Summary: the talk begins by outlining the development of civil society efforts on small arms control, with special reference to ICRC and NISAT roles. It touches on the difficulties of this campaign, the humanitarian impact of small arms, and the need for sustained effort by directly affected constituencies, such as the humanitarian relief community. The talk calls for RC movement involvement in two areas, in particular—advocacy of responsible arms supply policies by national governments, and gathering and publicizing information about the humanitarian impact of small arms.

Civil Society Engagement

Two years year ago, flush with success in campaigning against anti-personnel landmines, many non-governmental organizations and governments began pressing for more public attention to the devastation wrought by the worldwide sale and distribution of man-portable weapons like assault rifles, mortars, and grenades.

The Canadian Foreign Minister, Lloyd Axworthy, had spoken out about the humanitarian threat posed by such light weaponry at the UN General Assembly during the fall of 1997, and he included a working session on small arms at the parallel non-governmental—NGO—meeting during the landmines treaty signing in Ottawa in early December of that year.

Several days later a mix of humanitarian, disarmament, religious, and violence prevention groups from around the world—including the ICRC—held a very preliminary meeting on strategizing and cooperating to raise the profile of the issue and to challenge policies that proliferate guns and grenades. This meeting occurred in Washington, DC on 10 December 1997—doubly symbolic, as it was both international human rights day and the day on which the International Campaign to Ban Landmines was receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.

Around the same time, Norwegian Red Cross banded together with Norwegian Church Aid, the International Peace Research Institute of Oslo and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs to form the Norwegian Initiative on Small Arms Transfers--NISAT. The launch of this initiative came on the one year anniversary of the murder in Chechnya of six Red Cross relief workers, killed with automatic weapons while they slept.

The participation and leadership of Norwegian Red Cross in this initiative was encouraged greatly by the fact that in the fall of 1997 the council of delegates had commissioned the ICRC to examine the extent to which the over-availability of weapons was contributing to a growth and worsening of violations of international humanitarian law.

In the intervening two years, a tremendous amount of governmental and intergovernmental activity has occurred. The European Union, OSCE, Organization of American States, Organization of African Unity, Economic Community of West African States, and the South African Development Community all took up some aspect of small arms control, and almost every part of the UN (including, increasingly, the Security Council) engaged the topic in the past year.

Meanwhile, nearly a dozen governments are active on the issue. Most prominent have been Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Japan, Mali, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa and Switzerland—several of which hosted inter-governmental conferences on small arms control.

And more than 200 NGOs from the north and south—including the ICRC and NISAT—launched an "International Action Network on Small Arms"—IANSA—in May of this year. This coordinating structure works to rationalize and facilitate the research, advocacy and practical efforts related to micro-disarmament.

Most of the states active on small arms have embraced the "Ottawa model" of government-NGO collaboration in their work on the issue. Governments serious about making progress understand clearly their need for help from civil society in advancing their work —particularly in research and analysis of various aspects of the problem, creative thinking about workable policy solutions, and consciousness-raising among the public and other governments in support of corrective policies.

Conceptual Difficulties

For both the governments and the NGOs there has not been a single, overarching campaign goal related to small arms. Rather, the extraordinary explosion of activity on the issue in the past two years is a result of the breadth and complexity of the "small arms problem." The issue is much broader than landmines—both in terms of the scope of the problem and in terms of factors related to the proliferation of these arms.

The humanitarian toll is what motivates most of the NGOs and governments working on the issue, and—indeed—the humanitarian threat posed by these weapons eclipses even that posed by antipersonnel landmines. The ICRC estimated that 24,000 people per year are killed or maimed by antipersonnel landmines. While there are no reliable data on combat deaths and deaths from armed violence in all countries, it is safe to assume that small arms affect many more people than do landmines—in the range of hundreds of thousands per year.

However, some governments and NGOs see small arms proliferation principally as a crime issue. This framework suggests a very different set of remedial policies and a different set of priorities.

In the case of landmines, the biggest conceptual difficulty with advocacy work was whether to include all mines or just anti-personnel mines in the scope of control efforts. With small arms control there are many more fissures, some of which have been exploited by governments to stave off politically or economically unpalatable control measures.

A principal divide is whether the main problem is existing stocks of "illicit" weaponry in circulation in zones of conflict, or whether on-going legal transfers are also of concern. If it is the former, how do you define the term "illicit", given that the licit trade and the illicit traffic in small arms are inextricably linked? For example, arms that are originally exported legally, but are not properly tracked or secured, often fall into illegal circulation, as theft or capture of state security forces’ arms is a major source of black-market supply around the world.

The past two years’ focus on small arms will not be sustained indefinitely. Therefore, concerned and directly affected parties—like the ICRC and the national societies—have a vitally import role to play in identifying and pressing national governments for the farthest reaching measures possible to reduce dangerous small arms proliferation.

The main areas of engagement for the Red Cross movement lies in two areas: collection and dissemination of information from the field—to the greatest extent possible—on the humanitarian impact of small arms proliferation, and advocacy to national governments for responsible policies relating to small arms supply and usage

The international community has made a great deal of progress in recent years in the area of seeking to curb the illegal traffic in these weapons. An OAS treaty on this issue negotiated by West Hemisphere states recently entered into force, and the UN in Vienna is currently negotiating a global protocol against firearms trafficking. A major benefit of these initiatives has been that they cause States Parties to ensure that they have adequate laws and regulations in place to control manufacture, import and export of small arms and light weapons.

In addition to these initiatives, the United Nations will hold a major conference on the illicit arms trade in 2001.

These activities are most welcome, but a large portion of the on-going international trade in small arms is legal—authorized and carried out by many of the same governments that are seeking to play a leadership role in curbing the illicit traffic.

"Legal" weapons can exacerbate conflict, leading to humanitarian crises just as readily as can "illegal" weapons. In fact, the international community currently does not have enough information to know whether the legal or the illegal trade is a bigger part of the problem—in terms of contributing to the outbreak of conflict and violations of humanitarian law and human rights.

One of the most important initiatives governments concerned about the humanitarian and criminal impact of small arms proliferation could undertake is to provide greater transparency around the small arms exports they are authorizing. Such information is important to aid and relief workers, who might be working in a region where a sudden influx of guns has occurred or is anticipated. Transparency around planned arms shipments (that is, timely information exchange about license approvals granted) could prove to be an early warning indicator of pending violence and instability. While individual states might not be granting unusually large numbers of export licenses to a particular destination, when placed side by side with other suppliers’ export approvals, disturbing trends might become apparent.

Fuller information about the magnitude and destination of current and future small arms shipments is a necessary prerequisite for development of sound policy recommendations. Transparency would also facilitate and improve the ability of governments to ensure end-use verification of weapons exports they are authorizing. If such information were made public, increased transparency would allow the non-governmental community, as well as national legislatures, to play an important role in aiding governments’ efforts to curb diversion of these arms by providing oversight through research, questioning and reporting. Such information would also greatly facilitate disarmament, whether through peacekeeping or other initiatives, by providing some baseline information about arms supply in the state or region.

Increased transparency is possible at the global, regional and national levels. The United Nations and regional security organizations can help facilitate the former two, but such initiatives are, of course, predicated on a willingness by governments to engage in greater openness. Concerned states need not wait for some complicated global agreement. They can and should become transparent unilaterally, by providing publicly available reports on the weapons shipments they are authorizing, as a handful of states currently do.

A second area of advocacy concerns the need for all states to incorporate UN Security Council-mandated arms embargoes fully and clearly into their national laws. All members of the United Nations are bound by Security Council embargoes, and yet enforcement in recent cases has been extremely weak. Since embargoes are usually levied in only the most extreme cases of conflict –usually involving massive humanitarian suffering, and therefore necessitating Red Cross response—the RC movement would be well served to help ensure that Security Council mandated arms embargoes are adhered to.

A third area needing attention concerns laws and regulations controlling the activities of arms brokers and transport agents. UN documents, national investigations and court records and press reports have all shown that arms brokering agents have been responsible for many recent arms shipments into conflict zones.

Brokers typically locate the source of arms supply, set up the financing for the transaction, and arrange delivery. For the latter brokers usually contract transport agents who physically make the delivery.

Arms brokering often takes place in the gray area between legal and illegal arms dealing. Exploiting the absence of standard laws and practices, brokers base their activities in states with more lax rules. Despite the increasingly prominent role of private actors in brokering dangerous—if not illegal—arms shipments, controls on the activities of arms brokering agents in many countries are poor or even non-existent. And governments which have taken steps to control arms brokering in their own territory often see their efforts undermined when brokering agents move freely into a neighboring state where controls are less stringent or absent.

States should be encouraged to adopt adequate national law regulating brokering of arms deals and shipping of weapons by its citizens and by all persons subject to its laws and requiring all brokers and transport agents to register with the government. These laws and regulations should require prior license approval for each deal. Any decision to authorize such a license should be in strict conformity with all international legal obligations of governments (e.g., International Humanitarian Law and UN Security Council mandated arms embargoes).

Consciousness Raising

In order for any of these far-reaching, but necessary, policy proscriptions to advance, there is a tremendous need for public education and mobilization in the arms supplier countries and in aid donor states. There is also a vital need for people in areas awash in weapons to share experiences with and learn from similarly-affected peoples.

Humanitarian aid and relief groups have a uniquely credible role to play in this area. The publication of the ICRC study in July of this year marked a major contribution to the state of knowledge about small arms proliferation and—most importantly—the humanitarian impact of such proliferation.

Several other relief groups—most notably OXFAM UK, in its "cut conflict" campaign—have been increasingly devoting some of their research and advocacy budgets to understanding the dynamics of the small arms trade, and to curbing it. See for example the excellent study "Small Arms, Wrong Hands: A Case for (UK) Government Control of the Small Arms Trade", from April 1998.

In addition, the UN Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs, through its Inter-Agency Standing Committee—which includes the International Federation (of the RC/RC Societies—has created a Reference Group on Small Arms to develop a coordinated approach among Committee members on the specific humanitarian implications of small arms and light weapons. The group’s principal objective is to facilitate the collection of reliable data on the impact of the proliferation of light weapons, through several in-depth thematic or country case studies.

Such work is vital to inform on going policy work, in order to ensure that these efforts are correctly prioritized on the aspects that are causing the greatest humanitarian suffering. The ICRC report helped dramatically in this regard, by confirming—through a limited by likely representative case study--that assault rifles and fragmentation weapons were the leading cause of wounds to non-combatants.

Given the centrality of this issue to making progress on the core missions of the Red Cross movement, to the greatest extent possible, the ICRC and the national societies should be encouraged to gather and publicize information from the field about the impact of small arms and small arms supply on relief work—including the role that these weapons play in necessitating the relief work in the first place. We are particularly and almost uniquely able to report on the humanitarian and—in some cases socio-economic--impact of conflict which is sustained by fresh supplies of small arms and ammunition.