The Forgotten Victims of Small Arms

The 2001 UN Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects was an opportunity missed. The conference had the potential to be an excellent forum for developing a plan to reduce the human suffering caused by the unchecked proliferation of small arms and light weapons (SALW). Instead, the end result was a toothless Program of Action (PoA) that failed to adequately address the core of the problem: the humanitarian dimension. Framing the debate in traditional security and disarmament terms allowed arms-exporting states the opportunity to deliberately limit the conference's scope to the illicit trade of arms, instead of undertaking a more comprehensive assessment of both licit and illicit trade. In so doing, these states avoided any discussion of how their involvement and promotion of the licit trade in SALW exacerbated the very problems they were purportedly trying to address. More importantly, it also allowed them to neatly sidestep any discussion of their obligations or culpability under international humanitarian law (IHL), the law that governs human rights during armed conflicts, and international human rights law, the law that governs human rights outside of armed conflicts. These states were seeking to shirk their responsibilities for a problem they have helped to create. There will be no true progress until the debate is reframed in humanitarian and human rights terms. Only then will there exist sufficient international political will to tackle the problem effectively.

The Most Common Tool of Warfare in Today's Conflicts: Small Arms

In the hands of disciplined, professional forces, small arms are legitimate tools of security and defense. In the hands of poorly-trained, abusive forces, they are a grave threat to civilians. Cheap, plentiful, and easy to obtain, SALW can be operated by children and untrained civilians in addition to soldiers. Their use by state and non-stateforces contribute to serious abuses of international humanitarian law (e.g., in the massacres of civilians, in tragic conflict zones, including Afghanistan, Colombia, and Sierra Leone). In modern warfare civilian deaths vastly outnumber that of combatants. In Rwanda, where machete-wielding soldiers have become the poster-children for African conflicts, the easy availability of small arms has created a security environment in which the machete-wielders conducted mass killings without fear of reprisals. The international community continued to sell weapons to the Rwandan government both during the genocide and after, thereby signaling to the perpetrators that they could carry out their plans with impunity. Outside the arena of warfare, small arms are used to commit a wide range of human rights violations, including extra-judicial killings and forced disappearances. While these weapons themselves are not generally used as tools of torture, they foster an environment conducive to acts of torture. Clearly, the uncontrolled spread of small arms is a matter of urgent concern.

Conference Participants Responsibilities Under IHL and Human Rights Law

Government-sponsored legal trade plays a large, even central, role in perpetuating this crisis. Explicit legal restrictions on small arms are too few and consist mostly of national laws and arms embargoes that reflect security and disarmament concerns, but rarely take human rights and humanitarian concerns into account. As a result, what is legal under national laws is not necessarily moral. Moreover, virtually every illicitly traded weapon began as a legally traded weapon that entered the black market through inadequate documentation, irresponsible stockpile management, or unscrupulous arms trade practices. The conference's title specifically names illicit trade its focus, yet the qualifying phrase "in all its aspects" should have allowed for discussion on the role of the legal trade as the sine qua non of the black market. It is this linkage that was sadly ignored at the conference. By focusing on arms dealers, brokers, and smugglers, governments shielded themselves from scrutiny of their complicity in crises.

Moreover, the term "legal trade" in this context is disingenuous. Much of the "legal trade" can be considered illegal under IHL and international human rights law...