Jale and Fatu are two people whose lives have been devastated by violent conflict and by the easy availability of guns and the other weapons that fuel such conflicts. Jale lives in Uganda and has had to live with the fear of raiding parties attacking his village all his life. In the old days the armed raids were by men with spears. Now these armed raids are by men with AK47s – men who have a motto ‘one man one bullet’.
One such raiding party resulted in the death of all Jale’s family – his wife and his children, of whom the youngest was just six months old. Similarly, Fatu was trying to flee her village in Sierra Leone but couldn’t leave her elderly mother behind. She was raped by five men at gunpoint and saw her husband and daughter being tortured and killed. Such cases are why Britain is leading the way in the United Nations in pressing for an arms trade treaty, and controls that would begin to eradicate the illegal trade in small arms and light weapons.
At the moment, the global small arms trade is worth about £2.2bn, of which about 25 per cent is illicit or not recorded. Guns kill a person every minute of every day. Indeed, over 300,000 people are shot dead each year. The UN has been highlighting gun violence as the leading cause of hunger, with hunger in turn the biggest killer of children. In total, almost 45 million people are affected each year by armed violence destroying lives and livelihoods, slowing or stopping development and spreading fear and terror.
Guns keep poor people poor – two thirds of the world’s poorest countries are in or emerging from conflict. Tackling the underlying reasons for particular conflicts (the reasons for the demand for weapons) is clearly fundamental, but tougher controls would begin to limit the damage and devastation that conflict brings in its wake. We have strong arms controls in the UK and an arms trade treaty would see other countries adopt their own similarly tough measures to reduce the easy flow of weapons, from one conflict to another and from one crime to another.
There has been progress. In 2001 the UN adopted a ‘Programme of Action’ for the first time to help developing countries to begin to control the flow of small arms and light weapons. Most states now have some laws on the import and export of arms and over 100 states have tighter security around how weapons are secured.
The UN is already working hard to support countries destroying illicit weapons. We work with the United Nations Development Programme supporting their programme to destroy weapons in our 25 countries. In addition we have spent £27m over the past four years on small arms control programmes, particularly in Asia and Africa.
The white paper on international development published by Hilary Benn in July commits us to do more. We need, for example, a comprehensive international programme to reduce the availability of small arms and we need to expand support for the better regulation and control of those arms. We need to make sure that, in the aftermath of violence and war, disarmament and demobilisation programmes are implemented effectively. We need on occasion to support developing countries organise weapons amnesties, collecting illicit and unnecessary weapons and making sure they are safely destroyed.
Above all we need global rules to prevent the transfer of weapons that are used to flout international law, abuse human rights, commit acts of genocide and plunge countries, even whole regions, into violent conflict. An arms trade treaty is overdue.
Read a response to this article by Claire Hickson of Saferworld