CIAO DATE: 08/2008
October 2007
Human Rights & Human Welfare (University of Denver)
From Somalia and Afghanistan to Bosnia, Haiti, Colombia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Congo, small arms and light weapons were a common feature of the human rights calamities of the 1990’s. More than a hundred low-intensity conflicts flared across the globe in that final decade of the bloodiest century, and virtually all of them were fought with small arms and light weaponry. 1 Hand grenades, rocket-propelled grenades and bazookas, mortars, machine guns, and shoulder-fired missiles were the common weapons of warfare, along with the ubiquitous AK- 47--as readily slung over the shoulder of a 14 year old boy as a 40 year old man. Human rights and humanitarian organizations pondered the evidence: there was an inescapable linkage between the abuses they sought to curb, and the prevalence of these easy to handle, durable, and imminently portable weapons. In many instances the weapons were used as direct instruments of repression and devastation. In others, armed groups and government-sponsored militia used them to facilitate assaults with cruder weapons, spread fear, and create insecurity that effectively deprived people of their livelihood. Ironically, none of the countries in turmoil produced their own small arms. 2 Behind the plethora of weapons lurked shadowy arms dealers looking for a profit, indifferent to the public’s moral outrage and UN-imposed arms embargoes.
No one was more concerned about the growing threat of small arms to human security than Oscar Arias, President of Costa Rica from 1986-1990 (and re-elected in 2006). Arias’ work to end years of civil conflict in Central America won him the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1987, but it also left him with first-hand appreciation of the social, political and economic havoc that could be wrought by the untrammeled flow of weapons into small countries. Arias spurred his fellow Nobel Peace Laureates to action. In 1997 they developed a Code of Conduct on small arms transfers and urged all states to exercise the greatest caution and restraint in transferring deadly weapons...
Resource link: US Policy on Small Arms Transfers: A Human Rights Perspective [PDF] - 277K