D+C Development and Cooperation (No. 5, September/October 2002, p. 12-14)

Guns and other small arms are not inherently evil. They can protect people and their rights, but in the wrong hands, they spread injury and death, as well as insecurity. The fear of gun violence can keep children away from school, farmers from their land, traders from markets, patients from their doctors and voters from polling stations. Tourists and investors may refuse to visit the area. When this happens, sustainable development is impossible. The Bonn International Center for Conversion (www.bicc.de ) is an independent non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the transfer of former military resources and assets to alternative civilian purposes. Working with German Technical Co-operation (GTZ), Brot für die Welt (Bread for the World), Misereor and UNDP, BICC is promoting the control and disposal of small arms. Its main focus is the developing world, because that is where the need for small arms action is greatest.

Willy Brandt used to claim that "development policy is peace policy." Indeed, when they provide people with opportunities to make a living, broaden their horizons, assert their rights and take part in public life, development efforts reduce the potential for armed violence.

However, the world has changed in the last 25 years. Looking at the epidemic of political, criminal and communal violence in the developing countries today, one is inclined to turn Brandt’s adage around. Today, peace building needs to be a part of development efforts. Realizing this, governments and agencies around the world are beginning to address the spread and misuse of small arms in their development policy. In the South, sub-Saharan Africa is most outspoken about this, and among the donor countries, the members of the European Union, Canada and Japan have made small arms action part of their development policy. So have development agencies like UNDP and GTZ.

‘Practical disarmament’ is a term introduced by the UN General Assembly in a 1996 resolution tabled by Germany. By general agreement, some its main elements are:

1. Removing and destroying military small arms when they have spread in society,
2. Tightly controlling their possession and movement of such weapons,
3. Ensuring that government weapons are safely and securely stored, and that they are only carried by properly trained and fully accountable officials,
4. Educating the population about the dangers of weaponry, especially military types, and
5. Addressing the reasons that lead people to want to be armed.

Almost everyone agrees on the need for such measures in principle and in general. Yet it is proving difficult to put practical disarmament into practice on a wide scale and to make it part of the mainstream of development policy, international co-operation and arms control.

Gap in perception between security
and development policy

The first problem is that some countries, among them the United States, Egypt, India and China, are for various political reasons ambivalent about tackling the problem of small arms. Besides, there is a gap between the people dealing with development policy on the one hand and those responsible for security policy on the other. These communities are unaccustomed to dealing with each other and each other’s issues. While development agencies readily admit that without adequate security, their projects run the risk of being shot to pieces, they are unprepared and hesitant to take on board issues of public order, security sector reform, crime prevention, disarmament and weapons control. For their part, the people in charge of defence and public order are helpless when confronted with issues of ownership, gender and sustainability. As a result, security issues are at the margin, not the heart, of development policy. Donor governments are finding it difficult to spend the money they have earmarked for small arms action.

This brings us to the third problem. In many of the countries affected by the spread and misuse of small arms, there are major obstacles to effective small arms action. Government and civil society structures are weak, the military and police are corrupt and repressive, organized crime is increasingly aggressive, and people are afraid to engage in public action on small arms. They often have good reason to doubt whether the State will protect their families and property. No wonder many believe they need weapons of their own. Small arms action can achieve very little if it does not address these needs, real or imagined.

The Help Desk for
practical disarmament

BICC’s work on small arms issues began with research. In the late 1990s, the Bonn centre produced some of the first studies ever on micro-disarmament, written by analysts like Edward Laurance, Herbert Wulf and Joseph DiChiaro III. BICC’s largest research project on small arms so far resulted in an edited volume called ‘Managing the Remnants of War’ (Baden-Baden, Nomos, 2001), which investigates and compares experiences in post-conflict disarmament in West Africa, Central America and the Balkans.

Consultancy soon became another important field of work. The Norwegian government, the European Union and GTZ commissioned reports on small arms, and used them in policy-making. UNOPS asked BICC to lead an international team to evaluate the UN-sponsored weapons collection programme carried out in Gramsh, Albania, and UNDP hired BICC to facilitate small arms seminars at the UN in New York and in Albania.

The next step was to engage in practical support. With the Monterey Institute of International Studies, BICC produced a practical guide on the collection and destruction of small arms, which is now available for free in six languages. Five of these editions can be downloaded from the Internet site of BICC’s Help Desk for Practical Disarmament. This unit, established in 2000/2001, provides tools, information and advice on small arms control, collection and disposal. Thanks to the financial support of GTZ, the Help Desk can offer most of its services for free, but it also engages in paid consultancy for governments and organizations like UNDP, the development agency most actively engaged in small arms action.

The Help Desk maintains www.disarmament.de, the leading Internet site on practical disarmament, used by governments, activists and researchers around the world. Such users also send specific queries and requests to the Help Desk. In the course of this work, the Help Desk is confronted with the problems that stand in the way of effective small arms action. We mentioned some of these above. From the Help Desk’s point of view, it seems perfectly clear that there is a great and urgent need for small arms action in the developing countries, as well as a need for expertise to back up such action. Nevertheless, the Help Desk does not receive many requests from the groups most affected by the spread and misuse of small arms, and when it does, they often fail to lead to concrete action. The actual users of the Help Desk are mainly donor governments, international organizations, development agencies and researchers who are interested in problems of small arms in the developing countries, and whose queries usually do lead to concrete action. The Help Desk is now reaching out to local groups in sub-Saharan Africa in an effort to make its services better known in a part of the world where there is both a need and an explicit demand for small arms action.

Bearing in mind that governments and civil society around the world do not have sufficient capacity to deal with small arms problems, the Help Desk has begun to develop training programmes on small arms issues. It plans to offer these to government personnel, development workers and civil society representatives in the developing countries and the donor states.

SALIGAD: small arms action
in the Horn

The notion that to engage effectively in small arms action one needs to understand why people want to be armed is at the heart of BICC’s project called Small Arms and Light Weapons in the IGAD Region (www.saligad.org). BICC’s partner in SALIGAD is the International Resource Group on Disarmament and Security in the Horn of Africa (IRG). The project’s sponsors are Brot für die Welt (Bread for the World), GTZ and BICC itself.

In the midst of conflict and failing social and political structures, people in the Horn of Africa are turning to small arms for protection. SALIGAD supports indigenous capacity to analyze the demand side of the small arms market in this region. In doing so, it assists in the development of relevant policies and puts options for controlling and managing small arms within reach of the people suffering from insecurity and violence. SALIGAD’s work is complementary to initiatives to control supply and to restrict access to small arms and light weapons. The project staff firmly believe that small arms are ‘socially embedded’ and cannot be tackled from a purely disarmament perspective.

"As far as we are concerned, controlling small arms would be a minor issue, if we were given the means to do it. There are many among us who are as well versed in the issues as an Oxford graduate. We are experts on how to deal with small arms within the community. I have personally and single-handedly convinced a number of "bandits" in our district to surrender their arms. But if they cannot re-stock their lost animals, if they cannot maintain their families, they will go back to banditry,"said Ali Ethiopia, Chair of the Abdwak clan, at the Nairobi Conference in December 2000.

SALIGAD facilitates dialogue programs and builds capacity for peace in the IGAD countries (Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Kenya, Uganda, Somalia and Sudan) on small arms issues by bringing together representatives from NGOs, the academic community and governments. It reinforces humanitarian approaches to development and emphasizes the central importance of creating an environment that is conducive to crisis prevention and regional security. More specifically SALIGAD supports small arms action in the Horn by:

• Promoting the exchange of information, discussion and awareness among development workers, policy-makers and researchers,
• Suggesting policy options at the national and regional level,
• Enhancing local capacity by directly supporting researchers from the region.

SALIGAD’s activities

The project engages in three kinds of work:

• Field research and data collection by local researchers. SALIGAD recently concluded three studies in Kenya. They are on indigenous weapons control in the Kuria region, gun-related violence in Nairobi and the monitoring of gun prices and demand in Garissa. Research in Somaliland is focussing on how to get the guns off the street. In Ethiopia, a study in the regional state of Gambella is examining the trafficking of small arms in relation to a territorial conflict between the Anyuak and the Nuer. An exploratory study of small arms in the Gashbarka region of Eritrea has been finalized. Another research subject is the role of Gender and Small Arms in Sudan. In 2002 'conflict mapping' and training tools are being developed, based on the field experience of the project and with local partners. Back in Bonn, SALIGAD recently published ‘Small Arms in the Horn of Africa’, which summarizes the findings of these case studies. It is available for free downloading at www.bicc.de or www.saligad.org.

The value of SALIGAD’s case studies lies in their focus on operational details like numbers of arms, their circulation and supply routes, and in the involvement of stakeholders (local chiefs, people from the security sector, NGOs) in the research. This approach is demanding and time-consuming, but it produces information that would have not become generally available in any other way. Thus it contributes to informed discussion about the dangers of small arms in the Horn. It also encourages people who are directly affected to discuss these dangers and on how to tackle them.

• Dialogue among governments, NGOs and grassroots initiatives. In December 2000, BICC, Project Ploughshares and the Quaker UN office co-sponsored a Nairobi conference on how to reduce the demand for small arms. The conference was co-hosted by the Africa Peace Forum. Together with IRG, BICC also held a major conference in Addis Ababa in April 2001. These meetings focussed on the demand side of the small arms market, which has so far received much less attention than the supply side. The reasons that lead people to want to be armed are varied and often difficult to grasp. But, they must be addressed.

Before these meetings, the issues of small arms and light weapons did not figure prominently on the political agenda of many countries in East Africa. SALIGAD helped to change this. The dialogue forums that SALIGAD organizes are also leading to dialogue and co-operation between the security sector and civil society. Earlier, small arms and other security issues had been a domain strictly reserved for state authorities.

These dialogue forums are all the more important because neither the government nor civil society can effectively tackle the spread and misuse of firearms alone. Each side has its own role to play, but it is only when they join hands that they can be successful. By the same token, co-operation is needed between the countries of the region. However closely government and civil society work together within each country, they cannot tackle the problems of porous borders, cross-border crime and illicit international arms-trafficking unless they work closely with their neighbours.

Realizing the need for co-operation at the national and regional level, the members of IGAD have established National Focal Points on Small Arms and Light Weapons, which are also partners of SALIGAD.

• Training & raising the awareness of community leaders. In June 2000, SALIGAD co-hosted, with the Pastoralists’ Peace and Development Initiative and OXFAM, a community workshop in Garissa, Kenya, on the proliferation and impact of small arms in the area. Community leaders developed ideas on how to limit proliferation in their districts. Events like this are an opportunity for the communities to explore ways and means to curb the demand for small arms. Interestingly, the participants brought some weapons and handed them over to the meeting. A workshop on Gender and Small Arms, held in 2002 in Jinja, Uganda, turned out to be a learning experience for the women participating, and, more particularly, for the men.

Some of these meetings explored traditional and informal (i.e., non-governmental) ways to control weapons. While the influence of chiefs and elders is declining in this and other parts of the world, traditional leaders can sometimes still exercise some control over who holds which kinds of weapons and how they are used. The same sometimes applies to churches and other civil society organizations. This approach to weapons control has obvious limitations and drawbacks, but in the absence of effective state institutions, it may be the only option. Besides, state institutions may need to work with traditional leaders and civil society in gun control.

SALIGAD’s output and outlook

The project has managed to develop ideas and strategies to curb the uncontrolled accumulation and excessive use of SALW. Some particularly interesting points are:

• Gender aspects of arms possession are interesting and need special attention. While gun possession is widespread in this region, the weapons usually do not cause serious problems. They become a deadly threat when underemployed young males gain access to them. Targeted development interventions may be able to change this.
• Gender ideologies play a part in the demand for arms. For example, young men seek arms in order to raise the money for bride price through cattle raiding, or to move from one age group to the next. In some cultures the acquisition of small arms is a rite of passage. Such customs and attitudes can be changed, but this takes much time and effort.
• Urban crimes with small arms are rampant in major cities, and in the rural areas small arms have become a part of daily life of people, especially in nomadic society. The armed competition for natural resources can only be stopped if the rivals are disarmed and offered alternative economic opportunities, perhaps as part of a plan to protect and cultivate natural resources.
• Control of small arms along porous borders, like the one between Kenya and Somalia, requires joint border patrols. The rural people living on both side of the border area must be involved in such control measures.
• The small arms circulating in the region usually come from stocks that are already in the region, rather than from outside. Weapons flow from conflict to conflict and are used time and again. Therefore the registration, marking and licensing of private and state owned weapons and the secure storage of government stockpiles are crucially important.

Another key issue is ammunition. It is the bullet, rather than the gun, that kills. And unlike the gun, it can only be used once. Unfortunately, the sources and flows of ammunition are even less transparent than the traffic in guns. Here is another important topic for small arms action and research.