Small arms recycling rampant

Most small arms trafficking in West Africa involves "recycling" where dealers move the same weapons from one place to another, a regional expert said. Several countries have become either providers or recipients of such arms.

The region has about eight million illegal arms in the hands of "non-state actors", Napoleon Abdulai of the United Nations project against illicit arms trafficking in West Africa, based in Mali's capital, Bamako, told IRIN. These actors include armed rebel groups, militias, vigilante groups and armed bandits. Weapons are recycled between Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, Abdulai said, and among belligerents in other conflicts such as in Casamance, southern Senegal. Guinea-Bissau, which is estimated to have tens of thousands of weapons, is a regional source while recycling, from Ghana to Nigeria, also exists. Nigeria has about one million illegal weapons and could face a risk of violence in the run-up to the 2003 presidential elections, he added.

West African countries, Abdulai said, needed to focus on local manufacturing of small arms and insist on proper labelling in order to facilitate tracking. Gunrunning, he added, persisted inspite of a 1998 regional moratorium to tackle it, mainly because of porous borders, insufficient financial and institutional capacity and the ability of dealers to hide the weapons easily.

The Programme for Coordination and Assistance on Security and Development (PCASED), which is funded by the UN and involved in arms destruction, training of armed forces and security officials and collecting data, plans to begin a three-year weapons collection drive in Chad. Chad is a major crossroads between West African and Central African countries and could have as many as one million arms circulating illegally, Abdulai said.

The Moratorium on the import, export and manufacturing of small arms in West Africa was signed in October 1998 in Abuja, Nigeria. Aimed at promoting regional peace and security without compromising countries' right to defend themselves and to participate in peacekeeping efforts, it was renewed for another three years in 2001 in Lusaka, Zambia.