency in the Himalayan region. Islamabad says it only offers moral and diplomatic support to the rebels. More than 25,000 people have died in the restive Himalayan region since 1990.]

The roots of demand

The chronically marginalised, politically or personally, those driven to political desperation or domestic despair, find in user-friendly weapons significantly expanded political and personal options. When parties to intractable political conflict run out of options, they don't just give up, instead, 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 is growing insecurity, communal and personal, and the acculturation of violence - and growing demand for guns. In the extremes, states lose their monopoly on the use of force (a development invariably accompanied by the progressive privatization of security forces - another vehicle for the diffusion of weapons in civilian society). 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.

[Sidebar 3: In a small Albanian village a man in civilian clothes directs the loading of wooden crates onto two 10-ton trucks. The loaded trucks then head on back roads to the Yugoslav border. There the cargo will be strapped onto mules for a 10-mile trek across the mountainous border region into Kosovo where, deep in the woods, guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army will open the crates and collect their prize: shoulder-fired, heat-seeking missiles capable of bringing down Serbian Army helicopters -- or civilian airliners. Until recently, the KLA was dismissed as a ragtag band that made rare appearances. Today it is a serious fighting force carrying Kalashnikov rifles and walkie-talkies, and, if the delivery was completed, surface-to-air missiles.]

A fourfold approach

Four separate yet complementary approaches to addressing the problem of small arms and light weapons are broadly recognized as essential:

• much greater restraint in the licit trade in weapons;
• intensified measures to control illicit trafficking;
• confiscation and destruction of surplus weapons, especially in post-conflict societies;
• restoring economic and social conditions conducive to sustainable peace.

The most prominently advanced policy initiatives to better control the licit trade are proposals for international codes of conduct. One such archetypal code is the one issued by a group of Noble Peace Laureates to link supplier restraint to human rights, governance and economic conditions. Illicit trafficking is the focus of the "international instrument" now emerging out of the ECOSOC and G8 processes, and measures to manage post-conflict surpluses are receiving increased attention in peacekeeping and peacebuilding contexts. That leaves the most daunting, and most neglected, requirement - measures to build sustainable peace.

[Sidebar 4: While a durable reduction in demand for small arms depends on increased resources devoted to economic and social rehabilitation in conflict prone states and regions, worldwide development assistance funding is in sharp decline and remains well below the formal objective of .7% of GNP. In the period from 1988-89 to 1993-94, Canadian ODA spending was cut by 15% (compared with a cut of 2.4% in military spending). Additional cuts to 1998-99 bring the overall ODA decline to 43% (compared with a 29% decline in military spending in the same period). Internationally, OECD countries spent only .27% of GNP on ODA in 1995, and that was down a full 9% from the previous year. ]

The peacebuilding imperative

Efforts to control supply of small arms will founder as long as the demand for them remains buoyant, and reducing demand means building stable and sustainable societies with social, political and economic conditions that are conducive to a durable peace and individual security. In other words, no campaign to control small arms is fully credible unless it includes significantly expanded resources committed to social and economic rehabilitation. The EU's term for a rehabilitated society is "structural stability," helpfully 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.

A peacebuilding approach to the small arms problem will engage civil society in developing priority initiatives designed to mitigate, on an emergency basis, conditions that promote a demand for weapons and that lead to armed conflict. Thus supplier control measures, in a peacebuilding context, are but one element in the effort to establish economic, political, social, and human rights conditions conducive to stability and to the emergence of a longer-term peace. Furthermore, arms control measures should themselves be understood as part of the process of contributing to a good governance capacity and to building a political culture that promotes participatory governance and transparency.