Mar
18
Illicit Small Arms Trade
March 18, 2008 | | 1 Comment
By Wanching (Week 6)
Notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout was arrested in Thailand in early March for allegedly supplying the Colombian rebels with arms and explosives. Dubbed the “Merchant of Death” and the “Lord of War”, he has been in his arms “business” for a decade and a half.
His “business” included providing cheap freight routes to any rebels or governments willing to pay for the arms he had. Since 2001, he has worked for the US government and its civilian suppliers, helping them ship goods into Iraq. He was also said to have flown peace-keepers for the UN to Somalia and aid to Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami.
According to ABC news, Bout’s arrest was made possibly through US Drug Enforcement Administration’s sting operation focused on targeting suppliers of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a terrorist organization in the eyes of the West which sustained itself through drug trafficking and kidnappings.
While many welcomed the arrest, Oliver Sprague, Amnesty International’s UK arms programme director, had not lost sight of the bigger picture.
“Why has his arrest taken so long to happen?” he asked. “This is exactly why an international arms trade treaty is needed. Such a treaty would close loopholes that gun-runners like Viktor so easily exploit for their own gain. Through their irresponsible arms transfers gun-runners like Bout have fuelled conflicts where dreadful human rights abuses have occurred.”
As shown from the UN Commodity Trade Statistics Database (Comtrade), a quarter of the estimated US$4 billion annual global gun trade is believed to be illicit. Its study and survey also say that only 8% of the 200 million modern firearms owned by government armed forces worldwide have been formally acknowledged. AK-47 represents the largest portion of the global inventory of military firearms, and the US is the No. 1 recipient of all the small arms and light weapons exports.
In fact, UN’s General Assembly adopted the International Tracing Instrument in December 2005, and the fundamental principle of the instrument is to promote international standards for marking all small arms and light weapons so that the authorities can identify seized weapons quickly and verify the legality of the trade effectively.
The US, Egypt, Israel and Japan, however, all raised staunch opposition to adopting the instrument as a formal legal document, for fear of being tied to a standardized weapons marking system. Countries like the US where people are relatively easy to buy and possess weapons in private have the added worry that tightened control over trade and transfer of small arms and light weapons across international borders would one day translate into reduced constitutional freedom of their people to own arms as they see fit.
For rich, developed countries, the whole issue of curbing illegal small arms trade may touch on sensitive political agenda, but for the poor, less developed states, the whole problem is seen from a totally different perspective.
According to Human Rights Watch’s Small Arms Survey, people living in poor countries in Africa are more than twice as likely to die in violence involving small arms and light weapons as those living in rich western countries.
In these backward countries, the ownership of small arms has spread throughout poor communities as a result of war and the insecurities of poverty, and the spread of small arms is both an effect and a cause of underdevelopment and poverty. Instead of investing on improving the people’s well-being and economic development, the already poor are burdened with the cost to nursing the injured and paying for informal forms of security such as local vigilantism to guard against small arms-induced violence.
Misuse of arms in these places is more common than in the west as the people who get hold of the arms do not usually have the knowledge of how they should be handled. Sometimes, the lethality of the arms is also underestimated due to ignorance and illiteracy. The survey also suggests that majority of the estimated 300,000 child soldiers in the world are found in these poor, less developed parts of the world.
All these findings mean that while the high-profile arrest of arms dealing giants like Viktor Bout is encouraging symbol of the international community’s concerted efforts in restraining illicit small arms trade, co-operation among the rich countries and poor countries in stamping out unauthorized production of small arms is just as important to limit the number of small arms available and minimize innocent casualties.
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I guess if Bout had not supplied FARC, he would not have fallen foul of US drug enforcement authorities, and would still be free today..