UN agencies call for coherence, cooperation in combating illegal arms trade

As the first-ever international meeting to consider implementation of the United Nations Action Plan for eradicating the illicit small arms trade moved towards the end of its weeklong session, UN agencies called for a comprehensive, coherent, coordinated and cooperative response to the challenge.

The Coordinating Action on Small Arms (CASA), a body established by Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 1998 as a consultative mechanism, aimed to provide just such a response, Hannelore Hoppe, Director and Deputy to the Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs, told UN Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects.

Its objectives included retaining the UN's lead role in maintaining the issue of small arms on the global political agenda and encouraging civil society involvement in building societal resistance to violence, Ms. Hoppe added.

Edwin Judd, Director, Programme Division of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), said UN agencies had recognized that programmes for disarmament, demobilization and reintegration should not focus only on former combatants, but also on their dependants. Various agencies, including the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), UNICEF and the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), supported programmes to assist those individuals.

Such programmes, however, would remain minimally effective unless the causes of small arms violence were properly addressed and all aspects of the Programme of Action were implemented, he stressed. An important aspect of that Programme that was lacking was the explicit call to urgently combat illicit trade simultaneously from both supply and demand perspectives, he added.

Julia Taft, Assistant Administrator and Director of the Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery of UN Development Programme (UNDP), said the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UNDP would join hands to work on "urban-armed violence" issues. A primary focus of the collaboration would be on approaches to community-based violence and violence prevention, where full advantage could be taken of WHO's expertise in action-oriented research and UNDP's extensive programming expertise and strength in community development.

Speaking for the WHO, David Meddings said his agency had identified three primary objectives: to draw an accurate picture of small arms violence through data from hospitals, mortuaries, police reporting and focused studies such as victimization survey; to identify and support promising programmes in each setting, which aimed to reduce small arms; and to conduct external evaluation of those efforts to determine their effectiveness in preventing small arms violence.

Joao Honwana, Chief, Conventional Arms Branch, Department for Disarmament Affairs, noted that the issues of tracing, brokering, import and export controls, and law enforcement were central to the illicit small arms trade debate.

For her part, Patricia Lewis, Director of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), stressed the importance of including those affected in the decision-making process for programmes on weapons collection in exchange for development assistance. Donors should insist that women, children, tribal elders and other local parties be included in planning and implementation, since they knew best how weapons collection could work in their neighbourhood and which development projects could be best suited to their needs.