The meeting, ‘Small Arms and the Humanitarian Community: Developing a
Strategy for Action’, was organised by the Humanitarian
Coalition on Small Arms (Amnesty International, the ARIAS Foundation, the
Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, Human Rights Watch, International Physicians
for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Norwegian Church Aid, and Oxfam GB).
Diverse backgrounds and experiences brought approximately 120 people
together in Nairobi for 3 days in
November 2001. As Basil Lucima of Oxfam said in his welcome speech, “the aim of
this conference is to share our experiences so that we can move forward
together and work to remove the threat of guns from people’s lives. Millions of people are killed, maimed,
injured or forced to flee their homes because of gun violence. This is a global
catastrophe.”
This report contains edited presentations from the meeting, including
observations and comments from participants. These presentations overviewed the
issues associated with the ‘human cost’ of the proliferation and misuse of
small arms – charting the development, health, humanitarian and human rights
impacts of this deadly trade. The meeting also sought to explore lessons learnt
from other campaigns with a strong humanitarian advocacy component – landmines,
child soldiers and the International Criminal Court. This marked one of the
first times that the small arms community had actively sought to learn lessons
from other successful campaigns to enrich our thinking and approaches.
The meeting also sought to bring to the table for discussion some ideas
– elaborated or in their infancy – related to possibilities for campaigning on
small arms from a ‘people-centered’ standpoint. Workshops were held to further
encourage creative and lateral thinking about how to move forward with
humanitarian and human rights focussed campaigning.
These contributions led to the ‘germination’ of a Framework of Action
which premises the importance of addressing both the supply and demand or
availability and misuse of these weapons.
These series of conversations were long overdue. The small arms and
humanitarian community have up to now, had very little in common and no common
platform with which to come together. The meeting provided an opportunity to
undertake a much-needed conversation about the practical, policy and
campaigning opportunities that can be harnessed by the humanitarian community
in its broadest entirety.
Welcome
Basil Lucima, Regional Humanitarian
Coordinator for Horn, East & Central Africa for Oxfam GB
In August 2000, I was part of an assessment mission in Ituri in the DRC. I
came across a lady called Magdalena, who was
severely malnourished and admitted in one of the hospitals, close to the
Ugandan border.
Magdalena had lost her husband in a
raid that was carried out by militias in Eastern DRC. The militias came at night, rounded up people
especially men in that village and took them across the valley and shot them
dead. Magdalena was 34 years old
at that time. She lost two of her
children because they had to flee to the bush where there was no kind of
assistance and no services. Two of her
children died of hunger. She managed to
escape with the only child to an Oxfam run centre that was based at the
hospital. It happened that Magdalena was pregnant,
but the child died.
I went back in June 2001, although I did not get back to the hospital,
I met the doctor who had looked after her at that time,
and Magdalena with her only other child is surviving despite the
loss of her children, husband and two brothers.
No End in Sight, an Oxfam
briefing paper on the human tragedy in DRC gives more details about this attack
and countless others and the human cost of the conflict. Our task is to bring hope to people like
that.
This meeting is beginning the important task of develop a strategy of
action for the humanitarian community on small arms, so that in five years time
when the world governments come together again we will have taken giant strides
to improve the lives of people such as Magdalena and her little girl Anna
living in the hospital compound with nowhere to return to. Gathered at the meeting are 64 organisations from 46 countries. If we can harness our power and speak with a
united voice on guns I believe we can change the world.
Small voices collectively put together make a difference.
Oxfam GB: www.oxfam.org
No End in Sight report: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/policy/papers/drc/drc2.htm
Why did we participate in
this meeting? There were a lot of things
in common, but also a variety of incentives.
To better approach research, and other sources of information on small
arms, others came to learn and share experiences about campaigning. Others spoke about the internal challenges
within our organisations to place the small arms
question on our agenda.
Comment from a Workshop Participant
Sally Joss, Co-ordinator of the International
Action Network on Small Arms
IANSA is a global network on small arms
with 340 NGOs and many individuals belonging to the network from 71
countries. Our common denominator is
that we are all working to prevent the spread and misuse of arms. Some NGOs are doing research and working very
closely with governments on policy issues.
Others are out collecting weapons and working for community action on
the control of small arms. There are campaigners, there are ex-combatants, women’s groups, human
rights groups. This great diversity is
one of the key strengths of IANSA.
IANSA was created in 1998, when a number
of NGOs decided that because of the piecemeal approach that governments had to
the issue, it was important for civil society to have a more coordinated
approach in responding to this government inaction. IANSA aims to treble in
size in the next few years - to build a worldwide social movement focused on
stopping gun violence and the tragic loss of life.
We need to make clear to governments what their collective inaction
means, what it means to live in constant insecurity in communities which are
saturated with light weapons and small arms. This is where the humanitarian
community plays a huge important role. The Humanitarian Coalition can be the
voice of the humanitarian community, producing facts and figures that are
required to shift governments. It is not
just the stories that we need; we need to know how many hospital beds are taken
up by people with gunshot wounds; we need to know how many schools are closed
because of violence. And this is the
information that you work with every day.
A woman in a small town in South Africa, came up to me
when I was there a few years ago, and said, “Have you heard of Jubilee
2000? It is about canceling the debt
which is a problem for many countries and I want to tell you why it’s a problem
for our community. Our government has a
huge debt to pay back so they can’t spend money on health and education.” What was amazing was that this was in the
middle of the countryside in South Africa, this woman
understood that it was an international and local issue. Secondly, that there
was a global campaign underway to address the problem. It is a good example of where we need to go
with the small arms issue.
The messages need to link the supply of weapons with the human
suffering it causes and that in turn actually creates a further demand for the
weapons that have been supplied in the first place. There is now a momentum that we have a
responsibility to take forward at international, national and regional
levels.
How is IANSA going to help facilitate this? We are going to strengthen existing small
arms networks, regional networks and sub-regional networks. We are going to help participants set up new
ones, and extend the existing networks into new regions and to new groups in
civil society. IANSA will also be
supporting the development of thematic groups, such as the Humanitarian
Coalition. The doctors led by IPPNW are organising
themselves, so too are NGOs working on children and armed conflict. What is
important is all of those groups focus on work on particular aspects of small
arms relevant to them. The work will
complement each other at different times.
IANSA – www.iansa.org
Cate Buchanan, Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue and Lora Lumpe, Norwegian Church Aid
The uncontrolled spread and misuse of small
arms and light weapons is a global humanitarian crisis that results in the
deaths of hundreds of thousands of people every year. Countless more
individuals are physically or emotionally disabled or threatened by these
weapons. In addition, the presence of guns adds an unpredictable and lethal
dimension to the activities of organisations dedicated to human rights;
humanitarian, health and development work in the field. The ability of such
workers to undertake their duties is increasingly constrained, as many are
kidnapped, assaulted and deprived of their liberty under the threat of a gun.
The effectiveness of efforts to reach and serve people in many parts of the
world is impeded, rendered less effective and made more costly.
At the same time, guns are
immensely political. Humanitarian and
development groups are not in a position to work on this topic, by and large,
in an isolated manner. They need to be
part of a united front – a campaign.
Only a global campaign can provide a framework that would allow
humanitarian groups to step up to this issue in a coordinated and powerful way
by providing “safety in numbers.”
There are opportunities for
effective action in ways that do not jeopardize our mandates or access to
target populations, but the community of organisations
needs to be strategic and coordinated in how it uses these opportunities. The Nairobi meeting is an
opportunity for our community to talk about those experiences and start
converting it into a coordinated strategy for action.
We
want to spark discussion on ideas for a Strategy for Action, which has:
· A distinct focus: shifting the debate from
national security to human security
· A primary goal: curbing the supply of weapons
· A target timeframe for effecting change:
setting goals over a five-year period
· An interlocking set of agreed strategies:
which incorporates networking, research, targeted advocacy and campaigning
· A commitment to raising awareness about the human cost: drawing on where our strength and credibility resides, that is the
first-hand experience of our community
· An appreciation of lessons learnt:
constantly testing what we do against what we learn from others
Most
importantly, we believe the key to success is having the people who count at
the heart of the process. Ambitious campaigning on small arms must be informed
by the voices and priorities of people, living and working directly with the
crisis of small arms proliferation and misuse.
Background
Over the past
five years, the small arms crisis has steadily acquired a more prominent
position on the international agenda. Awareness continues to be raised and
path-breaking work is being undertaken on the ground in relation to sensitisation about weapons and weapons control. However
international advocacy efforts to stem the trade in arms have been
disappointing. The outcome of the July 2001 UN Conference on the Illicit Trade
in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects, a recent focal point for
global efforts on small arms, was under-whelming in the face of the widespread
human suffering inflicted at the hands of these weapons.
The challenges posed by the proliferation and misuse of small arms
are complex and do not lend themselves to simple solutions. As a result, a
multi-dimensional approach has been pursued in identifying all aspects of the
problem and corresponding responses. Much has been learned from this approach,
and the community of potential advocates has been broadened. But it has also
had an important downside. By offering dozens of policy recommendations, rather
than one or two priority goals, NGOs have enabled governments to pick and
choose the options most palatable and least demanding to them.
The Power of the Humanitarian Perspective
A first challenge
is to shift the discourse of the small arms debate away from talk about the
security of states to talk about the security of people. Doing so will help
establish an appropriate sense of urgency and political will on the part of
governments to take any number of necessary actions. Achieving this goal will
require the active participation of a much greater segment of the health,
humanitarian, development and human rights communities than have engaged the
issue to date.
Mobilising our communities
would unleash a wealth of expertise and access to compelling evidence about the
impacts of these weapons in conflict, post-conflict and ‘peaceful’ societies.
Our ability to speak from direct experience provides a credibility and moral
authority that will bolster international advocacy and campaigning efforts. A
humanitarian perspective also brings new tools and fresh insight to an issue
that has been framed up until now mainly by national security and law
enforcement perspectives.
A Campaign Goal with Regional and Global Relevance
A second great challenge is to identify a priority advocacy goal
around which health, humanitarian, development and human rights workers and organisations can rally. There are three main approaches
from which to choose: curbing the fresh supply of weapons into an area where
they are being misused, mopping up weapons already in existence that are being
misused, or alleviating the root causes giving rise to the demand for and
misuse of guns.
Workers in these communities are already – by nature of their
primary missions – engaged in important demand reduction work. For example, if
groups are able to facilitate sustainable economic development or social
justice, they would do more to reduce demand for guns and grenades than any sensitisation or public education program could ever do.
Rubem Cesear Fernandes, from the NGO
Viva Rio, says, “demand is local, but supply is
national and/or international.” Put another way, the means for reducing demand
are too specific to be generalized effectively into a global campaign, but
approaches to stemming supply can more readily be generalized and campaigned
upon.
The challenge therefore is to identify one or two campaignable goals that, if achieved, would have the
greatest impact in reducing the weapons of concern (those being used to kill or
maim civilians) in the shortest period of time in the most places.
Humanitarian Coalition on Small Arms
Among the groups
present at the UN Conference in July as part of the International Action
Network on Small Arms (IANSA), a handful of humanitarian, health, development
and human rights organisations decided to develop a Humanitarian
Coalition on Small Arms (HCSA), with two main aims. Firstly, to mobilise this particular community as part of
a broader contribution to the growing social movement spearheaded by IANSA, and
secondly to bring
compelling humanitarian perspectives and voices forward into the advocacy and
campaigning on this issue in the future.
The initiative is
based on the belief that to succeed, ambitious
campaigning on small arms must be informed by the voices and priorities of organisations and people, living and working directly with
the crisis of small arms proliferation and misuse. Such organisations have particular credibility lobbying the arms
supplying governments, primarily in the North.
In addition
to joining IANSA, NGOs that are operational in providing healthcare,
development assistance, and humanitarian relief or human rights protection are
encouraged to contribute to the work of the Humanitarian Coalition on Small
Arms.
Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue: www.hdcentre.org
Norwegian Church Aid: www.nca.org
Isaac Lappia, Amnesty
International Sierra Leone
For nearly a decade, Sierra Leone became a dumping ground for small arms and light weapons, the tools
of death and destruction. The deadly illicit trade in small arms prospered in
the sub regions, provided massive gains for arms traffickers, who were
determined to continue uninterrupted, irrespective of the catastrophe the use
of these weapons caused.
Sierra Leone was thrown into a brutal war in 1991 by
a rebel group of mixed nationalities; Sierra Leoneans,
Liberians and Burkinabis. The conflict was first
misunderstood as a mere border skirmish involving disgruntled illicit
businessmen. The conflict intensified and illicit arms dealers focused their
attention to a new arms market - Sierra Leone. There was unrestricted flow of arms
into the country as the conflict spread.
The Sierra Leone conflict was
characterized by massive destruction of property and a huge death toll. The
fundamental tactic of the Revolutionary United Front was terror. The combatants
would attack a village, capture people, execute a
large number of people so that the survivors obey their commands without
question. They were also involved in the training of large number of young men
be they willing or not. The selected trainees were first heavily drugged to
derail their sound reasoning capacity and make light the evil they may have
committed against their own people.
In a village close to mine, the rebels, after drinking a lot of palm
wine, argued over the sex of a baby of a pregnant captive. One argued that the baby was a girl and the
other countered that according to the shape of the belly, it was definitely a
boy. To prove who was correct, they commanded a 10-year old child soldier to
shoot the pregnant woman and slit open her stomach. The command was immediately
carried out. The foetus proved to be a girl. The
rebel who guessed correctly was so affected by the death and mutilation of the
young woman that without a second thought, he shot his companion in the chest.
He was later killed by the rebel high command for killing a comrade in the
struggle because he had no right to destroy a valuable life for a useless
pregnant woman.
In another instance a woman opted to give her life for her two children
of 11 and 14 years. The rebels had threatened to kill the boys for hiding in a
tree during an early morning attack on the village. The mother asked that she
be killed instead. In her presence one of the boys was asked to pull the
trigger against his mother, he refused and was shot in the leg. The younger
child was then asked to shoot his mother, and he did so. He was conscripted as
a hard, fearless fighter. The rebels' reason for asking the boy to kill his
mother was a belief that, whoever killed their parents will be fearless, a
'hard one'.
After the capture of every village, the rebels made arrangements for
food to be cooked. On some very jubilant occasions, parts of human beings were
cooked especially for the foreign rebels. While the food was being cooked the
rebels would select a “wife” from among the young cooks, take them to a
secluded location and rape them until the food was ready. The people lived in a
constant state of terror of the gunmen. To avoid contact with the rebels, they
abandoned their villages and towns and pitched make-shift huts in the
bush. Today some of those hiding places
have emerged as new villages. The attack on the city of Freetown saw the death of
more than 5000 people. Vultures
continuously fed on human bodies as there were no people to bury the dead. People were pressed at gunpoint into houses,
which were sprayed with petrol and set on fire. Who ever tried to escape was
immediately shot.
The largest peacekeeping operation in the UN history was established in
October 1999. The country was so heavily militarised
that people feared whether the weapons in circulation could ever be collected.
Arms were brought in large quantities from Liberia by all sides.
The government forces brought large supplies of arms which were many times
ambushed and captured by the rebel forces. The Sierra Leone Army emptied the
national armory to prosecute the war. A large quantity of arms was given to
local militiamen by the Government to fight the rebels in their respective
communities and to fight alongside ECOMOG (the Economic Community of West
African States Monitoring Group). Executive Outcomes (a British private
security company) came in with a lot of weapons, most of which was given to
trained militiamen who fought along with them.
The situation today in Sierra Leone is a sharp
contrast of what used to be. The guns are silent, internally displaced people
and refugees are gradually returning to their places of origins. Free access to
all parts of the country is guaranteed and disarmament of ex-combatants is
almost complete. One may wonder what is responsible for this quick reversal of
the conflict situation in my country. The general consensus is that the supply
route of arms to the perpetrators of violence has been disrupted. The illicit
manufactures, arms dealers and traffickers in the sub-region have been
identified and shamed in the international media. Presidents have been named in
the Sierra Leone crisis and their
illicit transfer strategies openly discussed. The RUF have been identified as
the main perpetrators of human rights abuses.
They initially held 500 UN staff as hostage to derail the peace process,
but surprisingly opted to cooperate for lasting peace simply because their arms
supply routes had been shut down.
The story of Sierra Leone highlights the
tragedy of war being prolonged and intensified by the virtually unrestricted
flow of small arms. Had the UN panel of
experts and NGOs investigated the arms flow to Sierra Leone at the rudimentary
stage of the war and demanded appropriate action as has now been taken, Sierra
Leone could have been saved years ago It is essential to identify the crucial
link between any conflicts characterized by gross violations of human rights,
crimes against humanity and war crimes and that of small arms and light weapons
supply to a conflict region.
To me arms make war.
Amnesty International: www.amnesty.org
“The problem of disability
is the worst human cost by small arms.
Wherever you go, wherever you look, you will find physical and mental
disabilities perpetrated by small arms abuse.”
Richard Mugisha, People with
Disabilities, Uganda
Joost Hiltermann, Executive Director of the Arms
Division of Human Rights Watch
In a nutshell, the 2001 UN conference on small arms, from a human
rights perspective, was a dismal failure, a critique of which can be found as
an annex to the conference report. Human rights are not even mentioned in the Programme of Action that governments finally managed to
agree to in the final hours of the conference.
It is as if states feel that human rights are a luxury, something that
can be addressed only after issues of high security have been settled first.
This is a fundamental mistake.
Human rights, that is, the observance of
international human rights law and international humanitarian law, constitute
the basis for the proper conduct of governments, and are also the basis for a
solution to the humanitarian crises that are caused by the uncontrolled spread
and misuse of weapons.
The omission of human rights from the U.N. Conference on Small Arms and
the resulting Programme of Action should be seen as a
deliberate effort by states to shirk their responsibility as states for the
proliferation and misuse of weapons.
Governments like to blame others for this problem: arms traffickers,
brokers, rebels, but rarely themselves.
The misuse of weapons invariably involves
a violation of human rights, possibly a very serious one, like a war crime or a
crime against humanity. And the
provision of weapons and other forms of military assistance to known human
rights abusers suggests a degree of complicity in human rights abuses. The key
issue is the problem of impunity, a lack of accountability
A current example can be found in Afghanistan. For the last 10
years, after the Soviets were thrown out in 1989, Afghanistan has been in the
throes of a series of internal armed conflicts that have been marked by
atrocities committed by all sides. As
this was going on, powerful regional actors—states—provided military assistance
to their friends in Afghanistan, thereby
throwing fuel on the fire.
What did the United Nations do?
In 1999, when it finally decided to do anything of significance, it
imposed sanctions on one of the
abusive parties, the Taliban. It then
failed to implement or enforce these sanctions, which after December 2000
included an arms embargo. Meanwhile, Russia and Iran were arming the
other side, the opposition alliance known as the United Front. The Russians told us last July: “Sure we are arming them, but the United
Front is the legitimate government of Afghanistan (holding the
country’s seat at the U.N.) and the United Front is not under any U.N. arms
embargo.”
What message did this send to the warlords in Afghanistan? Business as usual.
September 11 happened, and the US is waging war
against the Taliban and Al-Qa’ida. As part of this, the United Front was given
carte blanche in northern Afghanistan and received
fresh supplies of U.S.-financed arms from Russia as well as
decisive air support from the United States. Uzbekistan, which has a
terrible human rights record, also started receiving U.S. military and
political support including no more criticism of the government’s violent
repression of dissidents. The result:
One United Front faction entered Kabul contrary to an
agreement it had made with its U.S. handlers, and
another faction, headed by a notorious warlord, carried out reprisal
killings. They were doing whatever they
liked (though admittedly with more restraint than what we had seen from them in
the 1990s, when the world wasn’t watching), and of course, civilians suffered.
The issue of military support cannot be divorced from human
rights. The factor that binds these two
together is the existence of impunity.
Our challenge, therefore, is to break down the cultures of
impunity. Governments must be persuaded
to say:
1. No to atrocities,
2. No to the misuse of arms,
And the Golden Rule:
3. No to the provision of military support to gross human rights
abusers until the recipient makes a public commitment to end abuses and holds
the perpetrators accountable.
This is why
there must be a Humanitarian Coalition on Small Arms: To stress this link with
governments and convey this message, and to persuade them that a human rights
approach is not only a moral imperative but also in their own interest. By ignoring human rights, governments may
create new problems that in the end may harm their own national security.
The world’s neglect of the situation after the Soviets were driven out, and the continuing supply of weapons without strings
attached to increasingly abusive parties led to the total collapse of the state
structure in Afghanistan in the
mid-1990s. This allowed for the entry of
the Taliban, who were bankrolled by one of the prime beneficiaries of the CIA’s
war against the Soviet occupation forces, who is now Suspect No. 1 in the
atrocities committed here in Nairobi and in Dar Es Salaam in 1998 and in the
United States two months ago, and who has sent well-trained fighters to
Chechnya and Uzbekistan. Could this
possibly be in the U.S. and Russia’s national
interest?
The observance of human rights must be a necessary and integral part of
the solution.
Human Rights Watch: www.hrw.org
“If we can actually work
with the communities and make them understand that their security is very much
linked to having no guns in the community, then this is a good entry
point. In South Africa there have been
attempts to reform policing with more emphasis on community policing. They had a lot of violence until the elders
had to come and sit down and say, “Okay, look here, let us get rid of this
weapon. Let us get a new police force
that we can work with”, and this is being trialed in Malawi and Sierra Leone.” Comment
from a Workshop Participant
Gaim Kebreab, Regional representative of the Norwegian Church Aid
“Practically the whole of the Horn of Africa is in turmoil. Somalia is a nation in
shambles, without a central government. Sudan has been engaged
in a civil war for a long time. Ethiopia is experiencing
civil unrest. A civil war is in progress
in Northern Uganda. Northern Kenya has not known
sustained peace since independence.” (Breaking
the Spear & Cooling the Earth by Daudi Waithaka)
For decades, the Norwegian Church Aid has been engaged in emergency and
long-term development work in this region. The East African region has suffered
greatly as a result of increased misuse of small arms. The impact of small arms is an on-going
problem and attempts to move forward to develop the region, have proven to be
difficult.
In the year 2000 the misuse of small arms caused the deaths of friends
and colleagues.
· The Ugandan Lords Resistance Army killed eight
colleagues on 13 January 2000. They were returning from distribution of food
and non-food items to the internally displaced persons who fled from the
fighting around the Government of Sudan controlled garrison town of Torit.
· One colleague was killed in March when driving a
polio campaign team. The other people in
the vehicle suffered injuries from the bullets of the attackers.
· Two colleagues were killed when they were returning from
a hospital. They had earlier taken a
patient urgently in need of emergency surgical operation. They were shot at close range and died
instantly. As a result, development interventions were stalled for many months
because of a lack of personnel.
In the Gedo region of Somalia, small arms are
readily available and frequently used against humanitarian personnel. People
have been shot critically and kidnapped at gunpoint. Staff have been
evacuated. The flood of small arms,
political instability, poverty and warlords with power bases in different parts
of the country threaten any meaningful development intervention. The rule of the gun precedes development.
“It is identified fact now that many communities attribute insecurity,
underdevelopment, sponsored banditry, the influx of guns, political and
economic marginalization as some of the problems that contribute to their
situation, and are beyond their capacity to control or solve”. (Daudi Waithaka, Peace & Development Foundation – Africa)
A snapshot of the key issues driving gun possession, use and misuse
include:
· Poverty – this region is one of the poorest in the
world. Small arms may be a strategy for
survival and an indicator of no other viable options for managing day to day
existence in insecure environments.
· Justice and governance – there is lack of justice,
so many people take the law into their hands for the majority of people. Governments do not have a comprehensive grip
on state security and are often a big part of the problem.
· Political instability – at a state and regional
level. This produces refugees, movement
of people, and destruction of the economy and greater recourse to armed
violence, criminality and insecurity.
· Community participation – is essential for
sustainable interventions. Communities
need to participate in design and implementation of intervention programmes in order to ensure local perspectives and
priorities have been incorporated.
The humanitarian community should look for ways to include
interventions to limit and reduce the impacts of small arms on our work.
Humanitarian and development organisations have
significant opportunities to deal with this issue as part of our overall
interventions. Comprehensive alternative
perspectives are necessary. Breaking the back of the arms trade by governments,
private manufacturers and illicit traffickers’ is a crucial step. This has to
be challenged through coordinated international advocacy and legislation.
Norwegian Church Aid: www.nca.org
“We have discovered that
there is serious mobility problem for our workers, aid workers have found it
extremely difficult to access populations in distress. Staff movement is disrupted because armed
escorts are required. It displaces the
target community with whom many of us work.
It has damaging effect on the individual and it violates human
rights. Shun the gun is the only
solution.”
Comment from a Workshop
Participant
Robert Muggah, Project Manager
at the Small Arms Survey
Small arms, pistols, revolvers, assault rifles, grenade launchers and
mortars - they are the stuff of late night conspiratorial conversation at the
compound. They are part of the
inevitable burden of humanitarian work.
The humanitarian community are daily witnesses
of their use, they are at the ever familiar roadblock, slung loosely over the shoulders
of children, waved menacingly by militia, police and army factions, resting
between the knees of security guards.
Available evidence tells us that small arms are used in about 75 per
cent of all security instances reported by humanitarian agencies. According to UN Security Coordination Office
(UNSECOORD) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), 210 UN
civilian personnel and about 100 ICRC delegates were killed in intentional
violence in the last eight years alone.
We know that this population is not the primary victims of small
arms. Small arms availability is a
persistent and recurring nightmare for civilians all over the world. In virtually every emergency ward on this
planet there are victims recovering from preventable, non-fatal injuries
attributed to small arms. The most
conservative estimates figure that about 500,000 people are killed every year
with small arms. Some
300,000 in conflict situations.
These are 500,000 preventable fatalities.
From a humanitarian or public health perspective there can be little
doubt that small arms related violence constitutes an epidemic of global
proportions. Like any disease it is
preventable. To design an effective set
of remedies we need to know what we’re up against. We need to generate and disseminate data
about the vector and to design interventions based on irrefutable, empirical
evidence. We need something that is
often overlooked in the rush to provide protection and assistance: solid
research.
There is a strong association between small arms availability and human
insecurity. Small arms are by design
made to kill and maim human beings.
Evidence from criminologists, epidemiologists and public health
specialists demonstrate that small arms lead to a higher incidence of lethal
outcomes in any situation of conflict, including intentional violence such as
homicide and suicide,
or even so-called accidental or non-intentional incidents such as
celebration shooting.
Small arms exacerbate and multiply violations of international humanitarian law
and human rights. Principles the
humanitarian community are again by definition bound
by covenant to be upheld. It is becoming
clearer just how little we, the disarmament and humanitarian communities,
actually know about the humanitarian impacts of small arms. What is known is
often fragmented, anecdotal and based on qualitative short-term studies,
although there are a few exceptions.
Best estimations are better than no estimate for planning interventions
and guiding advocacy, but real empirical data is absolutely pivotal for guiding
research and analysis and any intervention.
The secondary or indirect impacts are contentious. They are part of the broader constellation of
impacts from conflict rather than isolated reservedly to small arms there is
often debate over whether it’s conflict or small arms that are causing the
types of impacts this community deals with constantly. Some significant inroads into the question of
causality are being made and we are starting to better distinguish the impacts
of small arms from the broader constellation of consequences of war and social
violence.
While we need better information on the humanitarian impact of small
arms, conventional ready made statistics are currently hard to come by. In terms of firearm related deaths and
injuries, national data is woefully inadequate.
Less than 40 per cent of all developing countries have any vital
registration or reliable surveillance on mortality and morbidity, most of which
does exist in the South is in Latin America. Very few countries in Asia have
surveillance mechanism and there is almost nothing in Africa with the
exception of South Africa.
However, the absence of this kind of data
should not stop smaller scale studies and targeted research or campaigning. Precisely because of the proximity to the
human toll exacted by small arms proliferation, the humanitarian community is
ideally situated to provide a range of information: neutral, objective,
impartial, subjective, quantitative and qualitative analyses of the impacts and
solutions to this crisis. Many organisations already collect or collate masses of
information whether through baseline monitoring, incident reporting systems and
short assessments. Much
of which is gathering dust in the corners of offices, not effectively being
used or analysed. In some cases, it’s a matter
of blowing dust off and collating this data and giving it a bit of
consideration.
In other cases there’s a need to collect new information. The collection of data should not be seen in
a vacuum, but rather for the purposes of directly informing policy and
advocacy. It should be empirically tight
so that credibility and legitimacy are assured.
If the prevention of gun related violence is the objective, then a big
part of the research agenda should be to articulate clear research questions,
appraising who is at risk, how are they at risk, why are they at risk and where
are they most affected.
There are several important questions to pursue answering in research
of this kind. How many people are being killed and injured by small arms
compared to other sources of death and injury in your region of operation? What is the financial burden of small arms on
agencies, their programmes and failed
investments? How are small arms affecting
livelihoods of the beneficiaries that the humanitarian and development
community works to support? This
research agenda should support objective and
subjective data collection and analysis.
The Small Arms Survey: www.smallarmssurvey.org
“A big part of the problem
of small arms is the lack of coping mechanism, a lack of human security
situations at the community level which is basically responsible for many of
these things: gun violence, the power of threatening others with the use of a
gun.” James Arputharaj, South Asia Partnership
International
Dr Olive Kobusingye, Trauma
Surgeon and Director of the Injury Control Centre of Uganda
This is a call for the humanitarian
community to help stem the flow of arms: go to the root of the illness of small
arms proliferation. To illustrate my point, I will use the example of my own
country, Uganda. It is one of the most densely populated countries in Africa, and unfortunately, one
of the poorest. Uganda’s health care expenditure is one of the lowest in the region at
about $8 per person annually with a doctor/patient ratio of one doctor for
every 25,000 persons. Alarming even by African standards. About 49 per cent of our population live
within 5 kilometres of a health facility, but actual
real access for health care is even lower because even people that live within
5 kilometres, for many reasons are not be able to
access health care. The GDP per capita
is about a third of the continental average at $US511.
Since independence in 1962, there have been seven changes of government
and each one of these has come through armed violence. Due to the real and perceived threat, insecurity
and private security companies abound. Firearms have upgraded from those which
fire one shot at a time, and hence increased capacity to maim and kill. Access to firearms is easy and government
control is limited.
In 1999, we did a survey in Northern Uganda. We were looking
at all injuries, in an area where there has been armed conflict for over 18
years. We looked at injury and deaths
from 1994 up to 1999. We were interested to know what caused the injuries, and
in particular, access to and use of health care services.
The graph (see over) reveals our findings. It was quite shocking even
though we knew this was an area of conflict. Gunshot wounds were the leading
cause of injuries in this group in terms of rates by 1000 persons per
year. In almost any African country, and
in the west, traffic incidents are the leading issue.
We looked at the time taken to reach a health facility and only about
13 per cent of the injured people were able to access health care in one
hour. Even when we pushed it to six
hours, only about 40 per cent of people were able to access health care within
six hours. The majority of people with
severe injuries will simply not survive if they do not access care in a couple
of hours at most. Only 70 per cent of
the victims had been able to access care and the majority of these had been
able to get to a hospital or a health centre.
What have we done since the survey?
We have tried to do something in the area of primary prevention
especially in terms of doing landmine awareness campaigns. We have been
involved in training of health care personnel that work in emergency rooms and
usually these are people that are already involved in acute and emergency
care. We have trained police, security
and army personnel in pre-hospital and emergency skills and we have also worked
in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and other agencies in trying to
strengthen rehabilitation for persons that have injuries.
Police training in Uganda only offers four
hours of first aid during their entire training, so we tried to improve
that. We have trained multi-disciplinary
teams unlike the kind of training that people go through, for instance, in
medical school. This training works in teams of doctors, nurses, orthopedic
officers, ambulance driver, nurse aides – people with different competence
levels. We train them using equipment
and supplies that are ordinarily available in their workplaces and we have
developed a curriculum that specifically addresses the needs of hospitals in Africa.
Graph:
Causes of injury in Gulu District
There are many constraints in delivering
emergency care. Evacuation and first aid services are very limited. Some of these conflict areas have maybe one
or two decent hospitals in the district and when incidents occur evacuating patients
and get them to health care is very difficult. Transport is poor and referral
systems are quite dysfunctional. Health
care personnel are often low in numbers and can be quite unmotivated and
unskilled. Shortages in hospitals often
include very basic supplies. Where I
work in Kampala sometimes we have no gloves! Lack of operating space is also a
major challenge.
High incidence of firearm injuries in hospitals also produces unfair
competition for resources. As firearm
injuries are quite often severe, they demand immediate deployment of senior
personnel and immense resources.
Sometimes we are pulling our senior anesthesiologists away from
scheduled surgery to come and do emergency work. Most firearm injuries do not occur in
isolation, and can introduce an ethical dilemma for staff. Recently we had police and criminals lying
side by side in the emergency room, and people were distressed to know that we
were going to treat robbers ahead of policemen. We prioritise
according to the severity of injury and not whether this person belongs to a
rebel group or government agency or is a suspected criminal.
It is like mopping the floor with the taps on. It takes five minutes to shower bullets but
it takes three hours and immense resources to repair each person. Even if we could afford it, it is a horrible
waste. We need to direct our full energy
to trying to prevent this crisis from escalating any further.
The humanitarian community can help to turn off the tap.
Sue Wixley, Advocacy and
Communications Officer for the ICBL
Much of the success of the International
Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) was a product of a collaborative exercise with
other international organisations like the ICRC as
well as with governments, particularly a core group of states prepared to take
and lead action.
It is important to learn from mistakes and achievements and it is easy to look back at the landmines
campaign and see only the great achievements, but not to acknowledge that there
were mistakes and compromises that were made along the way to the detriment of
campaign. It is also easy to fall into
the trap of simplifying the issue with hindsight. Looking at the campaign it
must seem easy, but we thought there was no way
we were ever going to achieve a ban on landmines.
It is easy to forget that as campaigners we tried different methods. We
tried one way of working, one argument with governments, one argument with the
various people that we were targeting and if that did not work we tried
something else. We tried different ways
of mobilising the public. If that was not working we tried something
else. We had to have a contingency
approach to dealing with the issue.
There are five factors to examine in looking at the ICBL’s
success:
1. The message of
the campaign, the fact that we called for a ban
2. The use of strong
visual images and the use of media
3. The structure and
the way we worked in coalition with governments and other international organisations
4. The post cold-war
context in which we campaigned where there was a new role for middle powers who
were carving out niches for themselves in this new political landscape
5. The use of non-UN
fora to pursue negotiations of the Mine Ban Treaty.
I will concentrate on the first point - messaging and how we defined
the issue. The first obvious point is
that we were calling for a comprehensive prohibition: a ban. Around the time of the negotiations for the
treaty a slogan used was “no loopholes, no reservations and no
exceptions”. The message was clear, under no circumstances is it permissible to use
anti-personnel landmines. It was clear
what we were against but also what we were for.
A lot of the ICBL material refers to a mine free world, a goal we are
aiming for. We offered a solution.
Another of our slogans called for governments to ban landmines, to
clear them and to help the survivors.
Similar to the small arms challenge, we have to work with the problem
and solutions at a range of levels. We made it clear that a policy alone would
not change the situation. To get to this point we had to decide what to not
say. The campaign specifically focused
on anti-personnel landmines, not anti-tank mines, and not other weapons
systems. It is worth noting that we had
a lot of debate within our campaign about how mines were defined, a lot of
practitioners and campaigners were arguing strongly that mines should not be
defined by their design but instead by the effect that they had on people. In many ways the treaty wording was a
compromise, an anti-personnel landmine is defined as “mine designed to be
exploded by the presence of a person that will incapacitate, injure or
kill”.
The campaign
message was definitely from a field perspective. The spokespeople of the campaign came from
mine affected countries largely. They
came from diverse cultures, men and women, and most people were involved with
the mine issue on daily basis. The
people speaking publicly were mine clearers, survivors of landmine injuries,
people working on rehabilitation and disability issues, and development
workers. They were able to lend direct
experience which gave credibility and legitimacy to our message.
It also injected passion and strength.
In some instances we had more experience and expertise than the
government officials. In dealing with
military personnel that were involved in mine laying and clearance, we were
able to counter their arguments with direct experiences.
An emphasis
at this meeting is a call to prioritise the human
cost of light weapons. This was at the
very basis of our campaigning: the stories of landmine survivors, the stories
of communities affected by landmines, and the stories of military personnel who
laid them and saw their colleagues being killed and maimed. We framed the message from a humanitarian
perspective.
At the same time we countered arguments
about the military utility of landmines. It was a turning point when we started
arguing with the military about what they were saying. Because as campaigners and
human rights people and people working in development we had kind of shied away
from arguing with the military.
It seemed quite technical and difficult but we skilled ourselves up, and
when we started engaging in those arguments we started to make progress.
A final crucial aspect of the campaign was that there was a broad
message at the international level, and at national levels we were able to give
it local significance. There was space
within the campaign to do that and it is a great strength of the campaign. The fact that we got an international ban was
quite a surprise at some point. We were
not expecting it because our approach had been to get governments to take
unilateral steps within their own country and eventually in the region and
eventually we imagined it might spread further.
International Campaign to Ban Landmines: www.icbl.org
“Getting a commitment
through international law made a real difference over landmines. It made governments responsible for
change. Most of the time it seems so
irrelevant and our challenge is to give it a meaning and urgency when it comes
to small arms issues.” Comment from a Workshop
Participant
Adrian Lovett, Director of Campaigns and Communications
for Oxfam GB, previously the Director of the Drop the Debt Campaign
Did it work? Up to 100 billion in promised debt
cancellation was achieved. Not all of
that by any means delivered yet. But in concrete real terms at least $800
million per year is the amount of the cut in total annual payments made by
about 25 of the poorest countries. In a
large number of cases you can show that direct link between the debt
cancellation and improvements in human lives.
But debt is still a burden for a large number of countries
and arguably the balance of power between richer and poorer countries is
largely unaltered.
There are five elements in the campaign which contributed
to its success:
1. Inspiration
2. Crafting
of the message
3. Building
the movement
4. Focus
with flexibility
5. The
‘wow’ factor
1. Inspiration
The campaign was inspired by the connection of the
cancellation of international debt from poorer countries with the millennium,
and then further connecting that with the concept of Jubilee, which for those
of Judeo-Christian tradition is very significant. The founders of the campaign managed to give
energy and dynamism to an issue that had been bumping along by giving it a
time-limited and popular focus around the millennium. We also picked a target: the leaders of the
richest countries in the G8, focusing on their annual meetings.
2. Crafting the
message
The essential part of the message was what we called
‘killer facts’. These have to be true
and explain the problem, ideally in one sentence and no more. The best killer
facts of all are mindset changing.
An example of a killer fact is ‘For every dollar that goes
from rich to poor countries in grants three dollars come back in debt
repayments.’ It is true. It is one sentence. And turns your
understanding of the world on its head.
We also tried to set aside the compassionate side, having
made that point, to say also that this is about economic sense. You cannot keep up a process where the rich
countries give one dollar and take three back indefinitely. We called on
historical precedent where some of the richer countries got very deep debt
cancellation. We picked particularly on
the German government after the Second World War who got massive debt
cancellation from Britain and United
States. If it can be done for them, it can be done
for others.
Finally we said it all over and over and over again. You say something about seven times to get it
heard, about 30 times to get it understood, and about 90 or 100 times to get it
remembered.
3. Building the
movement
The main movement building device was the Jubilee 2000
petition. We set out in 1997 to say that we were going to create the world’s
largest petition by the end of the year 2000.
The largest petition in the world had 21 million signatures so we had to
do better than that and in the end we got 24.2 million signatures. And we did that one signature at a time.
The petition also produced stories which were extremely
useful for energizing the campaign and explaining it in the media. For example, there was one woman, a nun, in South
India who collected 30,000 signatures single-handedly by going
from one village to another.
The petition was the bedrock of the movement building
process, but the movement had its moments as well. Two defining moments were the Birmingham G8
Summit in 1998 in the UK when
70,000 people formed a vast human chain around the G8 leaders as they met and a
similar event a year later in Germany in
the city of Cologne.
Those moments brought together celebrities and the media, but most importantly,
also huge numbers of ordinary people.
The campaign was fairly criticized for not being
sufficiently southern driven, but there was a lot of work done to build the
movement from both sides of the world and to meet in the middle.
As a little warning for those who want to create committees
and structures, it was an organisation based on disorganisation, which I do not by any means put forward as
a model for anybody because it was very dysfunctional at times. But in a short life campaign with a clear
time limit and a clear focus it worked and it allowed most of the energy in the
campaign to go into action and campaigning rather than into our own internal
deliberations.
4. Focus with
flexibility
We were determined to keep focused on that overall goal,
but at the same time seizing opportunities as they came along. For example,
when Hurricane Mitch hit Central America in
late 1998, Honduras and Nicaragua, two
heavily indebted nations, were very badly hit.
We had hours rather than days to get the message through to the media
that these two countries were paying something like $2 million every day in
debt repayments while trying to deal with this extraordinary catastrophe. This
made the gestures of aid from Britain, the
United States and Japan and
so on look fairly insignificant. And
about a month later there was a moratorium agreed on debt payments from those
two countries.
Bill Clinton helped as well in September 1999 by quite out
of the blue saying that the United
States was willing to
cancel 100 per cent of the debts it was owed by some of the poorest countries.
That was not the strategy that we had been working on at that time. We had been trying to get them all to move
together, but he leapt, so we thought, let us get the others to follow. We put huge pressure on the British and about
a month or two later they did and then we went to the Germans, the Canadians,
the French and so on.
5. The ‘Wow!’
factor
We had a “wow” factor in the human chain when 70,000 people
massed around the G8 leaders. We perhaps
had another one when we pulled together a meeting between the Pope and Bono and
a number of other musicians and Harvard economist Geoffrey Sachs. It was a moment born out of the mind of a
colleague of mine who one afternoon in the office said maybe we should get the
Pope to meet with Bono and everyone else said, “Yes, right, whatever”, and
about six weeks later he made it happen 100 days before the millennium.
Sometimes wow factors do not work. At the Okinawa G8 Summit in 2000 they were
discussing the digital divide.
Technology is a very important issue but it was not the heart of the
problem they should have been addressing.
So we burnt laptops on a beach in Okinawa. However, the point we were trying to make
just did not quite catch on.
And that comes to the final point: you have to tolerate
some failure when you are trying for the best in campaigning. You have to be ready to say, “It didn’t work,
let’s try something else.”
Drop the Debt: www.jubilee2000uk.org
“Poverty is one of the root
causes of the evil of gun violence, combine this with
corrupt governance and inadequate civil service. It is a dangerous mix. Here in Kenya we have had a
deteriorating situation for the last four years. The country has plunged deeper
into poverty, wars surround and there is an influx of arms. There is a
disillusioned population impoverished by mismanagement and corruption. Last year alone 300 UN staff in Nairobi were threatened at gunpoint.
Good governance and quality civil service could turn off the taps.” Red Cross
participant
Rory Mungoven, Coordinator of
the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers
The child soldiers campaign has faced a lot of
similar challenges to those found in the small arms realm. They are not clear cut issues of supply and
demand. They go to complex root causes,
of conflict and inequity linked to broader social dynamics.
The child soldiers campaign began as a
standard setting exercise. In the 1980s
when the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was negotiated, a key
loophole to an otherwise strong and very universally ratified instrument was
the participation of children in armed conflict. Broadly through the 1990s a lot of pressure
began to be rallied, to try and rectify this problem, to strengthen the rights
of children, as well as international law with respect to children’s
participation in armed forces and armed groups.
Those negotiations were a long drawn out process. The Coalition was born in that process
amongst the NGOs who had been most actively following the negotiating
process.
Under negotiation was an optional protocol to the UN Convention on the
Rights of the Child that would rectify this problem by raising
the minimum age for the participation of children in hostilities, for the
recruitment of children into militaries and into armed groups, to the age of 18
in line with all of the other rights of the child. The campaign began in 1998 when those
negotiations had reached a dead lock. In
the course of two years, partly through our campaign and through building a
Coalition of willing governments similar to the landmines campaign, pressure
mounted that finally brought those negotiations to fruition. In May 2001 the
optional protocol was adopted.
Along the way we also engaged in other standard setting processes. We had this issue incorporated into the
International Labour Organisation
Convention 182 on the worst forms of child labour. In defining child soldiering as amongst the
worst forms of child labour, we tapped into a new
child labour constituency. We had it included in the Rome statute of the
International Criminal Court, having the recruitment of children defined as a
war crime and within the jurisdiction of that court. We had it picked up by different regional bodies,
the Organisation of African Unity, the Organisation of American States, in Europe, in Asia, and we had it
taken on the UN Security Council agenda with a series of resolutions from the
Security Council on children and armed conflict broadly.
Too much – too
soon?
One of our problems was perhaps we were too successful, too
quickly. In some ways while we are
learning from the success of these different campaigns, particularly from the
landmines process, governments have also learnt some lessons and mostly they
are keen not to see another Ottawa process. There was a very concerted strategy to keep
our issue locked within a UN process.
Partly as a result of the campaign, and partly
because of attention building up around the issue there was pressure to cut a
quick deal. Key governments like the US and the UK who had been as
obstructive on this issue as the landmines issue could see another Ottawa in the
making. They could that if this went on
for long enough then the pressure would become so impossible to countervail
that they would end up with something they did not like, so they cut a deal
with a standard, which while it is a step forward has a lot of weaknesses.
The optional protocol has a lot of significant problems with it ranging
from definitions to terminology. Because
of these changed dynamics, and the pressure that had been built up on the issue
we ended up with a standard that we were not completely happy with, a standard
that was difficult to mobilise around. In some ways that is a similar experience to
what came out of the July UN Conference on small arms.
Keeping Focussed
How did we transcend that? We
kept our own goal. We have remained a
campaign for a global ban on child soldiers with child soldiers defined in a
very inclusive way. We have ended up
with a lot of different standards rather than one unitary standard but we now
have five or six different conventions we can use in our advocacy. For us they are just tools, they are just
elements of the solution, not the total solution.
Another lesson I would offer is not be confined by the process, by
someone else’s definition, and process because that is the UN discourse. Frame your own agenda and draw upon the
existing initiatives and discourses that are around. We now define our campaign in broader
terms. We say we are a coalition to
which has essentially three elements;
1. To prevent the
recruitment and use of children as soldiers
2. To secure their demobilisation
3. To ensure their
rehabilitation and reintegration into society.
We are a coalition committed to ratification of the optional protocol, this is one of our key campaign messages. However it has also broadened to a much wider
range of programmatic issues. It has
also taken our advocacy from focussing largely on the
international level to engaging in more local and national processes.
Changing Structure for
Sustainable Campaigning
We have changed the way we work to reflect this new goal, and tried to
build a long-term campaign base. The
first thing we did was to build our campaign through a series of regional
conferences. We decided to take the work
to the national level and selected a set of priority countries, or in some
cases, subregions where we would make a much more
intensive investment in building the network and campaign. This has taken different forms: it has
involved bringing people together, undertaking consultations, and sharing
information. To bring NGOs on board and
to bring local government actors on board, sometimes even to bring
representatives of non-state actors and armed groups on board, and in
particular, disseminating lessons learnt, disseminating successes and
strategies that have been successfully applied elsewhere, mobilising
resources and twinning NGOs with our international partners so that they can
continue with a more sustained programmatic effort.
We have needed to be very flexible with this transition. Sometimes the child soldiers
network has gone on to other issues. It
has been a catalyst to taking on other children’s issues or other conflict
issues. We have been very opportunistic
in terms of where we have tried to incorporate our work locally. Sometimes we have just fitted our issue into
an existing coalition, maybe an existing child rights grouping, sometimes into
an ICC coalition or into a national landmines campaign. We have also had to be careful in this
process of separating out what is the Coalition’s role as a catalyst, as
something that maybe starts up a process from the programmatic agency’s role in
terms of running sustained long-term programmes.
We developed a structure that was focussed on
supporting and building national coalitions in 40 plus countries, who are primarily focused on the lobbying around the
optional protocol. We are trying to mobilise our network across those different countries for
sustained campaigning on countries or particular governments, or a set of armed
groups at certain times. We do four or
five of these a year, the idea is not just to maximise
our pressure on those governments and armed groups but also to build solidarity
across the Coalition and to create linkages between partners in the north and
our campaigns in the south.
We have developed thematic groups, as we found that many organisations want to buy into just one part of the agenda,
and focus on girls, refugees or non-state actors. In response to this we have
created working groups that allow organisations that
do not naturally fit into a national campaign to participate more fully on
these thematic issues. Just as the Humanitarian Coalition has grown up within
IANSA, an important development has been many of the programmatic agencies
within our campaign have wanted to build their own network, to share good
practice and to do policy development on particular challenges and issues that
they are facing in the field.
As our work has become more multi-faceted, and our goals have become
broader, it has been very important for us to have some unifying projects. One focus has been the ratification process
for the optional protocol. Another is
the preparation of a global report, providing a compilation of information and
data. We also assembled a children’s war
memorial to which we drew the names and identities of child soldiers, who have
been killed over the past year. It is a
portable war memorial which is a tribute displayed at conferences, initiatives
and events around the world. It has also
been very important for us to celebrate success. For example the demobilisation of 3500 child soldiers from southern Sudan or the change of
the Colombian government’s position on the recruitment of children.
Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers: www.child-soldiers.org
“The importance of
humanitarian agencies engaging in efforts to control small arms cannot be
overstated. To date, the information is not available from the most accessible
official sources in countries of greatest need.
Working in disorganised settings,
humanitarian, human rights, development and health agencies are all the more
crucial to providing that base of information that is needed to analyse how to deal with the problem.”
Brian Rawson, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear
War
Betty Murungi, Lawyer and a
member of FIDA, Kenya which is part of the Campaign for an International Criminal Court
The excessive availability of small arms
in many regions of the world makes them the most utilised
weapons in the predominantly internal conflicts that are taking place all over
the world, and thus the primary weapon used in the commission of crimes during
these conflicts. Genocide, crimes
against humanity and war crimes are largely committed not by soldiers with
heavy artillery, but by people who take up small arms against others in their
own communities and countries.
While the use of small arms is not expressly prohibited in the Statute
of the International Criminal Court (ICC), if these weapons are used to commit
crimes as serious as genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, the
individuals that use them will be held accountable. The ICC will be the first permanent
international court capable of trying individuals for these crimes. It is expected that the existence of the ICC
will provide powerful deterrent against committing such crimes. Where they continue to be committed,
investigations and prosecutions may begin at an early stage, thus contributing
to the cessation of violence. The
existence of the ICC will also provide an important contribution to the healing
process for individuals and communities in the aftermath of a conflict, which
will undermine the potential for further violence.
The Coalition for the International Criminal Court (the Coalition or
CICC) has been in existence since 1995, with the goal of promoting the
establishment of a fair, effective and independent ICC. There are now more than 1000 member organisations in the Coalition, from all regions of the
world, and representing various constituencies, such as children, women,
victims, faith-based groups and the peace movement. It began with a meeting of a small group of
NGOs in New York that were
monitoring the UN General Assembly debate on a draft statute for an ICC. These NGOs agreed at the end of the meeting
to form an NGO Coalition for an International Criminal Court. They asked one of the organisations
in attendance, the World Federalist Movement, to run the Coalition as a
project, and they asked the Executive Director of the organisation,
William Pace, to serve as the Coalition’s Convenor. An informal steering committee was
established, including Amnesty International, Federation Internationale
des Ligues des Droits de l’Homme, Human Rights Watch, the International Commission
of Jurists, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, No Peace Without
Justice, Parliamentarians for Global Action and the World Federalist Movement.
From its inception, the Coalition sought to bring together a
broad-based network of NGOs and international law experts to develop strategies
on substantive legal and political issues relating to the proposed ICC
statute. A key goal of the Coalition was
and is, to foster awareness and support for the ICC among a wide range of civil
society organisations, including those focusing on human
rights, international law, humanitarian issues, peace, the rights of women and
children, religion and many other sectors.
In addition, after working to ensure that a treaty conference was held,
and providing expertise at that conference, the Coalition has had the following
additional goals:
· obtaining signatures and ratifications of the
treaty;
· ensuring that countries that ratify develop and
adopt national legislation so that they can comply with their treaty
obligations;
· promoting the development of ICC networks at the
national and regional level;
· supporting the work of the UN Preparatory Commission
working on supplemental instruments that will determine how the Court
functions;
· and preparing for
the first year of the Court’s operations.
The Coalition has served as a facilitator for civil society involvement
in the negotiation process, a coordinating body for the NGOs involved, a
liaison between governments and NGOs, and as a principle source of information
on the ICC. Throughout the last three years
of work by the ICC Preparatory Committee, some of the activities of the
Coalition secretariat have included arranging countless meetings for NGOs with
representatives of governments, UN officials and others involved in the ICC
negotiations; producing and maintaining extensive electronic resources and
print publications on the ICC; and promoting education and awareness of the ICC
proposals and negotiations at relevant events and conferences around the world.
Vibrant national and regional networks have now been established in
every region of the world. The Coalition
maintains its base in New York, and has
coordinators in Latin America, Asia, Europe and Africa.
The Coalition is well on its way to achieving the 60 ratifications
required for the Statute to enter into force.
A goal of achieving the necessary 60 ratification’s by July 17, 2002, set to “celebrate” the
fourth anniversary of the adoption of the Rome Statute. We expect to surpass that goal, as we already
have 43 ratification’s and at least 20 more countries
are well advanced in the process.
One of the most important strategies in the ICC campaign was to develop
a strong relationship, early in the process, with the like-minded group of
countries to advocate for the ICC. This
relationship allowed us to promote the development of principles that would
govern the work of these like-minded countries.
These principles not only helped to focus the work, but also proved to
be an important tool of advocacy for NGOs to keep governments on track during
particularly difficult periods, such as when the pressure was heaviest to
accept proposals by the United States that would have
undermined the effectiveness of the Court.
It is also helpful for the governments to be able to use membership in
such a group as a reason to refuse to accept undesirable proposals. It is crucially important to try to influence
the composition of a core group of states so that it cuts across government
groupings that can be divisive in other context. Seek to avoid divisions into the Non-Aligned
Movement versus the North, Anglophone versus Francophone, the
EU versus non-EU countries. This group
must be as inclusive and representative as possible.
This relationship must be one that truly reflects a new model of
diplomacy, with governments, NGOs and international organisations
agreeing to mutual goals that are commonly defined. Governments have the opportunity to see the
value of working closely with NGOs, viewing us as experts, and strategic
partners. This does not mean that we
forfeit our role as advocates, but it means that we advocate in ways that allow
us to get our messages to governments while maintaining our strategic
relationship. Some NGOs within any
network or coalition may choose to take more adversarial approaches, and this
also has value.
Building Coalitions
Inclusivity and representativeness
are critical. The availability of
information in as many languages as possible is critical. It has also served us well to have thematic
teams for each of the substantive issues being discussed at the Preparatory
Commission meetings at the UN, as well as caucuses to focus on the particular
perspectives such as violence against women.
With regard to the creation of teams to follow the issues in the
inter-governmental process, this has really allowed NGOs working on the ICC to
have the influence they have had. No
single organisation could have kept on top of all the
developments, and a team structure allows organisations
to cooperate to most effect, while allowing them the flexibility to maintain
their own organisational positions.
Perhaps the most important reason that the Coalition has stayed
together with very few rifts over the years has been the approach of keeping
the Coalition’s goals to general principles.
Members have a forum to develop common positions and approaches, and to
collaborate when they agree, but the Coalition as a whole speaks with one voice
only on issues related to these basic principles. Papers and letters that members can sign on
to are produced by participating NGOs, rather than producing these as Coalition
statements.
In terms of structure, decentralization of the ICC campaign, in
particular after the adoption of the treaty for the ICC in Rome in 1998, has
been the key factor in obtaining signatures and ratifications, in ensuring that
implementing legislation is developed, and creating widespread understanding of
the issue among NGOs, and the media.
While you can never involve enough people to make support for an issue
as widespread as it needs to be, having people involved from every region is
the most effective, and appropriate, approach. The encouragement of the
formation of national and regional networks has worked well, as these networks
can then develop a more strategic approach to the issue at that level. The role of Coalition Secretariat is then to
ensure the international organisations interested in
working in a particular region, in our case groups like Amnesty International,
Human Rights Watch, Parliamentarians for Global Action, and others, collaborate
with those working at the national and regional level. Individuals and organisations
are often quite willing to collaborate so that each can be as effective as
possible – they just need a forum for this and to have an overarching body can
facilitate this.
The Coalition has a Steering Committee, to serve as an advisory body
and to help the Coalition Secretariat provide better service to all its
members. In addition, the Coalition
Secretariat must be committed to promoting the work of the member organisations and not its own agenda. The Coalition Secretariat is not an
independent organisation but a project of one of its
members, as the ICC Coalition Secretariat is, requiring the host organisation to be careful not to use the coalition to
highlight its own work. The Secretariat
must exist to maximise the participation of civil
society in all regions and sectors, to meet needs for financial, political, and
even technical support whenever possible, to be the focal point for the collection
and dissemination of relevant information, and to promote and facilitate
cooperation.
International Criminal Court Home Page: www.igc.org/icc
Lora Lumpe, Norwegian Church
Aid delivered by Conmany Wesseh,
Centre for Democratic Empowerment, Liberia
The goal of this campaign is to keep
assault rifles out of civilian hands and out of the hands of irresponsible
government forces.
What difference would it
make if achieved?
High powered, high capacity automatic assault rifles
are most spectacularly lethal in conflict and post conflict zones around the
world. They have been used by
paramilitary groups in Colombia and
Mexico to
commit massacres of peasants and activists; they have been used by warlords in Sierra
Leone and Congo to
terrorize civilian populations; they have been used by terrorists in Egypt to
slaughter tourists at Luxor.
These weapons have also been used to slaughter innocent children and bystanders
in “peaceful” countries, like the United
States, Australia and
Switzerland.
These weapons are a staple of nearly all armies around
the world, as well as some of the most aggressive police and anti-terror
forces.
The idea would not be to ban these weapons globally,
but rather that states agree to bar civilian possession of
deadly assault rifles and refrain from exporting such weapons except to
law abiding (i.e. human rights respecting) forces under the control of lawful
governments.
National implementation of this law would have to be
forceful, and violations would have to be investigated and prosecuted.
If supplier states were compelled to agree to these
steps, this campaign would result in reducing the state authorized commercial
trade in these murderous weapons.
Restricting the overall trade would raise the costs of
blackmarketeering in these weapons and make it more
difficult for bandits, terrorists and warlords to get such guns.
What are the possible steps
for achieving this goal?
There are about 60 states that produce assault rifles
(see Small Arms Survey Yearbook 2001, p. 20).
A first step might be for campaigners in all
manufacturing/supplying countries to press for a moratorium on assault
rifle and ammunition exports by all countries to all countries – pending a
report by the exporting states about where they have licensed such weapons for
export in the preceding year(s), and to whom (including whom they have approved
to manufacture their assault rifles under a licensed production
agreement).
In the United States Senate, a bill currently pending
would bar the commercial export from the US
(that is, from the US
manufacturer to any non state forces) of any automatic or semi-automatic
assault weapons. Passage and aggressive
implementation of such a measure in all of the assault rifle making and
exporting countries would be a medium term goal.
A call for a global moratorium on exports of these
weapons into any/all conflict zones might be the longer term goal.
What are strengths of this
campaign?
It is relatively easy to argue that NO civilian should
have access to assault rifles (as is law in most developed countries, including
even the United States)
and that military and police should be trained and restrained in their use.
The child soldiers campaign
would likely support this focus on these weapons, since these weapons are the
ones most often singled out as allowing the recruitment/use of child soldiers.
This measure is likely to appeal to the humanitarian
community, as assault rifles are directly related to the crisis situations
relief organisations are most often called in to alleviate.
What are
problems/complications?
Human rights organisations might not support a weapons
specific focus, since the weapons themselves are not indiscriminate (even
though they are often used indiscriminately).
Health groups in developed and mid level countries
would find this focus less appealing than a focus on handguns, which result in
a larger number of casualties than do assault rifles. However, it is important
to view a campaign around these weapons not as the only or final word on
controlling small arms trade, but rather as a near term next step that - if
realized - would contribute to the safety of people in all parts of the world.
Background from the US
In 1989 President Bush I stopped the importation of assault rifles into
the United States for civilian
purchase. The number of imported assault rifles traced to crime dropped by 45
percent the following year. Assault weapons still pose a major danger to
Americans, particularly law enforcement officers. A recent study by The Brady
Campaign analyzed 122 fatal law enforcement shootings between January 1, 1994 and September 30, 1995. The study found
that at least 13 percent of the officers were shot with assault weapons.
In 1994 the US Congress passed a law banning manufacture of assault
rifles for purchase by civilians within the United States. However, export of these weapons to civilians
in other countries was not banned.
“Achievements in Latin America and Africa to impose
moratoriums need to be better understood and applied elsewhere where possible
and appropriate.”
Comment from a
Workshop Participant
Greg Puley, Project
Coordinator with the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress and Michael
Crowley, Senior Analyst with the British American Security Information Council
Why do we need a convention?
We know that
irresponsible arms transfers fuel violent conflict, undermine sustainable
development, and contribute to countless human rights violations throughout the
world. We know also that the tragic consequences of these transfers are felt
for years after the weapons have filled their most immediate purpose. Many of
the weapons destined for Central American armies or paramilitary forces in the
1980s are now to be found in the hands of the gangs that roam the countryside
of Nicaragua, or of teenage boys on the streets of San
Salvador, or of untrained private security
guards in San José.
More still are being reshipped to guerrilla or paramilitary groups in Colombia,
ready to fuel yet another war, to destroy yet more lives.
So we know that
the human costs of these sales are enormous, and we know that governments bear
the primary responsibility for preventing and combating them. One important way
of working to prevent such transfers on human rights and humanitarian grounds
is to develop national and regional systems of restraint in weapons sales.
However, in the absence of a common global standard of restraint, states will
always have recourse to the argument that 'if we don't approve this dodgy
weapons sale, somebody else will'. Therefore what is ultimately necessary is a
core common set of global minimum standards to prevent the most irresponsible
weapons sales turned down by one supplier from being picked up by another.
What would the convention do?
The
international community has already developed a series of binding agreements
concerning human rights, international humanitarian law and peaceful
co-existence which establish a number of important limitations on states'
freedom to transfer weapons. Hence what we are proposing is to take the
existing framework, clarify it, give it the force of renewed commitment, and
apply it consistently and effectively to the trade in weapons.
The proposed
convention arranges states responsibilities in the arms trade into three
general groupings:
1. States have a
responsibility to ensure that all arms sales are authorized. Each agreement for
the provision of weapons must be reviewed individually, and each must be
scrutinized in light of other obligations under international law. It is the
most basic, fundamental responsibility of all, and as such is the first
provision of the proposed Framework Convention.
2. Arms
transfers must not violate states’ direct commitments under international law.
This simply re-iterates a very clear existing responsibility not to authorize
transfers,
a) of certain types of weapons which are
prohibited under international humanitarian law because they are incapable of
distinguishing between combatants and civilians or are of a nature to cause
superfluous harm or injury; or
b) arms
transfers to a particular country, where the UN or other regional body to which
the state is a party has imposed a binding arms embargo.
3. This grouping
is concerned with the use to which the transferred weapons are
to be put. This is the crux of the matter for those of us who are primarily
concerned with the human impact. It is the specific application to the arms
trade of that body of international obligations aimed at protecting people:
human rights, humanitarian law, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and
genocide. If there exists a clear risk that a arms
transfer could contribute to any of these grave violations, or be diverted
towards those ends, that arms transfer must not go ahead. This, then, is the
central operative and normative purpose of the Framework Convention. This is
the golden rule. This is simply the international legal codification of the
principle: 'no arms for atrocities'.
What would a campaign for such a convention look like?
It important to
underline that the Convention gives the international community, gives YOU
a future tool to ensure that States abide by their responsibilities…that States
do not send arms to those forces in your country who will use such weapons to
hurt and kill your people, abuse your human rights, impoverish or destroy your
society.
To develop this
tool
- we need
more research to develop an irrefutable body of evidence of when, where, how
state authorized weapons transfers have contributed to such human suffering.
- we need
to build national and regional systems of effective arms control and restraint,
to build consensus and momentum towards an international agreement.
- we need a strong and simple popular
message (like 'no arms for atrocities') to make it comprehensible to everyone,
and that allows people to make the connection, in a direct and compelling way,
between the unregulated trade in weapons and the violence in their communities
or on their television screens.
- we need
a steering mechanism for the campaign which is open, transparent, and inclusive
of a broad cross section of regional and thematic representation.
On all of the
above, the current group of NGOs that have developed
the Framework Convention are eager to get to work, and very eager for dialogue,
feedback and suggestions from all interested parties. Our goal is to help build
the broadest possible campaign towards an international agreement. We believe
that the human rights, the humanitarian, the health and development communities
should be at the forefront of this campaign.
We believe that
the Framework Convention is a tool that can and must be used by all of us in
our fight to end the scourge of weapons proliferation and misuse. We are
convinced that if we do not place government responsibility at the very heart
of our campaign agenda, we may condemn ourselves to repeat the fatal flaw of
the recent UN Conference, and in so doing be guilty of holding the dealings of
arms brokers and traffickers to greater scrutiny and higher standards of behaviour than we do the dealings of our own governments.
Our proposal to
you today is to accept a challenge - a challenge to make governments abide by
their own rules. And though this challenge is ambitious, and though it will
take several years, we must not shrink away from it, because if we do, then the
massive human costs of arms will happen again and again, with nothing to stop
it.
BASIC: www.basicint.org
Arias Foundation – Framework Convention
website: www.armslaw.org
Lisa Misol, Researcher, Arms
Division of Human Rights Watch
This presentation focuses on ideas for a
campaign to prevent human rights abuses at the end of the barrel of a gun. "No Arms for Atrocities" is both a
slogan for a campaign and an approach to carrying out such a campaign.
As the focus of a campaign, it has
several compelling features:
1. It offers a simple, clear, and powerful
message;
2. It focuses on the human cost of small
arms misuse;
3. It provides a framework for the work
required to pursue needed policy changes;
4. It suggests a theme to unify our work,
which has various perspectives (for example, health and development).
How Might it Work?
No Arms for Atrocities can provide an
umbrella under which we as an NGO community can advocate for specific policy
changes that, if fully implemented, would reduce human rights abuse from small
arms.
The policy changes we would advocate
could include:
· Binding codes of conduct for arms transfers;
· Greater transparency, including mechanisms such as small arms registers;
· Brokering controls;
· Enforcement of arms embargoes;
· An international treaty combining some or all of the above.
These are opportunities on the supply side. There are also policies to push for amongst recipient countries, still under the "No Arms for Atrocities" umbrella. Some example include:
· Import moratoria;
· Transparency regarding arms purchases and stockpiles;
· Greater controls on domestic weapons and ammunition production, including those produced under license;
· Police and military reform – to stem the misuse of these weapons by state forces.
This approach creates space and opportunities to pursue international objectives with strong national campaigns that relate to local conditions. The slogan could be adapted for country campaigns, for example: No British Arms for Atrocities, No Brazilian Arms for Atrocities, No South African Arms for Atrocities, No Kenyan Ammunition for Atrocities. Thus the campaign would generate both national and international pressure on governments to clean up their behavior.
Another critical dimension under this
campaign proposal would be regional action.
We could tackle the small arms problem at this level by pushing for
regional arms registers, regional codes of conduct, binding agreements on small
arms controls, and cross-regional cooperation.
This would help create momentum for states to act. We would combine national, regional and
international objectives under one campaign and could both use and create
opportunities at more than one level at a time.
Why Consider Pursuing this Approach?
· It highlights human costs, which are at the core of the humanitarian community’s approach to small arms issues.
· It emphasises the responsibility of governments to tackle the problem (for example, No British Arms for Atrocities) and makes clear that governments who irresponsibly supply arms may be complicit in their misuse.
· It has flexibility that can be tailored for national context, and that can be focussed on both supplier governments and the recipients of the weapons.
· It provides a common message to unify and reinforce work at different levels and in different countries.
· The use of a common slogan helps to build identity for the campaign as a global movement.
· It shows that the problem is not insurmountable by pointing to who is responsible and what they should do to stop atrocities.
· Finally, such an approach can popularise
ideas that otherwise may seem irrelevant to those in small arms-affected
countries, as well as the public in the countries that supply arms, and it’s
this essential public pressure that we need to capture and to direct toward
governments in order to achieve our objective: No arms for atrocities.
Human Rights Watch: www.hrw.org
“Small arms availability and
misuse, affect our mandates and often further complicates our work, whether it
reverse developmental gains, hinders humanitarian assistance or demands
resource intensive medical care for injured victims, and additional security
burdens and fears for staff.”
Comment from a Workshop Participant
Brian Wood, Coordinator of the Military, Security and
Police Programme at Amnesty International Secretariat
Small arms are the cause of big crimes.
It is necessary to have a global campaign to strengthen controls on the
proliferation and misuse of small arms based on respect for international
law. A global campaign with two distinct
but interrelated parts: 1) stopping the proliferation of small arms and, 2)
preventing the abuse of small arms.
1) "No arms for
atrocities"
The goal of this campaign is identified with the "Golden Rule on
Supply", which should be included in state policy in all countries
covering all world regions and incorporated in the UN Programme
Of Action by the 2006 Review Conference.
The Golden Rule On Supply: No government should authorise
any transfer of small arms or light weapons where there is a clear risk that
these items will be used by the likely recipient to commit: a) grave human
rights abuses, b) war crimes or c) crimes against humanity.
Golden Rule On Demand: All states must uphold
human rights and apply non-violent means as far as possible before resorting to
the use of force. The lethal use of small arms is legal a) in law enforcement
only when strictly unavoidable in order to protect life and b) in military
conflict only if proportionate and targeted.
When we talk about abuse caused by small arms we refer to:
1. Crime by armed
citizens, gangs, syndicates etc
2. Human rights
violations by "law enforcers", ie those with powers of arrest and detention
could include military, police and other security personnel,
3. War crimes by
"combatants" in armed conflict, ie
soldiers, paramilitaries, armed political groups,
4. Crimes against
humanity by any of the above.
Please see in a table in the Annex in which the human rights violations
are associated to the applicable humanitarian law.
In order to reach the goal an international campaign should focus on:
1. Advocacy -
Promote the Framework Convention on International Arms Transfers based on
International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights Law in all world regions and
target the 600 or more companies producing these weapons;
2. Projects:
– Popularise the "Golden
Rule", for example using actions linked to sport and games, the slogan
could be: “Play by the Rules”;
– Publish "Small Arms: Big Crimes" materials
and connect it to events on Afghanistan, Rwanda, DR Congo, Indonesia, Colombia, etc;
– National actions at arms fairs or at factories in
supplier countries.
2) "Prevent small arms
abuse"
The second part of this international global campaign is to prevent the
misuse of small arms. The goal is a
global review of all states' use of small arms in terms of international law
and standards and the creation of a UN Rapporteur on
Small Arms by 2004.
In order to reach this goal an international campaign should focus on:
1) Advocacy: focus
on governments at the UN Human Rights Commission and use regional Programme Of Action meetings;
2) Projects:
– Global Lobbying: publish Humanitarian Coalition
draft review to strengthen accountability and training of soldiers and police
in the use of force in line with Human Rights Law and International
Humanitarian Law;
– Community Safety, e.g. Mobile Videos and drama
groups to promote civil-military and civil-police structures for NGO monitoring
and best practice;
– Impunity: seek redress for victims and prosecution
of small arms abusers
– Civic Education: make general public aware of risks
(e.g. "The Travellers Guide to the Risks of
Small Arms Abuse")
The emerging
agenda on Human Security
a) Military and law enforcement organisations should be accountable to elected civilian
authorities and operate according to the rule of law - this should be based
upon international human rights and humanitarian law and accompanied by
judicial and penal reform;
b) All security sector financial plans and
reports, as well as other resources such as personnel policies and recruitment
projections, should be made available to legislatures and to the wider public;
c)
Civil society organisations
should be actively encouraged and strengthened to monitor the activities of defence and law enforcement agencies - civil policing to be
developed with active engagement of local communities;
d)
Regional institutions and arrangements
should be developed to enhance security co-operation;
e)
International action to prevent armed
conflict, step up de-mining and support peace-building and mediation efforts,
including demobilization, disarmament and the reintegration of former
combatants - increasingly this includes co-operation to stem the proliferation
of small arms.
International donors could support:
· International aid projects to prevent
the proliferation and misuse of small arms should promote strict adherence to
international human rights standards and humanitarian law.
· Projects should include concerted
efforts to increase the capacity of law enforcement agencies to control the
proliferation and misuse of small arms, in accordance with international
standards, including the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms
by Law Enforcement Officials.
· An international fund should be
established to provide resources to assist countries in the collection and
destruction of small arms which are not in legal civilian possession or
acquired for legitimate national defence or internal
security purposes.
In order to reach this goal an international campaign
should focus on:
1) Advocacy:
focus on governments at the UN Human Rights Commission and use regional Programme Of Action review
meetings;
2) Projects:
– Global Lobbying: to strengthen
accountability and training of soldiers and police in line with Human Rights
Law and International Humanitarian Law; especially the neglected UN Basic
Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials,
– Community Safety, e.g. Mobile Videos and
drama groups to promote civil-military and civil-police structures for NGO
monitoring and best practice;
– Impunity: seek redress for victims and
prosecution of small arms abusers
– Civic Education: make general public
aware of risks (e.g. "The Travellers Guide to
the Risks of Small Arms Abuse")
Amnesty International: www.amnesty.org
This is a problem that
cannot be solved just focusing on any one level. The task is to translate the solutions into
effective options for campaigning at national, regional and international
levels. Comment
from Workshop Participant
Participants meeting in workshop format offered their views on a number
of key topics, which are summarised here.
Some ideas for the focus of
an international campaign
In addition to those ideas already discussed around developing legal
instruments (such as the brokering convention, framework convention etc.) other
ideas were proposed for further consideration:
· Focusing on taking assault rifles out of civilian
hands could be the raison d’etre of a campaign which
allows a host of other options to be pursued.
It could provide a practical wedge to demand safety and security for
civilians.
· Reducing the amount of guns in circulation. We could set as our goal reducing guns in
circulation by 1 million weapons a year up to 2006.
Challenges
· Participants discussed some of the difficulties
facing the humanitarian community as we tackle the small arms issue. They noted that one of the challenges we face
is to inspire action from the ordinary people.
It is obvious that many people still find small arms not to be a very
relevant issue, a technical or boring issue that does not resonate with
them. People to people connection can
change this: we need real stories and messages!
· The lack of concerted political will is a huge
obstacle. We have to finesse our
messages so that we build that political will.
The flipside is that currently we have insufficient allies.
· It was suggested that one approach would be to look
at the obstacles/arguments that are put in our way and do some work on laying
them to rest - e.g. such as the argument that in fact machetes produce more
civilian casualties than small arms.
· How can we make statistics real to people? What does 500 million mean to ordinary
people? This is all part of trying to
move away from the cerebral to the real.
Opportunities
· The 2006 Review Conference for the 2001 UN World
Conference on small arms is a clear opportunity to work towards and mobilise around. The
humanitarian community missed the boat at the 2001 Conference, and very little
attention was directed toward human rights and humanitarian issues. The path to the Review Conference offers us a
chance to change the political landscape, so that governments feel significant
pressure to act.
· One suggestion was that there is the need to have a
rapid reaction to articles about the impact of small arms in communities so
that if we see something in the media then we can respond to it quickly with a
set of demands and options for actions which can be localised
to respond to the situation.
· Another participant suggested that stories from the
human rights and humanitarian community if harnessed can have a great
impact. Everyone here has got many
stories up their sleeves. We can
translate them into action.
Logos
Logos need to be as simple as possible and should be tested outside of
the arms community, because we have all got used to seeing broken guns, guns
with knots, guns with lines through and that might actually mean something
totally different to the man or the woman on the street. We need to test them
in the real world rather than amongst us.
Possible WOW ideas:
· A trial of governments responsible for arms deals
which has led to genocide and chucking them in gaol.
· One thousand pounds, what could that buy in terms of
education for people. Every child that dies could be a future leader from small
arms, and it could be your child that dies and how that would make you
feel.
· A register of gun dealers in your country.
· Building on the Silent March, and going global.
· An image of one gun and 30 bodies, to highlight the
impact of one gun.
· Celebrities: Michael Jordan whose dad was a victim
of shooting.
· Trays of the human form filled with bullets.
· 2004 is exactly 10 years after the Rwanda genocide.
· The World Cup “play by the
rules”.
· A tourists guide for gun
free zones i.e. empty pages.
· The world press photo exhibition gets a lot of
exposure.
· Tracking bullets or weapons and their victims and
where they were made, ie. this bullet manufactured at
the factory near you shipped by British Airways, transported by a Land Rover
and killed Joe Smith on his way to school.
· A big concert to link up capital cities.
· An arms song, number one for Christmas.
Possible
Slogans:
· Light weapons, heavy cost
· ‘Stop the bleeding trade’ - could possibly work in
the UK.
· Keep out of arms way
· Keep abuse at arms length
· You might not be interested, but guns are interested
in you.
· Arm free zones
· Say no to guns
· Aim higher, no arms to abusers
· Educate the enforcers
· Shun the gun, say no to the gun
· Shot to pieces
· Small arms, big harms
· Small arms, big problem
· Small arms, big crimes
· Small arms, big abuse
· Aim higher
· Guns travel further than bullets
· Shot to pieces, shot away
The conference provided an excellent forum for NGOs of widely differing
backgrounds and mandates to get together and discuss the problems caused by small
arms and how to address them. However,
in some ways, our work appeared to be disparate – many NGOs working in
different ways with different outputs.
We wanted to find a way of pulling these strands together, to
- better conceptualise the
broad spectrum of our work and how it all fits together to achieve a shared
goal
- unite health, human rights, relief and development
NGOs, helping to build a critical mass of effort which would push forward to
achieve that common goal
- create an arena in the
small arms debate for a people-centred approach.
Hence at the end of the conference, the following Nairobi Framework for
Action on Small Arms was presented and discussed. It was accepted by the participants as a
useful approach to thinking about the way forward, noting that although it was
a good first step, it was not yet perfect.
A campaign with a humanitarian focus should highlight the human cost of
small arms – including underdevelopment, social violence, human rights abuses,
fear and insecurity - with the clear demands to stop the availability and
supply of weapons. This is the
humanitarian community’s ‘comparative advantage’. Most efforts to date have focussed little attention to this humanitarian dimension to
the problem.
The meeting challenged us to think outside of our organisational
perspectives and think as a humanitarian community as a whole. What do we have in common, an overarching
objective that we can all be moving towards, at the same time that we are
undertaking the core work of our individual organisations? What do we all have in common that we can put
forward as our concrete contribution to the small arms debate that prioritises the humanitarian dimension? The meeting was an important first step in
this “conversation” of refining the options, encouraging lateral thinking and
innovative responses.
There were a number of issues that echoed through the meeting; the
importance of the clarity of message, the visibility factors, the creation of
irrefutable facts, the importance of having cross-section of voices and
multiple constituencies with a broad base internationally and a grounded way of
working, locally the importance of taking advantage of opportunities as they
come along and being creative, the whole question of keeping your goal clear and
yet being able to adapt to circumstances as they present themselves.
We have been clear about the fact that there is a need for action. There is an urgent need to confront the human
suffering caused by small arms.
Everybody has their own reasons why they know this to be true. On that point we are of one voice.
The organisations gathered at the meeting are
witnesses to immense human suffering and are impeded by arms as we struggle to
relieve the suffering. We speak from our
own personal and organisational experience.
To confront the problem, action is needed now on two fronts. Neither will be effective in reducing the
human cost of small arms without the other.
These two fronts fit together as part of an overall framework
- The first is a flow front - we must stop the flow of
arms to abusers.
- The second is a community front - we must make our
communities safe from armed violence.
It is clear that reducing the flow of weapons to abusers is a critical
step. There are clear links between the
simple availability of arms and the levels of violence – the presence of arms
escalates the impact of conflict and can destabilize a difficult
situation. Stopping arms flows to known
abusers deprives them of the tools to carry out more atrocities. But this is not enough. Work has to be done at a community level to
create the environment for peaceful resolution of conflict, to ensure that arms
are used responsibly and for legitimate defence
purposes only.
The Nairobi Framework for Action on Small Arms
On the flow front, in order
to stop the flow of arms to abusers, we must:
- control the legal
flow. This means working on
international conventions and regional agreements to prevent arms transfers to
abusers.
- stop the illegal
flow, tackling brokers, preventing diversion and enforcing embargoes.
The primary targets of the flow front are governments.
On the community front,
there are a number of things that we know need to be worked on, including:
- reducing the quantity of arms through collection and
destruction, and national/domestic gun programmes
- ensuring responsible use by those who are supposed
to be legitimate users of arms by reforming the security sector
- punishing violations and working to end impunity,
which is also a dimension of the flow front
- reducing the resort to
arms through conflict resolution and transformation.
The targets in this case are more diverse, governments, security
services and other users of guns.
In terms of the campaigns, it is clear that the approach adopted by
those working on each front will be different:
- the flow front is a
targeted campaign, to prevent the uncontrolled proliferation of arms and hence
stop the flow of arms to abusers. This
will have a clear focused objective and be an international campaign.
- the community front
is a collection of concerted activity to make communities safe from armed
violence. It has many activities and
several targets. Much of this work will
be at a local or national level, targeting specific problems within communities. However, some may benefit from international
campaigning, such as campaigning to ensure that governments promote a rule of
law and security sectors do not abuse human rights.
We recognise that organisations
may focus on one or other fronts, or both, depending on our relative strengths
and chosen focus. The framework clearly
demonstrates how the work we all do, even if diverse, distinctive, with widely
differing resources, all contributes to the reduction of the human cost of
small arms.
Hence the two fronts are symbiotic; dependent on each other and
mutually reinforcing, not just coexisting.
Actors working on each front should share information and experience to
inform and guide those on the other. The
evaluation of our effectiveness lies with the community front - whether or not
our communities are safer.
Hence, at the end of the conference, progress has been made in
developing a humanitarian framework for small arms work, one that outlines how
we as the humanitarian community can move forward to advance our shared goals
and reduce the devastating human toll of small arms. There is still much to be done in:
- Building a humanitarian dialogue on small arms –
making our voices heard
- Fleshing out the framework, building on the progress
made and strengthening our understanding of the interplay between the demand
and supply sides
- Undertaking research to build a strong foundation of
knowledge for campaigning and lobbying work
- Joint campaigning, putting our strengths and
perspectives together to achieve great things
- Advocacy work, persuading the decision makers
- Media work, getting our message out to those with
the power to change and those with the power to influence
- Building the coalition of NGOs working on
humanitarian aspects of small arms.
PLEASE JOIN US AND
GET INVOLVED!
On July 9-20, 2001, the United
Nations sponsored a governmental conference on “the illicit trade of small arms
and light weapons in all its aspects” in New York. Many nongovernmental organizations
attended. The following is an analysis
of the conference and its outcome from the perspective of humanitarian, human
rights, health and development organizations that were there. Their main assessment: The conference was a
humanitarian failure.
Why the Conference was a humanitarian
failure
The Conference failed in the eyes of many, especially those in the
human rights, humanitarian, health and development communities, because it
failed to achieve what we considered to be key objectives.
These objectives were to have a robust Program of Action that, in
addition to having strong normative language on government responsibility and
acknowledging the human rights and humanitarian consequences of small arms
proliferation and misuse, would include a binding commitment on signatories to
negotiate one or more treaties on small arms and light weapons (SALW) that
would:
- Reflect the
cardinal norm (the “golden rule”): “No arms for atrocities,” and set a
high uniform standard for arms trade controls, consistent with states’
existing obligations under international human rights and humanitarian
law.
- Establish a
transparent universal mechanism of marking, tracing, record keeping, and
reporting, including through registers.
- Regulate the
activities of arms brokers.
The Program of Action does not even approximate these objectives:
- It is not
binding, nor does it provide a single mandate for the negotiation of a
binding instrument
- It has no significant normative language placing primary
responsibility for uncontrolled SALW proliferation on states.
- It virtually
ignores the human cost of irresponsible small arms flows, consistently
privileging the values and legal concepts of sovereignty, national
security and non-interference over those of human rights and humanitarian
law.
Several issues regarding the Conference process itself were also of
concern for the humanitarian, human rights, health and
development communities. These factors further compounded the disappointment of
the Conference, and include:
Conference Scope
The scope of the conference was too limited from the start, forcing
those states with a progressive approach and NGOs with a human rights and
humanitarian focus to fight an uphill battle to push open the door that was
kept ajar by the phrase “in all its aspects” in the conference mandate. The conference came too early at a time when
political will to seriously tackle the human cost of small arms proliferation
and misuse is not fully developed. Clearly most states are not prepared to put
human security before national security. However the Conference placed the
small arms crisis on the agenda of some regional bodies and some states who are
encouraged to consolidate this focus into action in the coming years.
Consensus
This conference, like all United Nations conferences, was driven by
consensus, which, for all practical purposes, meant the lowest common
denominator. States could water down the
Program of Action simply by drawing “red lines” about which they refused to
engage in any serious negotiation. Many
states did—to the detriment of the comprehensive security of their own citizens
suffering under the threat of small arms violence and abuse.
The most prominent of these was the United States government,
which successfully drove down the common denominator to the lowest conceivable
level. The U.S. position had
been tough throughout the negotiating process (including the PrepComs). Ironically there was no difference between the
base-line positions taken by the Clinton and Bush administrations – merely a
difference in delivery and style.
Other states were either too divided or were insufficiently organized
to make a common front. Many governments
came to the meetings ill-prepared, disinterested and effectively ceded control
over the conference agenda to ‘rejectionist’
states. Still, the European Union and
some other states deserve credit for trying to rally others around certain key
concerns, such as state responsibility and human rights.
States’ main concern with respect to the SALW question was the
‘destabilizing accumulation’ of these weapons, but that concern was not
sufficient to bring states together behind a progressive agenda, and in fact
proved divisive, demonstrating that one state’s destabilizing accumulation is
another state’s welcome influx of weapons needed for self-defence. The humanitarian dimension of the SALW
question, which could have provided the glue for a higher level of consensus as
well as pressure on states to address the problem in a constructive and timely
manner, was largely absent.
Civil Society Participation
NGOs were effectively excluded from participating in the
conference. Granted one three-hour
session of presentations and relegated to the gallery for the mainly symbolic
high-level speeches,
NGO delegates were otherwise carefully kept out of meetings that
made a difference. This is increasingly standard practice for UN conferences
despite the Ottawa Process providing a model for genuine and collaborative
exchange between states and civil society.
Despite the repetition of the importance of civil society participation
throughout the Conference process, during the Conference itself it was a pale
shadow of what it could and should have been. Those few states that allowed NGO
representatives onto national delegations are to be commended in this regard.
U.S. Unilateralism
The Bush administration’s attitude toward the Conference, articulated
for the first time on the opening day, reflected an emerging strategic posture
of the U.S. government that
has little to do with SALW in particular and has everything to do with larger U.S. concerns about
multilateral arms control and the projection of U.S. power in the
world. In 2001 the new administration
has given every sign of not wanting to be part of any entangling treaty
commitment, especially those bearing on U.S. strategic
concerns.
The irony about the U.S. position at the SALW conference was that the
U.S. can pride itself on fairly good arms trade practices at home, having
strong export controls that include some human rights criteria, a tough
brokering law (that remains to be implemented and enforced), an adequate
marking system, and strong but by no means perfect transparency mechanisms. Many have called on the U.S. to universalise its own best practices, but the most the U.S. has been willing
to do is to hold out its best practices as a model for others to emulate, not
as a regulatory system to be institutionalised
globally. The reason for this is a belief that only the U.S will be able to
enforce an international agreement, and that the lack of enforcement by others
will do irreparable harm to U.S. interests. That international treaties may have useful
normative powers is dismissed as wishful thinking; a treaty unable to promise
100% compliance is not worth having.
An interesting corollary of the U.S. posture at the
conference was that other rejectionist states, such
as Russia, China and the Arab
League, could shield themselves from scrutiny and criticism behind the U.S
approach. This represented a reversal of the situation prevailing just prior to
the second PrepCom in January 2001, when it appeared
that the Clinton administration
was counting on Russia and China to take the public
heat, laying down its base-line demands only in closed-door sessions of the
Permanent Five.
The U.S Gun Lobby
A second characteristic of the Bush administration was its willingness
to accommodate the American gun lobby.
Wielding a peculiar interpretation of the 2nd amendment to
the U.S. Constitution concerning the putative constitutional right of U.S. citizens to own
guns, the delegation proceeded to subvert the conference agenda, even though
the conference was about trade much more than it was about possession. To the U.S., any talk of trade controls came
to be seen as an attack on gun ownership, leading to the absurd result that
measures to keep rogue operators from placing weapons in the hands of RUF limb-hackers
in Sierra Leone were held hostage by the overriding need to protect the
constitutional right of Joe Blow in Wisconsin to fire an automatic rifle at
pigeons should he be so inclined.
The “No Arms to Non-State Actors” Proposal
A second divisive issue, advanced by the European Union and a number of
African states, was the proposal to place a ban on arms transfers to non-state
actors. The stated reason for the
proposal was the claim that non-state actors are by definition irresponsible
and therefore more easily prone to misusing the weapons they have, thus
contributing to destabilization and humanitarian havoc. Behind this claim lurks the more persuasive
notion that highly repressive African states facing armed insurgencies aimed at
bringing them down may be opposing arms transfers to non-state actors out of a
strong sense of self-preservation.
From a human rights perspective, the proposal suffered from at least
two critical defects. One, in using the
term “non-state actors” it tends to conflate civilians and armed groups. Yet the distinction between these two is
important, as international humanitarian law (IHL) recognizes the status of
non-state actors involved in armed conflict and bestows certain obligations on
them with respect to their conduct in armed combat. Civilians, by contrast, have no such standing
in IHL, but are given broad protections.
Under IHL, there is no bar to non-state actors having and using weapons;
it’s only the way in which they comport themselves in combat that is relevant.
Secondly, the human rights and humanitarian communities steer clear of
making political judgments about whether non-state actors should enjoy
international legitimacy. Doing
otherwise would harm our impartiality and thus our credibility, effectiveness
and safety on the ground. After all, it
is often states that, with their monopoly over the means of violence, are the
most serious abusers of human rights. To
us, the proper criteria to employ with respect to arms transfers is the
recipient’s human rights behaviour, not that
recipient’s political standing in the current world of nation states.
The United States flatly opposed
the proposal. In doing so its
negotiators went so far as to invidiously appropriate the logic and language of
the human rights community—claiming that “this proposal would preclude
assistance to an oppressed non-state group defending itself from a genocidal
government”—when its true motivation derived from the desire to be able to support allies
militarily whether they be states or non-state actors.
What Was Good About the Conference
The Conference may have failed from our perspective, but the little
progress that was made should be fully acknowledged and built upon. The conference achieved progress in the
following ways:
· It acted as a catalyst for mobilizing international
interest in the SALW question, drawing strong, though often fleeting, media
attention, and forcing governments to at least give the appearance of being
serious about the negotiations even within the restricted parameters identified
above. One tangible outcome is the commitment to have a review conference in
2006 - a useful benchmark for gauging the efforts of states to clean up this
lethal trade.
· Most importantly states committed themselves to “assess applications
for export authorisations according to strict national regulations and
procedures that cover all categories of small arms and light weapons and are
consistent with States’ existing responsibilities under international law…”
Although the Program of Action does not describe the nature or content of these
responsibilities, we believe that this is a sound basis for weapons trading
states to take greater responsibility not to authorize arms transfers which
could contribute to gross violations of human rights or international
humanitarian law.
The Conference also recognized the critical need for such
responsibilities to be codified in global instruments by agreeing to: “Strength(en) or develop agreed norms or
measures at the global, regional or national levels that would reinforce and
further co-ordinate efforts to prevent, combat and eradicate the illicit trade
in small arms and light weapons in all its aspects”
· A diverse array of international civil society
groups were brought to the conference under the auspices of the International
Action Network on Small arms (IANSA), and were given the opportunity to develop
future partnerships and areas of common work. NGOs had a chance to coalesce,
coordinate, and build frameworks for the future. Research and advocacy
materials, were prepared which served to educate delegates and the media. NGOs
also made powerful and provocative statements, especially when speaking from
their own experiences in affected countries in every region of the world.
A New Agenda
As human rights, health, development and humanitarian NGOs we sought to
drive home the following key points at the Conference:
- Most weapons
traded illicitly start out being traded legally before slipping—in a
variety of ways—into the black market.
- Tackling the
illicit trade without tackling the licit trade is an exercise in futility.
- To tackle
the licit trade, states must take responsibility for their own arms trade
practices (as well as security of stockpiles) through robust arms trade
controls. What is needed ultimately
is a binding global code of conduct on arms transfers that would
specifically ban arms transfers to gross abusers of human rights and
international humanitarian law.
This line of reasoning did not really resonate at the conference, with
some notable exceptions. Motivated by
this experience, a handful of NGOs decided to try to forge a fresh approach
toward the SALW question that would place the emphasis on the humanitarian
impact from SALW proliferation, not only the security impact from destabilizing
accumulations of SALW. Working from
within the network coordinated by IANSA, the Humanitarian Coalition on Small
Arms* seeks to bring forward the priorities of communities that directly
witness the suffering of people due to the saturation of small arms in
communities and regions the world over.
The Coalition is driven by a vision that seeks to combine the notion
that the unregulated spread of SALW produces a huge humanitarian impact with
the insight that this comes about because of systematic violations of human
rights and international humanitarian law, and the determination to end states’
complicity in these violations through their irresponsible arms transfer practices.
Addressed to the UN Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and
Light Weapons in All Its Aspects, 9-20 July 2001, United Nations, New York
1. Humanitarian, human rights, health and development workers witness
the devastating effects of small arms proliferation on civilians all over the
world. Providing relief to refugees and civilians displaced by war,
facilitating development projects and the provision of medical services,
mediating for humanitarian access and ensuring respect for human rights often
place our organisations at the frontlines. These
experiences have led us to believe that the uncontrolled proliferation and
misuse of small arms and light weapons have contributed to a global
humanitarian crisis – a crisis which results in approximately 500,000 deaths a
year.
2. The proliferation of small arms and light weapons adds another
unpredictable and lethal dimension to the activities of organisations
dedicated to human rights, humanitarian, health and development work. The
ability of workers to undertake their duties is increasingly constrained due to
the threat and use of small arms, as many are kidnapped, assaulted and deprived
of their liberty under the threat of a gun.
‘More and more I am frightened to travel to the
field. By air we go – small aircraft…by road, the risk of death and rape is
very high. The worries before and during travel will leave a permanent impact
on my health – long after I have left organisation X. I can’t cope anymore.’
Humanitarian
worker, Uganda, 2000
3. The UN Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light
Weapons in All Its Aspects provides governments with an historic opportunity to
set high common standards and policies to address this scourge.
4. The right of states to buy and sell weapons for purposes of self-defence brings with it important responsibilities, including
to respect and ensure respect for international human rights and humanitarian
law. All too often in the past, the transfer of weapons to abusive military,
paramilitary, security and police forces, whether arranged by arms brokers or
directly by governments, has violated this obligation. The consequences have
been devastating for millions of civilians around the world.
‘There were about 12 of them all carrying
Kalashnikov rifles with their faces covered. They asked us to give them our
daughter. We refused to give her to them.… One of them lifted his Kalashnikov
and shot my daughter in front of our eyes. She was only 20 and was just about
to finish high school.’
Abbas Fiaz, ‘Afghanistan: Atrocities
against civilians’, in Common
Grounds: Violence Against Women in War and Armed Conflict Situations,
1998
5. Factors leading to the demand for small arms are multiple and
complex and are related to problems of poverty, underdevelopment, human rights
abuse, insecurity and injustice. Our organisations
have long committed themselves to alleviating these realities. However, this work is undermined by the easy
availability and violent misuse of small arms and light weapons.
6. Small arms and light weapons are almost all produced legally, often
then moving through a series of legal or illegal hands. The UN Conference must
examine all aspects of this flow, and governments must agree to create control
mechanisms that meet their responsibilities--to their own citizens, to
civilians around the world and to the international community.
7. We therefore call on all governments to take assertive and co-ordinated action to:
i)
stop the supply of small arms and light weapons to
those who use them to violate recognised standards of international human
rights and humanitarian law; and
ii)
address the human suffering
caused by the millions of weapons in
circulation.
The results of this Conference will be judged by the degree to which
they contribute to the safety, dignity and well-being of those who live under
the shadow of armed violence.
Organisations supporting this
statement:
ActionAid
African Environmental and Human Development Agency, Nigeria
American Friends Service Committee
Amnesty International
Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress, Costa Rica
Bangladesh Development Partnership Centre
CARE
International
Caritas Secours
International
Canadian Auto Workers Union - Social Justice Fund
Centre for Democratic Empowerment, Liberia
Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue
Centre for Rehabilitation of Torture
Survivors, Bangladesh
Centro de Estudios
Estratégicos de Nicaragua
Disarmament and Security Centre, Aotearoa/New Zealand
Doctors of the World, USA
Engineers for Social Responsibility
HELP Network, USA
Human Rights Watch
Indian Coalition Against
Small Arms
International Peace Bureau
Fundación Gamma Idear, Colombia
Fund for Peace
Foro Ciudadano de Honduras
Fundacion de
Estudios Para la Aplicación del Derecho, Honduras
International Physicians for the Prevention
of Nuclear War
