Control Arms
“They carried guns all the time. I was afraid of the guns. Actually, I was in constant fear.” These are the words of Fereh Musu Conteh, who was abducted by an armed group during the conflict in Sierra Leone when she was just 13 years old.
“When there are guns, there are more victims,” said Malya, a woman from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, describing the level of violence in her neighbourhood.
Gun violence afflicts countries around the world – armed conflict and violent crime claim the lives of men, women and children every day. AI is part of a worldwide coalition campaigning for a global Arms Trade Treaty in order to prevent the proliferation and misuse of arms and so reduce the number of victims.
In 2006, activists achieved a major victory when the UN voted overwhelmingly to start work on a treaty. This marked a massive victory for AI and its partners in the Control Arms campaign, Oxfam and the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA). After three years of campaigning around the world and three weeks of concerted campaigning in New York before the vote, 139 governments were persuaded to vote in favour of a UN resolution to start work on an Arms Trade Treaty. In December, 153 governments voted for the resolution’s formal adoption by the UN General Assembly, with only one state – the USA – voting against.
Under the resolution, the UN must collect states’ views on the feasibility, scope and parameters of a treaty, then in 2008 set up a group of experts to establish the basis of a comprehensive, legally binding treaty. As a direct result of the campaigning before the vote, the UN resolution contains an explicit reference to governments’ obligations under human rights and humanitarian law. While AI is eager for rapid advances, in UN terms progress has been extraordinarily swift. The resolution could be a key first step towards a worldwide ban on transfers of arms that devastate the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
More than a million people around the world posted pictures of themselves on the Control Arms website for the Million Faces Petition. Supporters ranged from Archbishop Desmond Tutu to the entire French football team. The millionth face was that of Julius Arile, an athlete working for peace in Kenya, who presented the petition to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in New York in June. To lobby governments before the UN debate, the Control Arms campaign published Arms without borders(AI Index: POL 34/006/2006), a report on the globalized arms trade.
As part of the “100 days Countdown” before the crucial General Assembly vote, representatives from 70 AI Sections around the world travelled to New York to campaign and lobby a UN Review Conference on small arms and light weapons. Control Arms activists lobbied with a campaign report, The AK-47: The world’s favourite killing machine (AI Index: ACT 30/011/2006), and a booklet entitled Compilation of global principles for arms transfers(AI Index: POL 34/004/2006) published by AI and its partner organizations.
Although agreement at the Conference was stalled by a small group of governments led by the USA, the UN Secretary-General in his opening statement endorsed the call for an Arms Trade Treaty, as did many governments.
Other campaigning initiatives in 2006 targeted the export of arms to areas of the world in conflict where human rights abuses and war crimes are rife.
In January, AI published testimonies from individuals in Haiti (AI Index: AMR 36/001/2006) and during the conflict in Sierra Leone (AI Index: AFR 51/001/2006). Conflicts and mass killings in Sierra Leone and neighbouring states in West Africa were sustained by the supply of weapons funded by the illegal sale of diamonds.
In Haiti armed violence has spread from armed political groups to criminal gangs that kill and rape hundreds of people every year with arms smuggled from neighbouring countries, including the USA.
Developing countries now absorb more than two thirds of world defence imports, increasingly using private contractors in diverse supply chains. Just before the UN Review Conference, AI and Transarms, the Research Centre for the Logistics of Arms Transfers, published a report in May, Dead on time: Arms transportation, brokering and the threat to human rights(AI Index: ACT 30/008/2006). The report documented unaccounted arms flights from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Iraq by the US Department of Defense, as well as shipments from Brazil to Saudi Arabia and from China to Liberia using foreign brokers and shippers while disregarding patterns of human rights abuse by the recipients.
While international debate has focused on the transfer of nuclear or long-range missile technology to countries such as Iran, North Korea and Pakistan, the routine export of conventional weapons and small arms that contribute to human rights violations and armed violence has received far less attention.
In the July-August conflict involving Israel and Lebanon, Israeli forces used aircraft, bombs, missiles, cluster and other munitions supplied particularly by the US, while Hizbullah attacked northern Israel with Katyusha and other rockets said to have been produced with the assistance of Syria and Iran. An AI report on China’s role in arming conflicts and sustaining human rights abuses in such countries as Myanmar, Nepal, South Africa and Sudan was published in June (People’s Republic of China: Sustaining conflict and human rights abuses, AI Index: ASA 17/030/2006).