PRESS CONFERENCE LAUNCHING SMALL ARMS SURVEY 2006

 

After seven years of monitoring policy initiatives on small arms from around the world, the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva was seeking to uncover broader global patterns in armed violence, particularly the relationship between surplus weapons and increased armed-group violence, so that more countries would pay greater attention to ensuring stockpile security and removing weapons from circulation after conflicts.

In doing so, establishing transparency among weapons-exporting nations “was key to moving the process forward”, said Keith Krause, Programme Director of the Institute’s Small Arms Survey research project, at the launching of the Small Arms Survey 2006:  Unfinished Business -- the group’s sixth report -- at a Headquarters press conference this morning, sponsored by Switzerland.

He said a large number of the world’s weapons, about 77 per cent, were in the hands of 20 States.  China, Russian Federation and North Korea had the world’s largest estimated firearms arsenals, standing at 41 million, 30 million and 14 million firearms, respectively.  The United States, with 3 million firearms, ranked twelfth.

Giving correspondents his personal assessment of the United Nations Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons, Mr. Krause said that “the balance sheet is not that good after four or five years”.  He said he saw few States making significant improvements in transparency, and that the Institute’s small arms trade transparency barometer showed that not all major exporters were willing to be open.  For instance, Bulgaria, Iran, Israel and North Korea, which Mr. Krause characterised as “significant, though not huge, exporters of weapons”, had chosen not to contribute any information to the Institute at all.

During his exchange with correspondents, Mr. Krause’s attention was drawn to the stance taken by the United States National Rifle Association, which had embarked on a letter-writing campaign protesting the United Nations review conference on the Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons taking place at Headquarters from 26 June to 7 July.

“[We want to] make people think about what role weapons play in violent exchanges”, said Mr. Krause.  “Most Governments agree that there are issues around armed groups having weapons, whether it’s in Afghanistan, sub-Saharan Africa, Central America or elsewhere.  There was a concern that if the net was cast too widely, [it would affect] the legitimate possessors of weapons who happened not to be State agents.  Because of this, we focused on ‘armed groups’ because the term ‘non-State actors’ meant everybody.  We are trying to tighten and narrow the focus.”

Accompanying Mr. Krause was Anton Thalmann, Ambassador of Switzerland to Canada and former chair of the Open-Ended Working Group on Marking and Tracing, which had presented a draft international instrument on tracing to the General Assembly in 2005.  He said he hoped that the current review conference would “give impulse to that instrument”, to enable countries to better monitor the movement of weapons and prevent their misuse.

Mr. Krause said he believed “many States” had taken steps to destroy surplus weapons stocks and that future efforts should focus on tracking such action.  Reducing the availability of weapons to non-State actors had positive impacts:  for instance, the removal in Cambodia of more than 131,000 weapons from circulation amounting to at least 60 per cent of the weapons circulating outside official government stocks, had coincided with measurable reductions in reported incidences of homicide, armed violence and hospital admissions for firearm wounds between 1991 and 2004 in Phnom Penh.

He said that monitoring the removal of surplus weapons from circulation was something he would encourage the new Peacebuilding Commission to include in its mandate, in line with the United Nations goals of “disarmament, demobilization and reintegration”.

Nicolas Florquin, a researcher with the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey project who spoke alongside Mr. Krause and Mr. Thalmann, said one important policy message contained in the report was that “firearm violence was proving more costly than other types of violence”.  Studies in Bogota, Colombia, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, indicated that the cost of armed violence stood between $40 million and $90 million per year, including $10 million of lost productivity due to deaths of working-aged men in Brazil, and $4 million in Bogota.  That figure also included the cost of hospital care.

Asked how the Institute planned to deal with potentially controversial issues such as the role of the United States Government in distributing excess Warsaw Pact weapons, as well as that of other countries acting in a similar fashion as weapons “brokers”, he said “I don’t know the answer to that.”

The report Small Arms Survey 2006:  Unfinished Business, did, however, highlight activities of Ukraine, which had agreed, under a cooperative project with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to destroy nearly 2 million in surplus weapons and improve the security of other stocks, something that Mr. Krause said would have been “unthinkable five years ago”.  Also, because of severe effects to the population of southern Uganda, one chapter of the report was devoted to the relationship between small arms and the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Reports by the Small Arms Survey project had traditionally been launched at United Nations Headquarters each year, and served to provide reliable information on the role of small weapons in armed violence, as well as to promote implementation of United Nations Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons.  The 2006 report had been sponsored by the Swiss Government and that of seven other countries.

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For information media • not an official record