International cooperation and humanitarian actions

Illegal arms trade
To arm or to develop, a choice has to be made...

In today’s world, 640 million small arms and light weapons (SALW) are in circulation, which is one weapon for every ten people. Two thirds of them are in the hands of civilians, according to the Small Arms Survey, an independent research centre in Geneva (Switzerland), which estimated that between 80,000 and 110,000 people fell victim to such weapons during conflicts in 2003. According to the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) some 200,000 not conflict-related victims are added to this figure each year.

SALW include both the "light" weapons used by small groups of people and carried on light vehicles, like heavy machine guns or grenade launchers, and individual small arms such as revolvers, rifles and submachine guns. They are usually not only cheap - in some parts of the world an AK-47 assault rifle sells for the same price as a sack of corn - but also easy to maintain, conceal and use, which is why they have proliferated. The spread of SALW is, moreover, encouraging the use of child-soldiers, over 300,000 of whom are now thought to be involved in conflicts in over 30 countries (see article in Label France No. 58).

According to the SIPRI (Stockholm Inter-national Peace Research Institute), Russia, the United States and France were the three main exporters in 2004. The annual value of world exports of this type of weapon probably totals over 25 billion dollars and two thirds of purchases are thought to be made by third-world countries. However, it is difficult to establish precise figures, as this trade often goes unmonitored. Granted at least half of it is legal, but arms exported in accordance with the regulations often end up on the illegal market.

They fuel organised crime, drug trafficking and the illicit exploitation of precious minerals. They pose humanitarian problems because the conflicts concerned also give rise to the displacement of populations and aggravate poverty.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then secretary general of the UN, first mentioned "micro-disarmament" in 1995. Since then, the fight against the anarchic proliferation of SALW has been taken up at national, regional and international level. In 2001, the member states of the UN unanimously adopted the Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects.

Five years down the line, the United Nations Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons, held in New York in July 2006, sadly ended without agreement on a final document. This conference will at least have the merit of once more drawing the international community’s attention to the issue of small arms, secretary general Kofi Annan has pointed out. Obstacles remain: the absence of political will in certain countries, the porosity of borders, organised crime. Proof that it is minds that have to be disarmed first.

Olivia Marsaud
Journalist

A French woman at the head of the Global Environment Facility

In July 2006 Monique Barbut was appointed president of the world’s largest environmental funding body, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), for three years. At international level, it is the most important instrument for funding environmental protection projects in developing countries and in the Eastern European countries in transition.

With a budget of three billion dollars for the next four years, it has, since 2004, funded approximately 1,500 projects in the fields of biodiversity, climate change, soil depletion and the ozone layer.

Monique Barbut’s background is in the French civil service: France’s development bank, then the Caisse centrale de coopération économique, which became the French Development Agency (AFD). She joined the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2003. An economist by training, she played an active role in the creation of the GEF in 1989 and during the financial negotiations at the Rio Earth Summit of 1992.