Disarmament advocates in Colombia melt 14,000 guns

Rajiv Fernando

UNITED NATIONS — Schoolchildren in Colombia may soon be sitting on chairs made of metal recycled from almost 14,000 small arms and light weapons melted during a ceremony on July 9 — International Gun Destruction Day.

Organized by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the Colombian Ministry of Defense, the national armed forces and the “Vida Sagrada” (Sacred Life) program, this special ceremony in the city of Sogamoso highlighted the dangers of illegal arms proliferation.

The molten metal will also be used to construct a monument in memory of victims of violence and kidnapping in Colombia.

Stefan Liller from the U.N. drug office in Bogota said his agency supports a number of activities, such as nonviolence initiatives and training armed forces personnel in basic investigative techniques, to combat the illegal trafficking in firearms.

Colombian Ambassador to the U.N. Claudia Blum clarified that the weapons destroyed in the ceremony did not come from the armed forces.

“There were 13,778 weapons destroyed, which included machine guns, handguns, rifles and mortars,” she said. “Out of these, the vast majority — 77 percent — were confiscated from criminal organizations and illegally armed groups throughout the national territory. The rest were legally-owned weapons turned in by private citizens committed to security and nonviolent coexistence.”

A recent report by the U.N. drug office also challenged the perception that Colombia is plagued by indiscriminate violence. Rather, it found that the use of firearms is closely controlled and regulated by criminal gangs, rebel groups and the government.

Although Colombia has gone through a mass demobilization of paramilitary groups in recent years, watchdog organizations such as Human Rights Watch say President Álvaro Uribe’s government has since “lost track of several thousand of these supposedly demobilized troops and does not currently know where they are or what they are doing.”

Human Rights Watch notes that “both the Organization of American States and the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in Colombia have reported that mid-level paramilitary commanders continue to engage in criminal activity and recruitment of new troops.”

The New York-based group continues regularly to receive reports about threats to — and killings of — human rights defenders by paramilitary groups.

Colombia has one of the highest homicide rates in the world. One startling figure from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime shows that of the more than 17,000 murders that took place in Colombia in 2005, 70 percent were committed with firearms.

By contrast, the average global rate of firearm deaths for that same year, excluding situations of armed conflict, was about 15 percent.

Most homicides in Colombia are connected with illegal ownership, manufacture and trade of firearms. Interestingly, statistics show that cities that had the highest numbers of legal firearms also had the lowest homicide rates, while cities with the highest murder rates were those with the lowest number of legal arms.

Bogota’s “vouchers for arms” campaign, instituted by the city’s mayor’s office, offered participants a voucher worth about $100 that could be exchanged for food, clothing and other goods. It also included awareness programs at schools and other sites.

Colombia is hardly the only country with a gun problem. According to the Control Arms Campaign, a joint venture launched in 2003 by the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), Amnesty International and Oxfam, there are 639 million small arms and light weapons in the world today. Eight million more are produced every year.

Human rights groups argue that without strict control, such weapons will continue to fuel violent conflict, state repression, crime and domestic abuse.

IANSA’s Alun Howard said that momentum was steadily building to pass a global arms trade treaty (ATT).

The proposed treaty, which was backed by 153 of the 192 member states in a resolution adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in December 2006, does not envision a total ban, but is expected to call for far greater regulation of the production and sale of small arms, including handguns.

“The process will develop a legally binding global [treaty] that would apply to international trade of all conventional arms, from battleships to guns,” said Howard. “The ATT will therefore apply to small arms, and also tanks, planes, etc.”

“There is no text for an ATT at the moment,” Howard added.
Despite broad support among most countries, one hindrance is that the world’s leading arms manufacturers are also the most powerful in the United Nations, namely the five permanent members of the Security Council: the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia.

The United States was the only U.N. member state to vote against the December 2006 resolution. Twenty-four governments abstained from voting.

Regarding the recent gun destruction in Colombia, Howard said that while it was not directly related to the campaign for an ATT, members of his group were also “campaigning for stronger regulations on the weapons that are proliferating within their own societies.”

Several other countries also celebrated International Gun Destruction Day.

In Ukraine, a symbolic “millionth weapon destruction” event was held in Kiev on July 11. Ukraine is one of the countries where the U.S. is funding a weapons destruction program.

The Sri Lankan chapter of the South Asia Small Arms Network (SasaNet) organized three events to commemorate International Gun Destruction Day. An art exhibition with the theme “Say No to Guns” displayed 120 pastel drawings chosen from nearly 540 entries submitted by Sri Lankan schoolchildren. The second event was a meeting between civil society representatives and officials responsible for gun licensing. The final event was a live, hour-long radio program on the importance and relevance of the day to Sri Lanka.

“If you look at what [the U.N. drug office] is doing and the other U.N. offices, they’re all reaching the same goals and all roads lead to the same thing,” said Jayantha Dhanapala, former U.N. undersecretary-general for Disarmament Affairs.

Earlier in his career, Dhanapala was involved in orchestrating a similar program in Albania. In a 1999 public ceremony, a number of weapons were symbolically destroyed by mechanical cutting in what was known as the Gramsh Pilot Project.

Formally launched in November 1998, that project’s objective was to assist the government of Albania in collecting weapons and creating incentives for civilians to surrender their weapons.

(IPS/GIN)