MYTH 3

WE CAN CONTROL WHERE WEAPONS END UP AND HOW THEY ARE USED

Many weapons last a long time. If well-maintained, a gun can carry on shooting for years, sometimes decades. Small arms and light weapons (SALW) are particularly long-lived, but many mechanical weapons systems are built to withstand hard conditions, neglect, and wear and tear. Unexploded munitions from World War I battlefields were still killing French and Belgian farmers into the 21st century. Kalashnikovs and mortars from the 1960s can still function if they are given a basic service and cleaning. Thus, if arms are to be supplied to an ally there needs to be a reasonable likelihood that the receiver will remain an ally for many decades to come, and won’t be tempted to sell them on to a less reliable customer—perhaps when the ally wants to refurbish its armory with newer weapons and discard its old stock. There also needs to be enough capacity in the recipient state to make sure that arms are used as intended, and not passed on or ‘lost’ by its military personnel. Unfortunately, too often the long-term security interests of the supplier country take a backseat to the interests of the defense companies and/or special interests looking to see weapons sold. The consequences—fighting enemies armed with weapons you supplied—can be severe.

Despite the repeated claims that strong export controls in places like the US and Europe prevent weapons getting into questionable hands, the historical experience shows that the controls are often weakly enforced. Once you sift through the sordid history of double-dealing and deadly conflict, it becomes clear that there are multiple avenues by which arms can get into the wrong hands.

You may be asking: ‘but what about that Arms Trade Treaty we heard about? Didn’t this take care of these issues?’ Unfortunately, no. The Treaty, discussed at the end of the chapter, is full of holes, watered down after years of negotiation into a tool that will achieve little good, and maybe even more bad.

BLOWBACK: WHEN FRIENDS BECOME ENEMIES

The first and probably best known way in which arms get into the wrong hands is through what is known as ‘blowback’: when a one-time ally to whom you have provided weapons becomes an enemy. With that switch, enemies are able to turn the weapons supplied against their one-time ally turned enemy.

There are many examples of blowback, but none is more obvious than the serious mess that has been the US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the early 1980s, Iraq, under the dictatorial leadership of Saddam Hussein, launched a war against Iran. Iran had recently undergone a revolution that had replaced the Shah of Iran (a long-time US and European ally, despite his dictatorial rule) with a religious clique, the Ayatollahs, that promised to convert Iran to Muslim orthodoxy. Iran declared the US ‘enemy number one’. While the US was not above supplying weapons to Iran (the Iran-Contra affair exposed how the US had set up an enterprise to supply arms to Iran to secure the release of hostages and fund right=wing paramilitaries in Nicaragua1), it generally tilted its support towards Iraq.

This support was both financial and material. In 1989, FBI agents raided the Atlanta offices of the Italian Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), based on a tip-off from two insiders.² It soon emerged that the bank had been systematically supplying loans to the regime of Saddam Hussein. Representative Henry B. Gonzalez, tasked with investigating the matter, revealed that BNL had been Iraq’s largest source of loans from 1985 to 1989. This was done with the complicity of the CIA and Washington. Remarkably, the loans had been guaranteed under the cover of the Commodity Credit Corporation, a US government agricultural loan facility. When Iraq defaulted on the loans, it was the US taxpayer that paid the bill.³

The loans that had been granted to Saddam Hussein fueled an enormous program to buy weapons, mostly from European suppliers, which was supported and aided by the CIA and Washington; the program was given legal force by a National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) signed by Ronald Reagan that stated it was US policy to ensure Iraq won the war with Iran. Howard Teicher, a member of the US National Security Council in charge of Political-Military Affairs from 1982 to 1987 revealed in an affidavit that in 1995,

Pursuant to the secret NSDD, the United States actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing US military intelli­gence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure that Iraq had the military weaponry required.4

Between 1979 and 1985, when reliable data ceases, Iraq increased its expenditure on weapons from 6.9% of its GDP to 27.5%.⁵ During the early 1980s, Iraq became the world’s biggest importer of major weapons systems, only falling behind India in 1986 and 1987. The Stockholm Peace Research Institute could identify twenty-six different countries supplying weapons to Iraq at the time.⁶ The two largest suppliers of Iraq’s major weapons systems during the Iran‒Iraq war were France (accounting for 28%) and the Soviet Union (47%).⁷ Thus, with direct funding from Washington, not only was Saddam Hussein getting his hands on buckets of weapons, but he was buying a good portion of them from the US’ Cold War enemy, the USSR.

A unilateral US arms embargo placed on Iraq during the war meant that the US could not supply weapons directly (hence the convoluted system described above). But it made every effort to ensure that Iraq could import as many ‘dual-use’ items from the US as possible. ‘Dual-use’ items are items that have both military and civilian applications. Included in the designation of ‘dual-use’ items were biological materials that could be used in chemical and biological warfare. In the early 1990s, the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs released a report confirming that

The United States provided the Government of Iraq with ‘dual use’ licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-system programs, including: chemical warfare agent precursors, chemical war­fare agent production facility plans and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production facility plans); chemical warhead filling equipment; biological warfare related materials; missile fabrication equipment; and, missile-system guidance equipment.8

The list of biological material the US provided was shocking, including anthrax, botulinium, E.Coli as well as human and bacterial DNA.⁹ There is credible evidence that when the US invaded Iraq in 1991, US troops were exposed to the very agents that the US had supplied, over and above fighting against the weapons whose acquisition the US had helped to fund and arrange.¹⁰

In the aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein, the world was witness to another type of blowback: namely, when an ally is provided arms but fails to stop those arms being stolen by enemies. Between 2003 and 2014, Iraq received weapons to the equivalent value of $4.115bn (not all of which were bought: many of the weapons that were delivered took the form of aid transfers); of which $2.487bn, or more than 50%, came from the US.¹¹ Amongst the items delivered are armored personnel carriers, military helicopters, transport aircraft, anti-tank missiles, tanks, artillery and drones.¹² Between 2006 and 2009, for example, SIPRI reports that the US handed the Iraqi army 8,500 advanced armored personnel carriers.¹³ These figures also ignore the mountains of light weapons imported into the country; between 2003 and 2008, the US supplied over 1 million small arms (rifles and handguns) to the Iraqi military and police, 360,000 of which simply went missing.¹⁴

The story comes full circle in 2014: blowback in the form of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS – also sometimes referred to as ISIL or Daesh). Since 2013, ISIS, a hardline Islamist militant group that has attracted global approbation for its brutal tactics—including mass executions of captured minority groups and beheadings of journalists—has gained control of significant portions of Iraq and Syria. Originally armed with weapons sourced from an overly well-stocked region, with Syrian and Iraqi stores particularly lucrative sources, ISIS has overrun much of the northern quadrant of Iraq bordering Kurdistan.15 The Iraqi army, which was supposed to have been well trained and armed, melted in the face of the ISIS onslaught; illustrating yet again that no amount of material and technical training can fix that which is badly governed. These military successes, in particular the capture of Iraq’s second city of Mosul, allowed ISIS to acquire even more significant stockpiles of weapons, creating a feedback loop in which ISIS uses existing weapons to acquire even more, some of which had been provided to the Iraqi army by the US.¹⁶ The size of the seizures has been astonishing: a 2014 UN Security Council Report noted that in June 2014 alone ISIS seized sufficient Iraqi government stocks from the provinces of Anbar and Salah al-Din to arm and equip more than three Iraqi conventional army divisions.¹⁷ Reviewing the evidence, the same report provided a chilling summary of the range of weapons ISIS has at its disposal:

From social media and other reporting, it is clear that ISIL assets include light weapons, assault rifles, machine guns, heavy weapons, including possible man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) (SA-7), field and anti-aircraft guns, missiles, rockets, rocket launchers, artillery, aircraft, tanks (including T-55s and T-72s) and vehicles, including high-mobility multi­purpose military vehicles.¹⁸

Hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons they use have been instrumental in their rapid advance.¹⁹ This is particularly true of military infantry fighting vehicles—Humvees and mine-protected vehicles—and long-range howitzers that inflict frightening damage on civilian populations. When the US recently launched airstrikes against ISIS fighters who had surrounded tens of thousands of civilians on a barren mountainside, it was largely targeting weapons (in particular mortars) that the US had itself made available in the region.

The seizure of US weapons, which ISIS mixes with arms acquired via other means elsewhere (often smuggled in through routes that traverse Turkey20), has not only further destabilized Iraq, but fed further violence and devastation into the deadly Syrian conflict. Recent media reports indicate that some of the US-seized weapons and armor—Humvees in particular—have been seen in the hands of ISIS near Aleppo: a full 200 miles outside of Iraq.²¹ In a region where tensions are rife, where violence is endemic and a peaceful solution a long way off, and where predicting the political future is almost impossible, there remains one constant: if people want to fight wars, they have more than enough arms to do so for the foreseeable future. Indeed, in 2014 the London-based Conflict Armament Research published a report based on spent ammunition found in ISIS-controlled areas. It found that ISIS had been using ammunition from at least twenty-one different countries manufactured over seventy years. Nearly 20% of the ammunition discovered was supplied by the US in the 2000s.²²

There is, of course, a caveat: after a while, the seized weapons systems will cease to be functional without maintenance and a ready supply of spares. It seems obvious that this requires the US, in particular, to put in place stringent measures to stop such spares finding their way to fighters whose stated aim is to attack US interests throughout the region. And yet, as we have seen in the last chapter, the US is now doing the exact opposite by radically revising and liberalizing its Munitions Control list. Whether or not this leads to further blowback is unclear, but, considering the past, shouldn’t the emphasis be on caution rather than profits?

DISPERSION: ARMS DISPERSING FOLLOWING CONFLICT, REGIME CHANGE OR STATE COLLAPSE

As the American/Iraq example suggests, weapons can disperse widely following a particularly brutal conflict or the collapse of a state. While, fortunately, the incidence of state failure is still uncommon, the fallout from the collapse of states with massive arsenals can reverberate around the world. Just look at the examples of Somalia and Libya.

From 1969 until his overthrow in 1991, Somalia was ruled by the dictator Mohammed Siyad Barre. As Barre had taken power via a coup, he was particularly comfortable with using the military and police to enforce his rule. In the early period of Barre’s reign, he had aligned with the Soviet Union, which turned on the arms spigot to the tune of $260m between 1973 and 1977 alone.23 When Barre switched sides to support the US in 1978 following the Soviets’ backing of Ethiopia’s war against Somalia, weapons began flowing in from the West. As Barre increasingly turned his weaponry against his own people, the US transferred some $154m in arms to Somalia through military aid schemes, while Italy, Somalia’s largest supplier, was known to have sold $380m in weapons to the country between 1978 and 1982 alone.²⁴

Barre’s regime finally collapsed in 1991, overthrown by an alliance of disparate warlords. But instead of forming a govern­ment, the war­lords turned on each other, controlling different parts of the country with militias, using widely available weapons. As a result, Somalia struggled without a central government for more than twenty years. When the US Marines stormed ashore in December 1992 as the vanguard of ‘Operation Restore Hope’, they found Mogadishu a veritable cornucopia of weaponry from around the world, most of it eminently serviceable. Somali technicians had become adept at adapting sophisticated weapons for new uses, for example repurposing air-to-air missiles from grounded jet aircraft to be fired from trucks against ground targets. When US Special Forces confronted General Mohamed Farah Aideed’s militia in the infamous ‘Black Hawk Down’ battle of October 1993, they were fired upon by Somalis using weapons manufactured in the USSR, China, Romania and the US. Soviet rocket-propelled grenades shot down the US helicopters. In 2003, one European Commission Report estimated that 64% of Somalis possess one or more weapons.25 In the capital of Somalia, Mogadishu, open-air arms bazaars operated with impunity. In the biggest market, Huwaika, 400 traders sold weapons from rifles to RPGs until the market was shelled in 2013.²⁶ The arms are strikingly affordable: hand grenades sell for $25, landmines for $100 and various models of AK-47s for between $140 and $600.²⁷

Since 1992, Somalia has been under a mandatory UN arms embargo. But the embargo has done virtually nothing to stem the flow of arms. Reviewing the situation in 2003, the UN stated that ‘the violations are so numerous that any attempt to document and catalogue all of the activities would be pointless’.²⁸ Most of the weapons came from local neighbors (Ethiopia and Eritrea in particular), but Westerners with an eye for money were not above taking advantage. In July 2010, two US residents of South Florida, Chanock Miller and Joseph O’Toole, were indicted for breaking the embargo.²⁹ Miller (based part-time in Israel) and O’Toole made arrangements with a third party to export arms to Somalia, using fake end-user certificates from Chad. The problem: the third party was an undercover US agent.30 Fortunately this deal was stopped; too bad so many hundreds of others weren’t.

Beyond fueling constant instability and warlordism, the wide availability of arms has helped the cause of a particularly worrying group, Al-Shabaab, which declared its affiliation with Al Qaida in 2012.³¹ Emerging around 2006, Al-Shabaab is currently engaged in a vicious war with Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, African Union forces and the governments of neighboring countries (notably Kenya and Ethiopia), although it claims to be at war with all enemies of Islam. A good part of Al-Shabaab’s weapons are undoubtedly drawn from the existing stockpiles in the country, but the group can also count on another useful supply: weapons sold and supplied by Western countries to Somalia’s government. In 2013, with US backing, the arms embargo on Somalia, in force since 1992, was eased.³² The weapons that have now flowed into the country as a result are poorly monitored and frequently stolen and diverted. In 2014, the UN found that elements in the Somali government, including an advisor to the president, had been arranging for weapons to be smuggled to Al-Shabaab militants.³³ Those that didn’t flow directly to the militants could be purchased from the arms bazaar, where a good portion of the weapons ended up.³⁴

The depressing story of Western arms sold to a fallen dictator spreading to dangerous militants was repeated in Libya. In 1969, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the man who would become associated with eccentric and frequent outbursts against Western perfidy, took power in Libya. He refused to build government institutions and dismantled all structures that existed. With major regional ambitions, Gaddafi also spread weapons and instability throughout the Middle East and Africa. He invaded Chad, supported Arab supremacists in Darfur, and indiscriminately funded groups such as the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone and the insurgents led by the war criminal Charles Taylor in Liberia.

To do so, Gaddafi relied on massive arms imports, funded by oil exports. Between 1970 and 2009, Gaddafi imported weapons that were equivalent to $30bn.35 Most of this was from the USSR, which supplied $22bn in arms.³⁶ The remaining $8bn was made up mostly of European suppliers, in particular France and Germany, which exported $3.2bn and $1.4bn each.³⁷

In the 1970s and 1980s, Libya was embroiled in a war in Chad—a combination of border dispute, invasion and support to proxies. Libya’s war culminated dramatically in 1987 when a light but deadly Chadian force overran the main Libyan army base at OuadiDoum, capturing 8,000 soldiers and a vast array of equipment, including twelve aircraft and almost 200 armored vehicles. With little use for the heavy weapons, the Chadians sold them on—for a few years, N’djamena was a veritable bazaar for second-hand arms, which found their way to all corners of the African continent. Libya’s army never recovered. But Gaddafi’s appetite for buying huge quantities of weapons was unquenched, and he found ready sellers.

Because of links to terrorism, Libya was placed under US, EU and UN sanctions including a mandatory UN arms embargo in 1992, reducing arms imports to about $10m a year.³⁸ Nevertheless, after making moves to win over the global community, the UN arms embargo was abandoned in 2003, followed by the US and EU in 2004. Assorted European suppliers attempted to take advantage. SIPRI noted, in its 2010 Yearbook, that ‘the heads of the governments of France, Italy, Russia and the UK have visited Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi in recent years, accompanied by arms company representatives and rumors of multi-billion dollar arms deals’.³⁹ Although the orders for big transfers took a while to materialize (and few did), Russia, at least, agreed to a $1.8bn deal to supply tanks, fighter jets and air defense networks.40 Two years prior, Russia had cleared Libya’s historic debt. Other EU countries granted at least €834m in arms exports licenses between 2005 and 2009.⁴¹ The biggest issuer of licenses was Italy (€276m), followed by France (€210m) and the UK (€119m).⁴² South Africa was the largest African issuer of export licenses, permitting the export of £6.5m worth of arms and ammunition in 2010 alone.⁴³ While not all licenses led to exports, it was not for want of trying.

Gaddafi’s arsenal was so large that it verged on the ludicrous. So many weapons were purchased under his rule that it was almost impossible that the Libyan military could use them all. Anthony Cordesman, a military expert, reported that Libya’s ‘imports vastly exceeded its ability to organize, man, train and support its forces. The imports reached farcical levels, and involved vast amounts of waste on equipment that could never be crewed and operated.’⁴⁴ In 2010, Cordesman and Aram Nerguizan investigated the Libyan holdings, and found that many of its aircraft were in storage, along with 1,000 tanks.⁴⁵ Gaddafi’s arms buying spree was motivated by a number of factors, not least his belief that he could build an Islamic Legion, staffed by what he estimated would be 1 million troops. Despite getting the weapons to arm it, the Legion as such never materialized. But the fighters drawn from neighboring countries as its putative core went on to lead rebellions in west Africa and organize militias in Darfur and Mali, among other places.

In 2011, Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown by an insurrection, backed by Arab governments such as Qatar and Sudan, with a NATO air campaign paving the way. His overthrow was presaged by the mass looting of Libyan stockpiles in areas that the Libyan government couldn’t control; and as revolutionaries and mercenaries captured more territory, more stockpiles were looted. In July 2012, Libya held its first ever elections. But since then the situation in Libya has deteriorated rapidly. In 2014, elections were held for a representative assembly, the Council of Deputies.46 However, the elections results were rejected by losing parties, mostly Islamist, which decided to reconvene the 2012 body, the General National Council.⁴⁷ As it stands, there are two Parliaments, neither of which recognizes the other, and a continuing war between them: the Council of Deputies, for example, was forced from Tripoli in 2014 in fighting between Dawn of Libya and Zintan and had to set up in a different city.⁴⁸ Meanwhile, in the countryside, the plethora of weapons has fueled the emergence of multiple factions and warlords, each fighting for their own patch of land. While the deaths of 1,000 triggered NATO intervention, the war that followed killed some 25,000, and the unrest in years since, has added many thousands more (between June 2014 and April 2015, for example, over 3,000 people were killed in what has been called Libya’s second civil war⁴⁹). Libya could quite easily go the way of Somalia.

When the African Union debated its position on the uprising and civil war in Libya in March 2011, the Chadian President Idriss Déby warned against ‘opening the Libyan Pandora’s Box’. He was prescient. The arms that Gaddafi had stockpiled have spread widely on the continent, fueling further regional instability, both in the chaos before and virtual anarchy after his overthrow. In Mali, Tuareg rebels, once employed by Gaddafi as mercenaries, took over large swathes of the country after looting Libyan armories.⁵⁰ Along with Islamist fighters, the Tuareg attempted to overrun the entire country, prompting an African and French military intervention:⁵¹ France was thus fighting against rebels armed with weapons which may have included some that France had earlier sold to Gaddafi. Meanwhile, the opening of Libyan weapons stores also benefited Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.⁵² This is not the only extremist group now toting Libyan weapons: solid information has emerged that Al-Shabaab in Somalia has been buying ex-Libyan armaments,53 while Al Jazeera reports that Libyan arms have made their way to Boko Haram, the Nigerian extremist group that kidnapped hundreds of schoolgirls to be used as slaves and continues to wage war on the Nigerian state.⁵⁴ Large quantities of Libyan weaponry also went to Syria in what the New York Times called ‘a complex and active multinational effort financed largely by Qatar’.⁵⁵

THEY WERE RIGHT HERE WHEN WE LAST LOOKED: DELIBERATE DIVERSION OF ARMS TO OTHER STATES AND OTHER PARTIES

This may surprise you, but sometimes arms dealers lie. And they lie convincingly. Indeed, it is this subterfuge on the part of brokers, as well as complicit military and state officials, that provides another way in which arms get into the wrong hands: via diverting arms officially intended for one state but sold to another (or a non-state actor), or through outright theft from state holdings to distribute internationally.

The diversion of weapons is remarkably straightforward. This is illustrated by how easy it is to manipulate a vitally important document used in arms exports: end-user certificates. The certificate states that the ‘end user’ is the government or entity buying the weapons. Two problems: one, end-user certificates are not inter­nationally standardized and are incredibly easy to forge. Two: end-user certificates are hardly an iron-clad promise that the weapons will actually remain in the stated area. The ease of forgery is aided by a widespread lack of proper national controls over imports and exports, particularly of small and light weapons. In 2001, for example, all UN nations signed up to the UN Program of Action, which committed countries to tightening up their arms control rules. By 2008, only 111 of the 185 states had procedures and laws controlling the sale and movement of small arms and light weapons (SALW).56

One recent example shows just how easy it is for weapons to be diverted to other users. In 2012, Swiss media in Syria found hand grenades used by Syrian rebels that bore the brands of Swiss armament manufacturers.⁵⁷ It created a national scandal in a country that is meticulous about its neutrality. In response, the Swiss authorities instituted a formal investigation. Using tracking numbers, they were able to locate the grenades to a shipment made from Switzerland to the United Arab Emirates in 2004.⁵⁸ The UAE confirmed that it had received the shipment, but admitted that a portion of the shipment had been re-exported to Jordan. The UAE had undertaken the export to assist Jordan ‘in the fight against terrorism’.⁵⁹ From Jordan, the weapons entered Syria.⁶⁰ It is unclear how the last step occurred.

And this is not the only case of Swiss ammunition being retransferred: in early 2012, for example, investigators found M-80 ammunition from Switzerland being used by anti-Gaddafi forces in Libya. The ammunition had been exported to Qatar in 2012. Illustrating the durability of small arms and ammunition, Qatar was also found to have allowed the re-export of 7.62 × 51mm ammunition to the same Libyan forces—they had originally been imported from Pakistan way back in 1981‒1982. Since then, the Pakistani ammunition has been discovered in shipments from Libya to Syria.⁶¹

At least in the last example the weapons spent a little bit of time in their stated destination. This was not the case with a batch of weapons, including surface-to-air missiles and rocket-propelled grenades, imported into Burkina Faso in 1999. The arms transfer had been arranged by a Gibraltar-based company, and was backed with an end-user certificate issued by Burkina Faso. However, when the UN investigated the transfer in 2000, it found that once the weapons were unpacked in Burkina Faso’s largest city of Ouagadougou, they were simply loaded onto a host of trucks and delivered to Liberia.62 Liberia at the time was under a mandatory UN arms embargo as a result of the terrifyingly vicious actions of the dictator Charles Taylor, now in jail after being sentenced to fifty years in prison by the Special Court for Sierra Leone for war crimes during his support for rebels in Sierra Leone. Burkina Faso’s long-time military ruler, Blaise Compaoré, had gained a reputation for backing particularly savage rebellions in nearby countries—and could also have faced charges by the Sierra Leone special prosecutor—but that didn’t stop arms traders doing business with him.

Those arms that do end up legitimately in the stockpiles of purchasing states are also not free from diversion. Poorly managed inventories are easy to steal from, and this can happen on a vast scale. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, Ukraine was left with an enormous arsenal of weapons. Military officials, struggling to survive in the midst of economic collapse, saw an opportunity to make easy money, and, with the help of notorious arms dealers like Viktor Bout, smuggled vast quantities to conflict zones around the world. A Ukrainian parliamentary investigation into the scale of the theft was eventually closed down for being too combustible, but only after compiling seventeen volumes of evidence.⁶³ Illustrating just how difficult it can be to face up to the global arms machine, the leader of the investigation was court-martialed and stripped of his rank.⁶⁴

And it is not just individuals who struggle to face up to the global arms industry; it is also big institutions like the United Nations. In instituting its mandatory arms embargoes, the UN relies on its member states to put in place legislation and procedures to prevent the export of weapons to embargoed territories. But this is often sloppily done, or insufficiently monitored. This is part of the reason why a study at the University of British Columbia found that of 502 violations of UN arms embargoes only two had resulted in any legal action whatsoever.65

FROM THE CORNER SHOP: WEAPONS BOUGHT BY CIVILIANS AND TRANSFERRED TO CONFLICT AREAS

A much ignored but hugely important way in which arms get into the wrong hands does not really involve states at all. Instead, it involves civilians who purchase weapons on the open market, usually with legitimate licenses, to be used in all sorts of wrong-doing, in particular organized crime. A particularly violent recent and ongoing example of this is the supply of arms to Mexican drug cartels.

Since the mid-2000s, Mexico has been in the grip of a brutal drug war to control the enormously lucrative trade in drugs made in Latin America and consumed in the US. Mexican druglords control the majority of the illicit trade in drugs to the US; they are responsible for 95% of the cocaine transported into the US.⁶⁶ The arrest of several prominent drug kingpins in the early 2000s opened the way for rival gangs to bid for power, frequently engaging in bloody running battles to cement it. Local communities have been paralyzed with fear as the drug lords become the effective government, killing an exceptional number of women, taking vengeance on anyone who stands in their way; the infamous sight of tortured bodies hanging from a highway on the way to the US border was only one of a thousand different atrocities. The instability has only increased since the decision taken by President Felipe Calderon to deploy the military, working in conjunction with US law enforcement, to dismantle the cartels. The scale of the violence is truly shocking: in the six years that Calderon led Mexico (2006 to 2012), an estimated 60,000 people were killed in relation to the drug trade.67 And that is in addition to the 25,000 Mexicans who simply can’t be found, dead or alive.⁶⁸

The absurdity is that, although 50% of the killings are committed with handguns and rifles, Mexico only has a single legal gun shop, run by the military.⁶⁹ The guns largely come from across the border in the US, where there are 2,200 small weapon manufacturers making more than 4.2m handguns a year.⁷⁰ Cartels have employed US citizens to buy weapons in the US, where gun laws are somewhat laxer than Mexico, and smuggle them into Mexico in vast quantities. In 2013, the Igarape Institute in Brazil and the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego conducted a detailed study estimating the scale of cross-border transfers. Basing their calculations on economic data (and not just seizure information, as other studies have done), the researchers estimated that 253,000 firearms were moving illicitly into Mexico from the US annually.⁷¹ The trade is so large that it is estimated to constitute 2.2% of all firearm sales in the US, while an estimated 46.7% of firearms dealers are dependent on the sales. Worryingly, it appears that Mexican and US authorities have only been able to stop the movement of 14.7% of weapons trafficked into the country annually.⁷²

US gun lobbyists may point to their regular canard: guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Perhaps. But what is clear is that far more people are killed when efficient killing machines are available. In 2011, three researchers pored over Mexican homicide data and found an important correlation. In 2004, the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which prohibited the sale of military-style weapons to civilians in the US, expired. Some states repealed the ban entirely, in particular Arizona and Texas. In California, the ban remained mostly in place due to state law. In Mexican municipalities close to Arizona and Texas, the homicide and fatality rate due to gun crime increased by a full 40% over Mexican municipalities close to California.73

WEAPONS USED IN WAYS THAT ARE NOT (BUT SHOULD BE) FORESEEN

In addition to the real danger that arms will find their way into enemy hands, there remains the ever-present concern that weapons will be used in ways that were not originally countenanced or conceived of when they were exported. Generally speaking, Western arms exporting countries have to try to ensure that weapons will not be used in gross human rights abuses. But their combined lack of foresight can be catastrophic when they misread the situation. Nowhere was this clearer, or more devastating, than in Rwanda.

During the span of a hundred days from April to July 1994, ethnic Hutu extremists in Rwanda perpetrated genocide against their Tutsi compatriots, along with moderate Hutus who stood in their way. At least 500,000 people died. This genocide is popularly associated with the machete—an agricultural tool used for hacking vegetation—wielded by gangs of militiamen known as interahamwe, who manned roadblocks and searched house to house for their victims. But the interahamwe were just one part of a military-genocidal machine, run by senior army officers. The biggest massacres of the genocide were organized and carried out as military operations, involving army detachments armed with machine guns and RPGs.

The primary weapons of genocide—small arms and light weapons, rocket launchers and military vehicles—were almost all purchased in the four years leading up to the genocide. Between 1980 and 1988 Habyarimana had only spent $5m on arms imports in total.74 However, between 1990 and 1994 Rwanda spent 70% of its state budget on arms;⁷⁵ in the three years following October 1990, the country spent $112m on arms,⁷⁶ twenty times what had been spent during the whole of the 1980s.⁷⁷ This spending spree ensured that an estimated 85 tons of arms flooded one of Africa’s smallest countries; grenades were so widely available by 1994 that they could be bought for the equivalent of two beers from local vegetable markets.⁷⁸ The build-up occurred with the onset of civil war, which began when the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group of mostly Rwandan Tutsi refugees, invaded from Uganda, but it also provided the means for genocide in 1994.

Rwanda was able to turn to a number of suppliers for the weapons, including South Africa (still under the control of the apartheid government) and Egypt. But by far the largest supporter and supplier was France, a long-time supporter of the Habyarimana regime that feared a Tutsi victory (supported by Anglophone Uganda) would diminish French influence in the region. In addition to supplying ground troops to halt Tutsi advances, France helped to broker deals with South Africa and Egypt (all under the watchful eye of the president’s son, Jean-Christophe Mitterrand) and supply voluminous weapons on its own. Between February 1990 and 6 April 1994, the day Habyarimana’s plane was downed and genocide followed shortly after, France exported arms and ammunition to the total value of 136m French francs. In addition, France donated weapons to the Habyarimana regime to a total value of 43m French francs in 36 batches. What was eventually transferred to Rwanda was sobering:

France agreed to transfer—and presumably delivered—the following weapons: three Gazelle helicopters, six Rasura radar systems, one Alouette II helicopter, six 68-mm rocket-launchers (with 1397 68-mm rockets; for the helicopters), two Milan ant-tank missile launchers, 70 12.7-mm heavy machineguns (with 132,400 rounds of ammunition), eight 105-mm cannons (with 15,000 shells), six 120-mm mortars (with 11,000 shells), 3570 90-mm shells (for AML-90 armored vehicles already in service), 8850 60-mm mortar shells, 4000 81-mm mortar shells, 2040 rounds of 20-mm, 256,500 rounds of 9-mm, 145,860 rounds of 7.62-mm and 1,256,059 rounds of 5.56-mm ammunition, as well as many small arms and spare parts for helicopters and armored vehicles.79

On 6 April 1994, Rwanda’s President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down (by whom is still disputed). In response, a radical group took control of the government and military, and deployed the armed forces against civilians. They also let loose organized militias throughout the country, armed with anything they could get their hands on, and engaged in a mass orgy of violence. They systematically killed Tutsis, moderate Hutu leaders, and anyone who resisted the genocide. Estimates are still debated, but the death toll is now presumed to be at least 500,000 Tutsi killed in the genocide, while the RPF is estimated to have killed between 25,000 and 45,000 Rwandans from April to August 1994.⁸⁰ A full 75% of the country’s Tutsi population at the time perished. For 100 days, six men, women and children were killed every minute of every day. For those that survived, life was horrific. Between 100,000 and 250,000 women were raped.⁸¹ In a study in 2001, a tested sample of 1,125 rape survivors found that 70% were HIV positive.⁸²

At the time, international media and world leaders gave the impression that the violence was a free-for-all, a primal slaughter, a frenzy. But in reality, the genocide was highly organized, with the aim to achieve the highest number of deaths in the shortest time possible.⁸³ And in this the arms sold by the world to Rwanda were particularly important. They were used in two primary situations: to kill strong young men and community leaders who could resist the massacres; and to efficiently kill large groups of people. When Tutsi and moderate Rwandans were successfully herded into schools and sports stadiums, they were almost always killed systematically with firearms and grenades in order to achieve the highest kill-rate possible.84

At the time, it was vaguely possible, if not plausible, for the French government to claim ignorance of Rwanda’s eventual aim of genocide (despite the fetid genocidal propaganda that spewed out of the country’s state-owned media from 1990 onwards). They were merely supporting one side against another in yet another African civil war. But they did know that they were supplying arms to a dictatorship with a particularly poor record on human rights and democracy. Even if they couldn’t have foreseen genocide, despite the loud and early warnings from observers, France must have realized the risk that was inherent in supplying arms to an undemocratic regime.

Perhaps, with the lessons of history, we need to be ensuring that weapons are not so liberally supplied to dictatorships and regimes responsible for human rights abuses, despite the regional and short-term political considerations. Perhaps the presumption of innocence that legitimates the recipients of arms sales to corrupt, dictatorial or war-prone governments should be reversed: the working assumption should be instead that things will go bad, and the weapons will be someday used for lethal purposes.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ARMS TRADE TREATY?

The fact that we have reached this point in the chapter without mentioning the much-discussed Arms Trade Treaty is something of a give-away in itself: the ability of the treaty to seriously impact on the trade in weapons is minimal.

The treaty had auspicious and well-intentioned roots. It emerged out of a discussion between numerous NGOs, including Amnesty International and Oxfam, which had campaigned for a full recognition of how the arms trade was fueling human rights abuses around the world. Flowing from a list of initial principles, the treaty that emerged out of this group sought to put in serious controls over the arms trade, so as to stop the very things that we have described so far in this chapter happening: arms being sold to repressive regimes, diverted to human rights abusers, and generally fueling some of the world’s most intransigent conflicts.85

As with many international agreements, the treaty became sucked into a seemingly endless round of negotiations, as different states around the world attempted to modify its content to suit their ends. The treaty, as it was passed in 2013, reflects this: it is riddled with bullet holes that will limit its ability to properly limit the trade. The noted campaign group, Ceasefire, has pointed to five major problems:⁸⁶

1. The treaty sets a threshold for stopping arms exports way too high. The treaty requires that arms should not be exported to a state if there is an ‘overriding risk’ they are to be used in violating human rights. The use of the word ‘overriding’ is not only open to interpretation, but implies that the trade in weapons should only be stopped in exceptional circumstances. Indeed, in the original drafts of the treaty, it stated that weapons should not be exported only if it was ‘likely’ that they would be used in ways the treaty forbids.

2. The treaty doesn’t have any major requirements regarding record keeping and reporting. One of the big selling points of the early drafts of the treaty was that it would make the trade in weapons transparent by forcing states to properly report on their imports and exports. However, the final version of the treaty only requires states to submit a horribly under-detailed list with minimal information to the UN Secretariat, which the Secretariat doesn’t even publish. States are also allowed to leave out any information that is ‘commercially sensitive’ or constitutes ‘national security information’.

3. The treaty does not include a whole raft of weapons. The treaty is applicable to eight categories of conventional arms (such as battle tanks and attack helicopters). But the list is so circumscribed, and so out of date, that it is entirely unlikely to be applicable to new and emerging categories of weapons (such as drones). Most importantly, while mentioning ammunition, the treaty excludes the trade in ammunition from a whole host of its central provisions.

4. The treaty only covers sales. This is distinct from covering other forms of arms transfer we’ve discussed above, such as weapons that are loaned, leased, bartered or given as part of an aid package. The treaty also excludes arms transferred as part of a ‘defense cooperation agreement’, that is, an arrangement where the militaries of two countries work together. It would be easy for most states to simply claim that controversial weapons sales fall under the rubric of these sorts of agreements and bypass the treaty altogether.

5. There is simply no international enforcement or assessment. Determining whether there is an ‘overriding risk’ that arms will be used to violate human rights remains the responsibility of the exporting state. Is it realistic to expect that exporting states, which want to transfer weapons in their own economic interests, will apply this rigorously? More to the point, are states likely to really apply these provisions when there is no international review and there are no legal sanctions for violating the treaty. In a legal sense, the treaty is a set of polite suggestions rather than iron-clad requirements.

A lot of people who supported the Arms Trade Treaty in civil society may baulk at such a blunt description of the Treaty; almost as if we’re saying that the treaty was a waste of effort and a failure on their part. This is not true. The act of getting this issue on the agenda was brave in and of itself, and bringing the public’s attention to the issue for the first time in decades was immensely necessary and powerfully done. Securing the attention of 1 million people who signed petitions in support of regulating the trade has to be lauded and shows what can be achieved with effective campaigning. The weakness of the Arms Trade Treaty is not a reflection on them; it is a further commentary on how states around the world, in particular those that are the biggest arms producers, so effectively manipulate the international regulatory environment in the interests of arms manufacturers rather than global citizens. Perhaps it is the beginning of a bigger debate, and the treaty can be radically revised over time. But as it stands, it will do little to limit the worst parts of the arms trade.

CONCLUSION

Weapons don’t rot, and they don’t simply go away. They hang around for a very, very long time, able to become the means of immense destruction decades after they are first produced. With this in mind, one would think that the major arms-producing countries would be remarkably reticent about them getting into the wider world. And yet the history of the trade in weapons proves the exact opposite: weapons flow freely, mostly with state support, to every corner of the globe. And arms export controls, where they do (intermittently) work, are useless when the states that write the laws do so much to undermine them.

A common refrain that is wheeled out to support arms exports is that there is nothing wrong with arming allies to protect themselves. Perhaps. But we need to be aware that there is a very good chance that, over the years, those weapons can (and most likely will) migrate into the hands of people who don’t play so nicely. As the historical evidence shows, there is a very good chance that a dictatorship or other dysfunctional state that is your ally right now won’t stay that way for very long. As Henry Kissinger noted, the US has no permanent friends, only interests.87 And even if those arms stay where they are intended to, they can be put to the most devastating use in ways that may not, but should have been, foreseen.

The simple fact is that the wide availability of arms in the world makes wars more deadly, violence more efficient and brutality more widespread. Maybe it is time to consider turning off the tap.