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June 2008 Latest News

June 17, 2008

West and Central African arms smuggling

Allafrica.com has released a news item on the spread of illegal arms in Western Africa. The small arms program manager with the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in Bamako, Jonathan Sandy, has remarked on the continued movement of arms outside countries that are currently becoming more peaceful, and towards regions where there is unrest, including Chad, Niger and Sudan.

The authorities in Northern Mali, now seen as one of the centres of passage for arms, actively seize small arms, and remark not only on the difficulty of finding such illegal arms, but also on the wide variety of sources of manufacture, including Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Far East, and the West. In addition, the number of seized arms found to have been privately manufactured in the region has doubled in the last five years, according to ECOWAS.

allafrica.com



June 12, 2008

Workshops in support of Tracing

Seminars and workshops on firearms legislation, specifically the need for tracing, have recently been taking place. Another has been held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, using financial contributions from the European Union the Czech Republic, Estonia and Norway.

In 2005, the International Tracing Instrument was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, and signatories agreed to undertake measures aimed at ensuring the marking of and record-keeping about small arms, and to strengthen cooperation between states in a bid to help trace those that are illicit.

Now, the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs, working through the Regional Centre for Peace, Disarmament and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, and with the assistance of Interpol, has put on a workshop to speed up the implementation of the International Instrument to Enable States to Identify and Trace, in a Timely and Reliable Manner, Illicit Small Arms and Light Weapons (International Tracing Instrument).

According to the UN, this is the fourth in a series of regional seminars on the implementation of the International Tracing Instrument. A previous workshop was held in Kenya for the eastern, southern and northern African States. Another was held in Togo for the western and central African States. Yet another took place in the Republic of Korea for the Asia and Pacific region.

The efforts of such meetings extend as far as to advise states concerning introduction of their own universal longarm registration among civilians. In the words of the UN Office of Disarmament Affairs press release, "It is also envisaged that the workshop will help to identify areas where capacity-building for international cooperation and assistance is needed."

June 3, 2008

Gun confiscations proposed in Sudan

According to the Sudan Tribune, the Government of South Sudan is planning a campaign to forcibly collect firearms from southern citizens. Citing suggestions that pastoralists are the victims of violent influence imported from outside the country in a bid to destabilize authority in the peace process between north and south, Eric G. Berman, Managing Director of the Swiss Small Arms Survey, has argued that “coercive disarmament will not resolve matters”.

Armed attacks are widespread in Jonglei state among a number of ethnic and other groups. Much of the violence manifests in regard to plundering cattle while using military arms rather than the primitive spears that have traditionally been part of the conflict.

In order to reduce the amount of bloodshed, the Governor of Jonglei has planned a six-month campaign of forcible arms confiscation, set to begin during this month. A disarmament campaign in Jonglei two years ago netted four thousand firearms at the cost of a thousand human lives. With no guaranteed methods of protection on offer, and surrounding groups just as well armed as they were previously, those who were disarmed found themselves at the obvious disadvantage. They rapidly took measures to replace their guns from other illegal sources, with the result that they are now known to be more heavily armed than ever before.

The article points to the likelihood of the plan disarming the wrong people and leading to further bloodshed. Calling the intended process “short-sighted”, it emphasizes the need for other, lower-key approaches.

sudantribunue.com




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