Africa, Development & Aid, Headlines, Human Rights, Middle East & North Africa

DEVELOPMENT-AFRICA: Small Arms That Do Big Damage

Moyiga Nduru

JOHANNESBURG, Jun 7 2005 (IPS) - A global week of action against the flow of small arms that is fuelling conflicts in Africa and elsewhere kicked off Monday.

According to the London-based International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), these weapons have killed an estimated two million children since 1990, many of them in Africa. In addition, about 1.5 million people are said to be wounded by small arms annually.

IANSA is one of about 30 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) supporting the week of action. Global aid groups Amnesty International and Oxfam have also joined the campaign, which ends Jun. 12. On Monday, about 60 activists gathered in the South African commercial hub of Johannesburg to mark the start of the event.

Chemist Khumalo, national co-ordinator of the Johannesburg-based Ceasefire Campaign, told IPS that not all of the blame for the small arms crisis in Africa could be laid beyond the continent’s borders.

“South Africa and Egypt are the highest suppliers of weapons in Africa. South Africa, which is a bigger supplier than Egypt, sells arms even to Britain and the United States,” he said at the Johannesburg gathering.

Ceasefire is also concerned about South Africa’s own expenditure on weaponry and other defence-related matters.

“South Africa has committed itself not to spend over 1.7 percent of its GDP (gross domestic product) on military expenditure,” said Khumalo. “About two months ago, the minister of defence (Mosiuoa Lekota) told us that they were spending less than 1.7 percent of the GDP. We have no independent way of confirming this figure.”

The United Nations recommends that countries should not spend more than 1.7 percent of their GDP on defence. But, even this is too much, says Ceasefire.

“We would like this money to go to social services such as health and education, development, job creation, crime prevention and poverty alleviation,” observed Khumalo.

The Coalition Against Military Spending, a South African group of which the Ceasefire Campaign is member, believes the country’s military spending has increased by over 50 percent in the course of the past three years.

IANSA’s Joseph Dube said a number of African countries had ratified the United Nations Vienna Protocol on Firearms, an initiative for marking firearms and tracking them in the event that they changed hands – but cautioned that ratification did not necessarily translate into effective control of small weapons on the ground.

In 2001, a UN Conference on Illicit Trade in Small Arms was held, resulting in a programme of action to eliminate the trade in small arms and light weapons. UN agencies and NGOs will meet in New York next month to evaluate the implementation of this programme.

Desmond Rose of the ‘For a Better Society’ NGO, also based in Johannesburg, said concerted action by campaigners was key to stemming the circulation of small arms.

“We need to build up an international network…That was how apartheid was defeated: through a network of protests, sanctions and isolation. We should employ the same tactics to stop the supply of arms to Africa,” he told IPS.

The release of a new book edited by Australian academic Geoff Harris has coincided with the global week of action against small arms.

In the preface to the book, ‘Achieving Security in Sub-Saharan Africa: Cost Effective Alternatives to the Military’, Harris notes a widespread belief among nations that their security is threatened – or that some form of threat will materialise in the future.

“The only way of deterring such threats, it is argued, is a strong military,” he stated further, at the launch of the book in Johannesburg on Monday. But, “the recent history of warfare suggests that invasions of one country by another since 1945 have been rare events.”

“Very few countries can be realistically described as being in danger of invasion, although the armed forces of almost all countries are said to be built on this premise.”

Harris questions the ability of armies to ensure security – saying they have proved “costly, ineffective and immoral” in this regard – or to bring about beneficial changes in the leadership of countries.

“Out of 16 regime changes only four – Germany, Japan, Grenada and Panama – have been successful in the 21st century in terms of sustainable democracy.”

He argues that a general improvement in levels of development would serve as a more effective deterrent to insecurity than substantial investments in the military. However, it would also require courage on the part of leaders to pursue less conventional – albeit cheaper and more moral – approaches to providing national security.

“The military is often effective, in the short term, in winning wars; but this normally does little to deal with the underlying reasons for the conflict, thus resulting in a likelihood of renewed warfare,” Harris observes.

 
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