Sunday, March 1, 2009

Somalia a land of chaos, awash in weapons

Country is centrepiece of Toronto filmmaker's connect-the-dots study of global arms trade

So much blood has drenched the red dust of Somalia that it forms a dry river of death beneath the feet of the latest killers and victims.

Last week, another 80 people died in battles between African Union peacekeepers and Islamist rebels, as terrified civilians fled the capital Mogadishu and the town of Hudur to the south.

During the Islamists' two-year struggle to dislodge a teetering transitional government, some 16,000 people have been killed, a million others forced from their homes and more than one-third of the country's 9.5 million people surviving only with the help of outside aid.

In spite of a UN arms embargo, Somalia is awash in weapons. It is a land where chaos reigns supreme, fuelled by an arms trade that begins in capitals half a world away.



The trade is directed by profiteering middlemen who depend on pilots and truckers willing to take on some of the world's most dangerous assignments.

The deadly connections are documented in Running Guns: A Journey into the Small Arms Trade, airing tonight on History Television.

The film, by Toronto-based Shelley Saywell, recounts a three-year investigation of a trade that stretches unchecked from the Horn of Africa to Bosnia, Paris, the former Soviet Union and beyond.

This week in New York, international diplomats are meeting to work out an arms treaty aimed at plugging some of the legal loopholes that allow an unfettered gun trade so prolific that 8 million new weapons a year are added to a massive global stockpile that already supplies one gun to every 10th person on the planet.

In Somalia, shipments of weapons arrive by sea from Yemen. The Mandera Triangle – where Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia meet – is a conveyer belt that moves arms to and from all three countries, and across the African continent.

After two decades of anarchy, guns have become ingrained in Somali society.

"There's no economy ... so we use guns to rob people to feed our families," a militia member in a Somali border town admitted to Saywell. Another added chillingly: "We steal things and rape women with them."

When Somalia's government collapsed in 1991, a stockpile of weapons systems and ammunition was up for grabs, says Matt Bryden, former director of the International Crisis Group's Horn of Africa project.

"Militias took control of the stocks and Somalia became one of the most heavily armed societies, no longer a state but people holding weapons and a brutal civil war."

Over the years, the guns have been recycled throughout the region and newer models added as local militias and merchants upgrade their stocks.

Somalia's neighbours have become part of the problem.

In Kenya, nomadic pastoralists barter their cattle for rifles, turning local rivalries into bloodbaths. And in Nairobi, truckloads of smuggled guns from Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan are actually rented out to bandits and hit men who pay with a percentage of their take.

Arms monitors say the guns come from a surreal mix of sources that includes China, the United States, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Ukraine, Finland and North Korea.

Some of the weapons are bought legally but change hands rapidly, managed by dealers who steer them to illegal destinations, often with the use of phony end-user certificates that make their transport appear legitimate.

One alleged dealer, Victor Bout, is suspected of running an arms network from the former Soviet Union to Africa and the Middle East. Another, Syrian-born Monzer al-Kasser, was last week sentenced to 30 years by a U.S. court for conspiring to sell weapons to Colombian militants.

Phoenix, Ariz., gun store owner George Iknadosian is accused of selling hundreds of rifles to smugglers who delivered them to a Mexican drug cartel.

Many arms dealers are well known to investigators and the media, but they're protected by powerful patrons and lax laws.

"The intelligence agencies of various powers need these guys so they can maintain a veneer of deniability," says Laura Lumpe, author of Running Guns: The Global Black Market in Small Arms.

Those who monitor worldwide arms shipments look to a future treaty that would make governments more accountable for what they sell, and to whom.

This treaty would require any country where part of an international transfer takes place to officially authorize the transaction – reducing the possibility of diverting weapons to illegal destinations.

Advocates say the effects of the burgeoning gun trade are so catastrophic that the effort must be made to push the treaty through, possibly by 2012.

"Small arms are a weapon of mass destruction," says Senator Roméo Dallaire, who has campaigned for the treaty. "They kill and keep on killing."

But although backed by Canada, Britain and other countries, the treaty is not supported by the world's largest arms seller, the United States, nor Russia and China. Enforcement would be difficult without the agreement of such major players.

Source: TheStar.com

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