National Post

UNITED NATIONS - Less than three months before the United Nations hosts a major conference on international gun control, its showpiece disarmament project in West Africa has been exposed as an utter failure by a confidential internal evaluation obtained by the National Post.

Canada was the first country to sign on to the project, which promised to galvanize international efforts against gun-running in a region where rebels have killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of innocents.

Donor nations have given up to $9-million in financing, and pledged more. Total budget requirements approach $20-million.

But the evaluation says the project, launched in March, 1999, by the UN Development Program (UNDP), has done little or nothing to fulfill its mandate.

"Very few results that could be described as tangible have been identified as a result of [the project's] activities," the evaluators' report says.

Presented to UNDP behind closed doors less than two weeks ago, the evaluation has caused great concern.

The UNDP reacted quickly, removing the project's director, Ivor Richard Fung of Cameroon. One senior UN official called for an audit, UN sources say. Mr. Fung remains chief of the UN's Regional Centre for Peace & Disarmament in Africa, based in Lomé, capital of Togo.

But some UN officials fear the controversy will make it harder to renew a West African arms sale moratorium, which expires in October after being established for an initial three-year period in 1998.

The officials wanted to postpone Mr. Fung's removal until after the renewal deadline. They were overruled.

The document says: "It is essential that some substantive results be achieved [by the project] before the end of the moratorium" to keep West African nations and international donors on side.

The turmoil at the top will mean an embarrassing lack of good news to trumpet at the first major international meeting on small-arms control. The Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects is scheduled to take place in New York from July 9 to 20.

Though the evaluation contains no allegations of major misdirection of funds, it does list several "financial irregularities."

For example, Mr. Fung took over a project vehicle for his "exclusive usage ... on personal grounds," it says, citing the vehicle's log book.

It attributes these irregularities to a "lack of competence" in UN bookkeeping procedures in Lomé.

Reached in Lomé, Mr. Fung said, "I have rejected the report because it was written by amateurs. I founded the project. I directed it until last week. The report has totally distorted the facts.

"We need first and foremost the consent of the country to go and do weapons collection correctly. To obtain that consent needs a lot of time."

He also said the report fails to reflect bureaucratic difficulties within the UN system that "have hampered progress on the ground."

But he conceded UNDP had "accepted and acted on" the report. "What is important for me is the survival of the project," he added.

Omar Gharzeddine, a UNDP spokesman, said, "The agency has no comment at this time."

Illicit gun-running has been on the rise around the world as regional and ethnic conflicts proliferate after the Cold War. It is helped by lax export controls, especially in former Soviet bloc countries.

Private brokers and front companies, sometimes working with national intelligence agencies, have fuelled wars in Colombia, Afghanistan, the former Yugoslavia and Sri Lanka.

But African countries have suffered the most. In some, "it is easier and cheaper to buy an AK-47 [assault rifle] than to attend a movie or provide a decent meal," says a U.S. State Department study.

The West African bid to end small-arms trafficking was sparked by Mali, a landlocked Saharan state, which asked the UN for help in ending a conflict in its north in 1993.

A UN advisory commission that visited seven countries in the region concluded small-arms controls were "essential for ... economic and social development."

That led to the three-year moratorium on manufacturing and trading in light weapons.

The UNDP's project, formally known as the Program for Co-ordination and Assistance for Security and Development (PCASED), aimed to publicize the moratorium, set up a registry to track arms sales and help West African countries establish commissions to destroy confiscated weapons.

Mr. Fung was to head the project until he could be replaced by a deputy director, based at the project's headquarters in Bamako, capital of Mali.

Canada's Liberal government, which considered international gun control to be central to its "human security" goal of protecting civilians in war, quickly signed on. The Canadian International Development Agency chipped in $400,000, a fraction of the $30-million Ottawa has earmarked for "peacebuilding."

No CIDA official with knowledge of the project was available for comment.

But by last summer, donor countries had begun to suspect progress was less than as advertised and called for a study.

Two evaluators scrutinized the project from Nov. 22 to Dec. 14. Their report rejects Mr. Fung's claims the project has helped destroy weapons, as well as train border and security forces in weapons detection.

The evaluation complains about Mr. Fung's "unwillingness ... to recognize the weakness of the program," but admits he has been effective at raising money. "The director has been instrumental in securing donor funding," it says.

He is also praised for "facilitating dialogue with [weapons] producers and suppliers."

The evaluation suggests Mr. Fung clung to the job, saying he has shown "little inclination to transfer his functions to the deputy director, as originally intended."

In deciding to support the project, donor nations had been most impressed by its promises to set up commissions in 16 West African countries to rid the region of illicit light weapons and to establish an arms register to track arms sales.

So far, only three commissions have materialized -- in Mali, Niger and Guinea -- and the first two existed before the project began.

Plans for the arms register not only remain unfulfilled, but are too grandiose, says the evaluation.

Instead of developing a simple information Web site, the project budgeted $360,000 for a sophisticated regional network with "an advanced intranet system or elaborate software configurations."

The evaluation recommends pulling the plug on this system, which it says has a "technological capacity far in excess of PCASED's requirements." The money saved should be used to beef up efforts to gather small-arms information from member states.