Black market weapons at the root of global security threat

Tuesday, 13 March 2007

In the time that it takes you to read this article, someone, somewhere in the world will likely be killed with an illegal weapon. Whether in the hands of a child soldier in Africa, a gunman in the Middle East or a common thug somewhere in North America, illicit weapons are used to take the lives of hundreds of thousands of people every year.

The weapons black market has many different faces. Professional black-market arms merchants (also known as gunrunners), organized crime cartels and the clandestine espionage operations used by some of the world’s most powerful countries to supply weapons covertly to groups or states they are sympathetic to (often using gunrunners or organized criminals as proxy agents), combine to form an international web of illegal weapons sales.

The top threat posed by black market weapons is their sustenance of various conflicts in developing nations—particularly those in Latin America and Africa. The weapons black market is also the chief weapons supplier to various terrorist organizations. Cutting off the flow of weapons into these hands seems like the most logical solution to solving these particular problems.

While there have been numerous attempts to crack down on illegal weapons sales—including the UN’s Small Arms Review Conference, as well as efforts by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines—the illegal weapons trade continues to pose a serious threat to global human security. Year by year, it’s becoming clearer that the current approach isn’t working, and that it’s therefore time to try something more ambitious and direct.

Currently, the international comm-unity relies on customs agencies, domestic police forces—often linked through co-operative organizations such as INTERPOL—and the aforementioned weapons embargos to control the flow of weapons to trouble-areas around the world.

But such soft-power approaches, based on diplomacy, coalition-building and international good will, are meaningless without sufficient hard power—that is, actual operational capabilities—to back them up. This is where current international policy toward black market weapons trading falls short.

As unsavory as the idea may seem, the problem could best be solved through the creation of an international law enforcement organization, designed as a more autonomous and active version of INTERPOL and modeled along of the lines of a special operations strike force. In other words, an international SWAT team with a specific mandate to pursue and arrest those who deal in illegal weapons, and deliver them for prosecution—either in their home countries or at the Hague.

Intriguingly, when tallying the costs related to the black market weapons trade, one can’t help but realize that failure to deal adequately with the illegal sale of weapons has a negative impact on the UN’s peacekeeping initiatives. Terrorists, freedom fighters and militant factions the world over have to attain their weapons somehow, and the black market serves as a convenient source for these arms.

It’s in this sense that the establishment of any such force actually characterizes a more proactive approach to UN peacekeeping, one built upon the foundation of simply enforcing international law.

Of course, the establishment of any new United Nations initiative, especially one this ambitious, raises the question of how it will be paid for. Perhaps the UN could take the advice of Satya Das, who suggested levying an international tax on defence spending in order to fit the bill. Mustering the necessary political will would, in the long run, prove more difficult. However, the lives saved would be well worth the effort.

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