Small arms trade provides true weapons of global mass destruction

I had managed to wangle my way aboard only the second humanitarian aid flight to have reached the country since the upsurge of the civil war there a few weeks before. 

The aircraft was flown by a group of volunteer pilots who told me that days earlier, while landing on the first aid flight, they had almost collided with an unscheduled incoming cargo plane. 

One of the pilots on my flight, a 58-year-old Swede, told me how they later found out the aircraft with which they had nearly collided was flying in arms and ammunition for the forces of Liberia’s then-president Charles Taylor.

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“It’s always the same across Africa, you never know who is flying what,” the pilot told me, before another member of this own crew admitted to having “ferried a few bullets” in his time.

Two years after that encounter in Liberia I wrote a newspaper article entitled, From Factory To The Firing Line: The Story Of One Bullet, in which I endeavoured to reveal how legally manufactured AK-47 bullets make their journey from point of manufacture and sale all the way into the hands of mercenaries, militias and the child soldiers in Africa often press-ganged into doing their violent bidding. 

Around that time, the movie Lord Of War, starring Nicolas Cage and based on the life of the illegal arms dealer Viktor Bout (below) had been released, drawing attention to the nefarious global trade that had earned Bout the epithet the “Merchant of Death”.

These “merchants” of the arms trade, as this week’s in-depth series of articles in The National have shown, come in a variety of guises. From the up-front giant legal arms manufacturers right through to those like Bout and others, whose international reach is no less massive even if carried out in a much more covert and shadowy way. 

It’s long been recognised that the vast majority of arms sales to human rights-abusing regimes and into conflict areas are not only legal, but actively supported by governments. Many of these “legal” sales violate the selling countries’ own arms export laws and of course when things get tricky, there is always the illicit route.

Right now, much of the current attention on the arms trade has come as a result of legal arms sales to Israel by countries like the US and UK. This, too, has tended to focus on the big business and government provision of often sophisticated weaponry like fighter aircraft, helicopters, guided missiles, radar and electronic warfare systems, tanks and armoured vehicles.

But as anti-arms trade and human rights activists have long pointed out, it’s the provision of basic small arms and light weapons like the ubiquitous AK-47 “Kalashnikov” and similar guns that cumulatively account for most of the deaths in conflicts around the world.

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Sub-Saharan Africa has long been at the forefront of those regions that suffered the most from the effects of the illicit small arms trade. These weapons while mainly produced outside the continent, are still acquired and used by unauthorised recipients and illegally armed groups within Africa.

Small arms are attractive tools of violence for several reasons. They are widely available, low in cost, extremely lethal, simple to use, durable, highly portable, easily concealed, and possess legitimate military, police, and civilian uses. As a result they are present in virtually every society. 

Back when I first wrote about small arms in 2005 there were estimated to be 100 million AK-47s across the planet. So universal has the weapon become that the rifle’s familiar silhouette with its banana-shaped magazine clip is part of modern iconography, making its way onto the flag of the Islamist Hezbollah movement and the Mozambique national coat of arms.

In other African countries, Kalash – a shortened form of Kalashnikov – has even become a boys’ name.

In recent years despite regional and global initiatives to stem the illicit small arms trade into Africa and elsewhere, it still continues at terrifying levels.

As a result, a cascade of consequences have spilled across Africa for decades, destabilising nations, spreading a tide of trafficked weapons into villages, towns, and cities.

And so, while war and the arms trade fill the bank accounts of large conglomerates and individuals they simultaneously have plunged millions into poverty. It’s estimated that armed violence costs Africa $18 billion per year, and to put this in some kind of context, it’s approximately proportionally equivalent to a substantial chunk of the annual sum of development aid to the entire continent. 

Today, in nearly 50 conflict zones around the world, some one and a half billion people live under the threat of violence and in the main the execution of that violence is carried out not by “sophisticated” weapons, but by basic small arms like the Kalashnikov and similar assault rifles. 

This year 2024 marks 10 years since the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) entered into force. But having such an agreement on paper is one thing, while making sure it makes a difference to people on the ground in the real world is something else again. 

READ MORE: As Israel arms sales continue, does the UK have weapons embargoes on other nations?

As one UN official observed back in 2022: “We cannot keep mopping up the damage while the pipeline keeps leaking.”

If that leak is to be plugged, then obviously tighter global controls are imperative. The question is whether the political will needed to implement such legislation exists against the murky backdrop of a lucrative business both “legal” and illicit. And the challenge doesn’t just start with the politicians. 

For just as the profiteering has become a way of life for the dealers, so it is, too, for those who pull the trigger. 

As ever the focus of attention tends to centre on the “big weapons” and “big deals”. But it’s the lethal small arms trade that so many overlook that also needs urgent global attention, not least given that nearly one million of the seven to eight million small arms produced every year are “lost”, stolen or otherwise go unaccounted for.

Back during that visit to Liberia during the civil war in 2003, I recall also coming across a group of child soldiers one afternoon guarding a makeshift checkpoint on the Po River bridge outside Monrovia.

High on cocaine and alcohol and heavily armed, the boys were in an unpredictable, volatile mood and hell-bent on extorting whatever they could from terrified civilians fleeing along the road from nearby fighting. 

One who called himself J-Boy had a swaggering, boastful air and carried his assault rifle like some totemic macho badge of honour. Had he himself ever killed anyone? I eventually asked tentatively. 

“Oh, sure man, plenty, plenty,” he replied, grinning widely, his eyes scarily unblinking. “With this good AK, it’s way easy, killing,” he assured me, slapping the assault rifle in his lap while speaking Kreyol, the English-based pidgin spoken by many people in Liberia. 

It was a disquieting confession that I had no doubt was true. Just one of many acts of killing and violence made possible by small arms – the real weapons of mass destruction.