The Arms Fixers

Preface

THE SMALL ARMS PLAGUE

During the 1990s, millions have died in armed conflicts and in their immediate aftermath. Most of the victims have been civilians. And most of them have been killed by small arms such as automatic rifles, submachine guns, grenades and other weapons that a single person can easily carry and use.

The widespread availability of small arms is a global plague that rages more or less out of control. There is little systematic information about it, though the suffering it causes is well understood. Not only are small arms the commonest weapons in armed conflicts (as well as in crime and in political repression) – their very presence makes it hard for war-torn societies to recover from conflict. The easy availability of small arms can make war more likely in tense situations, more vicious once started, and harder to recover from once over.

This is a problem with many dimensions. There is both a legal and an illegal trade in small arms. One aspect that makes the trade extremely difficult to monitor, let alone control, is the role of the middlemen – the brokers and the shipping agents, the deal-makers who arrange for the shipment of quantities of small arms and associated military and paramilitary equipment, sometimes new, sometimes second-hand. This is one part of the problem about which there is particularly little information, and an aspect with which governments have not yet come to grips.

Arms brokers and gunrunners have been able to get hold of surplus stocks of weapons, no longer needed now that the Cold War has ended. The globalization of trade,
communications and finance has enabled them to push the envelope of legality, and take advantage of the gaps within and between national legal systems. Laws have not kept pace with their activities, so much of what arms brokers do takes place within a grey zone of legality. And if one country has inconveniently stiff laws, arms brokers simply locate part of their activities in a state that is more lax, exploiting the weakest links in the international chain.

The aim of this investigative and policy report is both to lift the veil on the world of arms brokers, and to suggest policies that can address the problem. What is needed is international agreement to control and restrict the activities of arms brokers, to close the gaps in the laws, to make sure they are as answerable to law as any other international trader.

Recent years have witnessed a growing international movement of nongovernmental organizations and some governments, who have formed a coalition aimed at bringing under control the international transfer of small arms from one country to another. The Norwegian Initiative on Small Arms Transfers (NISAT) was established in 1997, in the wake of the Ottawa Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling,
Production and Transfer of Anti-personnel Mines and on their Destruction. The
organizations that constitute NISAT – Norwegian Red Cross, Norwegian Church Aid, the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, and the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) – joined other NGOs around the world in recognizing small arms as the next great humanitarian campaign after landmines. The British-American Security Information Council (BASIC) has been involved in research and lobbying on the small arms issue since 1994, when BASIC established its Project on Light Weapons. Recently, BASIC has been one of the driving forces behind the establishment of IANSA – the International Action Network on Small Arms – a global coalition of NGOs active on small arms. BASIC, NISAT and PRIO have worked together to
produce this report.

The Arms Fixers is based on painstaking research over the past year conducted by Brian Wood and John Peleman, in which they interviewed primary sources, compiled the evidence, and identified the patterns. On the basis of that close examination of the problems, the authors make detailed proposals for controlling the activities of arms brokers worldwide. Unless specifically stated, no individual, company or other entity mentioned in this report is considered to have deliberately set out to contribute to
serious crimes, and information is presented by the authors merely to illustrate the nature of the problem and what governments can do it address it.

NISAT and PRIO are grateful to the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for its
financial support for NISAT activities, including the work for this report. The views expressed in this work are the authors’ own, and neither the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs nor the various organizations behind NISAT are responsible for
empirical accuracy, nor views expressed here.

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Preface / Acknowledgments / Introduction / Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7 / Chapter 8 / Chapter 9 / Chapter 10 / Chapter 11

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25/11/1999 - NISAT