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LONDON: The world has a unique chance starting on Monday to begin to curb the trade in guns and military hardware that kills at least 300,000 people each year and ruins the lives of millions more, campaigners said.
Exploiting legal loopholes and unscrupulous dealers, deadly weapons are finding their way from legal manufacturers to countries like Sudan, Indonesia and Uganda which are subject to international arms embargoes, Control Arms said.
The group — consisting of Amnesty International, Oxfam and the International Action Network on Small Arms — called for the First Committee of the UN General Assembly which begins meeting on Monday to start the process for a binding Arms Trade Treaty.
To support its call, the group issued a report called Arms Without Borders, highlighting the size and scope of the global arms trade and citing numerous examples of current flaws.
“This report reveals a litany of loopholes and destroyed lives. Arms companies are global yet arms regulations are not, and the result is the arming of abusive regimes,” said Oxfam International director Jeremy Hobbs.
The report noted that so global was the arms business that few weapons systems were now sourced from any single country, with components or construction regularly outsourced.
This made it relatively easy for manufacturers and arms traders to circumvent national restrictions on supply to sensitive destinations, the report said.
One example it cited was the use by Uzbek security forces in May 2005 of landrovers to fire on and kill hundreds of protestors in the town of Andizhan.
Some 70 percent of components in these vehicles had been supplied by the UK-based Land Rover company to Turkey where they were then assembled before being gifted to Uzbekistan.
In another instance, the report said Austrian pistol-maker Glock planned to set up production in Brazil where it would not be subject to European Union controls.
And the value of the business is gigantic and growing, estimated to be worth more than $1,000 billion this year — or 15 times annual international aid spending, the report said.
While the big five arms exporters — Russia, United States, France, Germany and Britain — still dominated the trade, with China an unknown quantity but rising fast, India, South Africa and South Korea were all increasingly active, the report said.
Elsewhere, some 92 countries now manufacture small arms and light weapons, while 76 make small arms and ammunition — with enough bullets in the world to shoot every one of the six billion inhabitants twice.
A survey of Baghdad's black market earlier this year found ammunition from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Russia and Serbia, the report said.
The Control Arms coalition said that while there were some agreements on arms control, they were political. What was vital was a legally binding international treaty.
This, it said, would not prevent legal and responsible arms production and trade, but it could — if properly drafted and implemented — stop the weaponry getting onto the hands of despots and human rights abusers.
