Preparing to fight the illicit trade in small arms

More than 40 police and military personnel from Ghana, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone took part in Freetown in the first training of trainers course on the control of small arms in West Africa. Issues discussed included introduction to the terminology of small arms, security systems in West Africa, and small arms flows in the region, where about eight million such weapons are estimated to be in circulation.

Participants at the 13-19 August meeting included military senior officials such as the commander of Sierra Leone’s paramilitary Civil Defence Forces. Their programme further included cross-border crime, community policing, the UN system and efforts to curtail small arms, disarmament expert Napoleon Abdulai, one of the resource persons, told IRIN. Among the other topics were the African common position on small arms, and demobilisation, disarmament and reintegration (DDR), including lessons learnt from the DDR processes in Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Central African Republic.

The meeting also looked at issues such as humanitarian law, laws on small arms, civil society and arms control, arms collection and destruction, and arms for development, according to Abdulai, who works with the UN Programme for Coordination and Assistance on Security and Development (PCASED)in Bamako, Mali.

The need for serious cooperation between the three countries of the Mano River Basin (Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone) was also discussed at the event, which marked the first time in a long period that senior Liberian security and military officers had travelled officially to Freetown.

Monrovia has been at loggerheads for some time now with its two neighbours.
Participants wanted the United Nations to take stronger measures against arms brokers and producing nations which fail to control their exports, Abdulai said. They are to begin training other officials in their countries
soon with the support of PCASED.

A second training-for-trainers course is scheduled for 17-23 September in Abidjan for participants from Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivore, Mali, Niger and Senegal.