Amnesty Magazine
Taking Aim at the Global Gun Trade
In the minute it takes you to read this page, someone somewhere will be shot dead. Several others will be wounded, and many more will be threatened with guns. Every minute of every day.
BY LORA LUMPE
Lora Lumpe is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC. She edited Running Guns: the Global Black Market in Small Arms (Zed, 2000) and is a member of Amnesty International USA's working group on military, security and police.
One minute in February 2000 it was 6-year-old Kayla Rolland’s turn. A first-grade classmate killed her with a gun he had found in his temporary home, a crack house in Flint, Mich. One minute in 1998 it was Camila Magalhaes Lima’s turn. The 11-year-old was caught in the crossfire of gang-police warfare while walking home from school in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Luckier than Kayla, Camila is in a wheelchair for life. My minute came in 1996 in Nairobi, Kenya. I was carjacked, kidnapped with a revolver to my head, molested, robbed, and dumped in a thicket. I was not shot. I was lucky.
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 Kenyan police prepare to burn some eight thousand guns recovered from criminals over several decades.The burning of arms is in line with an agreement reached by states in the Horn of Africa and Great Lakes region binding them to stop the proliferation of illegal small arms. May 2003. (© AFP Photo / Simon Maina) |
Getting a gun (or guns) is, generally speaking, easy—certainly easier than getting a decent job in many parts of the world. At least 640 million firearms are in circulation—one for every ten people on earth. This global glut makes weapons all too available to those who would misuse them—whether government forces, insurgent armies, fear-addled citizens, or criminals. In a 1999 report, the International Committee of the Red Cross found that “in the era of globalization, there are more firearms getting into the hands of more people with fewer restraints.”
The results? According to the World Health Organization, small arms are the main tool of death for about 300,000 people every year in wars from Afghanistan to the Democratic Republic of Congo, from Colombia to Liberia. The victims, says the Red Cross, are just as likely to be civilians as soldiers. An additional 200,000 people die every year from gunshots fired in criminal violence, suicide, and accidents in “peaceful” places like Flint, Nairobi, and in Rio de Janeiro, where guns have become the leading cause of death among young male Brazilians.
This half a million annual toll is already tragic, but it excludes the countless wounded survivors and shattered families. And it masks wartime practices related to gun use such as torture, mass rape, forced displacement, and forced recruitment of child soldiers. “Small arms have become the tools of choice in facilitating or executing widespread human rights violations,” says Barbara Frey, special rapporteur for the U.N. Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights.
In October, Amnesty International, along with Oxfam and an international coalition of 500 gun control groups, launched an international campaign to control the global arms trade. They are demanding that all governments end arms shipments likely to facilitate human rights abuses. The coalition is also telling governments to take steps necessary to protect their own citizens from gun violence. “Unregulated or loosely controlled weapons sales within countries permit the internal trafficking of weapons that put guns into the hands of torturers and murderers,” AIUSA executive director William Schulz told a rally at the United Nations in July 2001. “The fact that such killers can all too readily gain access to guns and destroy lives in this country should be seen as a critical human rights issue.”
The campaign is gaining global support from activists, and in one case, from a government that exports arms. Brazilian President Luis Inacio da Silva (Lula) is trying to curb gun trafficking by addressing the causes of violence. At a recent meeting of the G-8, the world’s most powerful states, Lula attended and proposed a tax on all arms sales to provide funds to abolish global hunger. Doing so, he said, “would not only give food to those in need but would also create the conditions necessary to strike at the structural roots of hunger”—the armed violence that diverts food from people’s bellies and resources from long-term development.
He is building on the efforts of a powerful local movement. In Rio—Camila’s home and one of the most gun-violent cities on earth—the citizens’ movement Viva Rio has worked with local governments in the past few years to train police in less violent tactics, to collect and destroy 110,000 weapons, and to pass a national law limiting civilian gun ownership. The result, so far, is that the sharp increase in gun violence in Rio’s slums over the past two decades has leveled off.
The G-8—which includes the world’s leading arms makers and buyers—did not embrace Lula’s proposal. And the United States—the largest gun manufacturing, gun importing, and gun exporting nation—has rejected tightening international regulations: “We do not support measures that would constrain legal trade and legal manufacturing of small arms and light weapons,” John Bolton, the under secretary of state for Arms Control and International Security, said in a speech to the opening session of a July 2001 U.N. conference on gun-running.
Washington’s definition of what constitutes legal trade in arms is disputed by Amnesty International and other human rights groups. As tautologically defined by Bolton, any transfer of firearms that Washington approves is legal—no matter how egregious the human rights record of the recipient. Amnesty International’s “Control Arms” campaign is working to remind governments that basic international humanitarian and human rights laws (the Geneva Conventions, Genocide Convention, U.N. Charter, etc.) ban arming governments that commit torture or genocide, that attack civilians as a tactic of war, or that are under a U.N. arms embargo.
Washington has a vested interest in its interpretation of the law. U.S.
companies produce half the world’s annual total of 8 million firearms.
And as part of its “war on terror,” the U.S. government has
stepped up military aid, including shipments of guns, to many governments—including
Georgia, Israel, Nepal, the Philippines, Uzbekistan and Yemen—that
the State Department acknowledges engage in torture or assassination.
Many other governments have blood and cordite on their hands and cash
in their coffers. According to the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based think
tank, some 1,135 companies manufacture guns in 98 countries. In addition,
with the end of the cold war, several Eastern European countries put up
much of their arsenals for sale. And middlemen—usually residing
in Western Europe—use globalized communication, transport, and trade
to facilitate the movement of these arms into war zones—often in
violation of U.N. embargoes.
This increasing international trade—both illicit and licit—has inflamed local conflicts. After neighboring Somalia dissolved into armed chaos in the early 1990s, assault rifles, pistols, and revolvers flowed into Kenya, where I was kidnapped. An AK-47, the most common assault rifle, used to cost the equivalent of 60 head of cattle in Kenya; now it can be exchanged for a chicken. In addition to fueling a crime wave in Nairobi, this flood of weapons has transformed tensions among pastoral tribes in Kenya into much deadlier armed conflicts. And the weapons spread like bad weather—over the borders into Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where more than 3 million civilians have been killed in the past five years. In late 2001, Amnesty International found evidence of North Korean, Chinese, Russian, and Bulgarian or Slovak weapons around Kisangani, the scene of some of the worst bloodletting in the DRC.
This pattern of proliferation has been repeated in Central America, South Asia, and almost every other part of the world where conflict reigns. In West Africa, guns flowed to both the government of Liberia and then-rebel leader Charles Taylor’s forces in the late 1980s, then on to Taylor’s proxy gang—the butchering RUF—in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, then back into Liberia to both Taylor-as-president and armed opposition groups in the ongoing fighting in that country.
The guns do not fall just into the hands of militaries. American civilians own fully one third of the world’s 640 million guns, and civilians around the world are increasingly armed. Clearly, some of the 1,500 weapons that the State Department approved for sale to Brazil in 1999 ended up in gang members’ hands. Viva Rio has recovered more than 6,500 American-made guns used in violence in recent years. In Rio alone some 5,000 to 6,000 children are armed, according to a recent BBC report.
American guns sold locally and sometimes legally in gun shops or at gun shows in places such as Tampa, Miami, Houston, or San Diego can find their way illicitly into the hands of drug cartels in Mexico and gangs in Jamaica. Most commonly, the smugglers use a “straw purchaser”—a local citizen with no criminal record or documented mental instability—to buy multiple guns for a trafficker who then moves them across borders on foot or in hidden compartments of trucks or cars.
“Heading south, the border is pretty much open,” said J.J. Ballesteros, a U.S. attaché in Mexico for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF). His agency is responsible for curbing the traffic in firearms within and from the United States, in part by tracing purchases. During the first eight months of this year, the Mexican government gave BATF more than 17,000 guns of U.S. origin that were recovered from local crimes. These imported weapons contributed to Mexico’s 3,589 shooting deaths in 2000 and helped boost the country to fifth place worldwide for gun deaths per capita.
In the late 1990s, Amnesty International, Oxfam, Viva Rio, and hundreds of other groups began demanding international action to cut the killing by reducing availability of arms to both civilians and militaries likely to misuse them. Their demands led to the 2001 conference on gun-running, the first ever at the United Nations. Despite initial optimism, John Bolton’s opening statement and Washington’s staunch refusal to agree to any regulation of civilian gun ownership ensured the outcome: The conference issued a toothless “program of action” that in fact requires no action.
The governments of the United States and other countries, including China and Russia, see new regulation as limiting their commercial and foreign policy options, while arms manufacturers see a threat to their bottom line. Small arms manufacturing in the United States is a $2 billion a year industry. The profits are handsome and the exporting companies—as well as the National Rifle Association—have considerable political clout. Bob Barr, then a Republican Congressman from Georgia and a board member of the NRA, was part of the official U.S. delegation to the 2001 U.N. gun conference.
But the human rights groups calling for increased regulation are going over the heads of governments. Activists around the world are building a mass movement of people from all walks of life, in all kinds of places, who demand an end to the business-as-usual that is killing, torturing, wounding, raping, and threatening so many.
Meanwhile, the death toll mounts. Globally, an estimated 500,000 people die annually. Closer to home, the September 11 terror attacks that killed 3,000 people provoked worldwide outrage. In the two years since, more than 60,000 Americans have died from firearms; half were homicides. Since Kayla was killed, 20,000 other children in the U.S.—each with a name, a family, a story —have been cut down.
It was their minute.
