since November 24, 1998
Dealers in Death |
By NINA PLANCK London
The AK47 is emblematic of a class of weapons fueling conflicts and facilitating crimes around the world. Tens of millions of these deadly small arms - including pistols, submachine guns, rifles and even antiaircraft rocket launchers - have fallen into rogue hands, in the process lining the pockets of the people who traffic in them. The aid agency Oxfam has estimated the global trade in small arms between 1990 and 1995 at $ 22 billion. Traditional arms control methods - treaties and inspection rules - can work against costly and hard-to-hide tanks and nuclear missiles. But light weapons are cheap, portable and easily hidden. With a high dollar value and low volume, they are a smuggler's dream, and consumers like them because they are rugged, easy to use, and just as easily repaired and recycled. They are often used by state-sponsored terrorists, organized crime networks and guerrilla insurgents. There is no international registry of small arms, little capacity to trace them, and not much political will for either. "Light weapons are post-cold war, eclectic phenomenon," says Chris Smith, director of the North-South Defense and Security Program of the Center for Defense Studies at London's King's College. "This is much newer and bigger than we think. As arms control has been in our careers, so will light weapons be for the next generation." Since 1989, peace between the super-powers has prevailed, but bloody civil wars and regional conflicts, fed by small arms and the profits they generate, rage on: ■ The Tamil rebels' fight for independence in Sri Lanka feeds a brisk trade in antiaircraft missiles, explosives and artillery shells, many captured from government forces. Rohan Guneratna, an expert on the Tamil Tigers, estimates their annual war budget at $50 million.
■ Weapons spilling over from the end of civil war in Mozambique plague South Africa. Police found 5,600 assault rifles and 3 million rounds of ammunition in a joint raid on the South Africa-Mozambique border last year, and 1.5 million AK47s are missing in Mozambique. "Small arms proliferation is a major political and security issue at the local, national and regional levels in Africa," says Peter Batchelor of the Center for Conflict Resolution at the University of Cape Town. At a special United Nations Security Council meeting last month, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called for a voluntary moratorium on arms sales in African "zones of conflict" and supported the idea of a special data collection center to monitor weapons transfers. Because small arms change hands so easily, making peace in one conflict often feeds violence and fighting elsewhere as old weapons crop up. "If you're a former combatant with few skills, weapons are a form of currency," says Andrew McLean of Saferworld, an arms control group in London. Despite a 1991 accord in the Angolan civil war, ineffective disarmament by the United Nations peacekeeping operations made Angola a major supplier of arms to soldiers and criminals in places such as South Africa and Zambia. Since El Salvador's civil war ended in 1992, murder rates have soared by 36%. Gunshot wounds are rising sharply in South Africa's crime wave.
Regional stability is at stake. If the Afghanistan civil war ends and tribal chiefs reduce their armories, security experts worry that many of the weapons will cross the India-Pakistan border and fuel other conflicts in Central Asia. "Afghanistan is the region's weapons warehouse, and light weapons flowing from there into the neighborhood will, if anything, increase when peace returns," says Tara Kartha of the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses in New Delhi. The IDSA estimates that after two decades of civil war afghanistan's many arsenals are worth $6 billion to $8 billion. The usual disarmament approaches -- buy-back programs and amnesties -- typically founder because of general instability in areas of conflict. The mother of all buy-back programs has largely failed in Afghanistan, where the CIA has spent millions to recover the shoulder-launched Stinger antiaircraft missiles it gave rebels fighting the Soviet-backed regime in the '80s. By offering as much as $100,000 per Stinger, the CIA started a bidding war among warlords, drug barons and other rogues. "People aren't going to hand in their weapons when the state has lost control of the use of force," says Smith. "Think of all the weapons stashed in cars and under beds." In a rare effort at combining disarmament and reconciliation, former fighters in Mali's civil war built a ceremonial bonfire of guns in 1996 to symbolize the conflict's end. The enormous publicity for the drive to ban land mines, aided by Princess Diana and promoted by Canada, has given advocates hope that controlling the small arms traffic could be the next cause celebre. But their optimism may be premature. Land mines are used and controlled mainly by regular armies, while small arms are sold by corrupt or destitute military officers, stolen by bandits, shipped by government-funded terrorists and smuggled by organized crime. A deep-seated gun culture rules in places like Albania, where defense policy is historically based on small militias. "Canada can't do for light weapons what it did for land mines," laments Smith. "Who ever heard of a land mine culture ?" Still, light weapons control is high enough on the international agenda for the National Rifle Association, the powerful American gun lobby, to take notice and take aim. The NRA has won status at the U.N. as an accredited non-governmental organization, and last year the World Forum on the Future of Sport Shooting Activities was formed in Brussels to lobby organizations such as the U.N. and the European Union. At a 1997 U.N. workshop on weapons, the gun lobby made its objections plain. "Firearms regulation is not an international issue," said the NRA's Thomas Mason. He denounced attempts at international regulation, registry or policing. But while global regulation seems a distant dream to gun control advocates, some regional arrangements offer a possible blueprint for international rules. The NRA may have some catching up to do. The Organization of American States signed a regional convention in 1997 aiming to improve the tracking of small arms. Thirties countries agreed not to issue export permits without explicit permission from the country destined to receive the arms shipment. Jonathan Winer, the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Crime, Narcotics and Law Enforcement, considers the deal to be a breakthrough. "The only way you can track guns is if you've got good monitoring of licit flows," he says. "You want to be able to tell the moment something has stopped being licit and has become illicit." Less promising are vague measures like the agreement of E.U. states in June not to grant export licenses when there is a "clear risk" that weapons will be used by a government to repress dissent. In April, 46 U.N. states called for an international agreement to combat illicit small arms manufacturing and trafficking. Arms control advocates are skeptical of such measures, which lack teeth. Even with the best intentions, "Most countries don't have the infrastructure or capacity to implement the [ OAS ] agreement," says Geraldine O'Callaghan, an analyst at the British American Security Information Council, an arms control group with offices in Washington and London. Tagging weapons, training police and computer tracking all cost money, which the agreements, however bold their language, don't provide. End-user certificates - which governments rely on to determine who will ultimately receive the arms - are easily faked. Corruption is a problem. Advocates also argue that governments should at least refuse export licenses on weapons banned at home. Handguns are banned in Britain, but exporters still sell them abroad.
Meanwhile, the Kalashnikov rifle continues aiding heists and hijackings. Rosvooruzheniye, Russia's state arms export agency, boasts that its Kalashnikov will remain "second to none" for years. But small arms proliferation is not only a problem for the enemies of criminal gangs and guerrilla armies. Terrorists with conventional and even state-of-the-art arsenals threaten us all. Consider: British Airways flights from Islamabad to London take a long, westerly detour to avoid those Stinger antiaircraft missiles the CIA gave Afghan rebels long ago. "A lumbering 747," says Smith, "is a plum target." With reporting by Dejan Anastasijevic/Belgrade, Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town, Waruna Karunatilake/Conlumbo, Angela Leuker/Vienna, Maseeh Rahman/New Delhi, Rachel Salaman/Mexico City, Violeta Simeonova/Sofia, Mark Thompson/Washington and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow |
The answers are at the bottom of the translation.
he original Soviet model appeared in 1947 complete with a wooden pistol
grip and a distinctive banana-clip magazine holding 30 rounds of 7.62-mm
ammunition. With only six moving parts, the AK47 rifle is a marvel of modern
manufacturing: light, durable and easy to maintain and fire. More than 50
years later, this vintage automatic weapons, designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov,
may be the world's most popular assault rifle. Low-tech armories from Bulgaria
to North Korea to Iraq have churned out more than 70 million Kalashnikovs
to meet the seemingly insatiable demand of thugs the world over, from dictators
and urban terrorists to drug smugglers and tribal warlords.
■ Albania's civil collapse last year unleashed a flood
of arms into criminal hands. After a million rifles disappeared from arms
depots, Kalashnikovs appeared on the black market selling for as little
as $15. Smugglers quickly profited from the separatist conflict brewing
in nearby Kosovo, where they sold them for $150.
