August 31, 2007...10:18 am
Weapons overflow
By Fred Lubang, Nonviolence International, Philippines
It’s been a week of listening intently on the discussion among states on the issue of small arms transfer at the small arms meeting in Geneva. It occured to me, the logic is really simple – when you continuously pour water in a glass, it overflows. Or expressed in another way, ‘we just can take as much water or food and eventually we will throw up’. While we could argue, ‘yeah our body needs nourishment and so forth in order to survive we just can take as long as our body could handle it. While arms producers all over the world continuously produce and transfer these weapons to places in unbelievable pace, eventually we would be awash with weapons and eventually throw up.
In the midst of the meeting, I recalled some memories in the recent past. I lived with weapons. I grew up with a gun under my bed and guns in our cabinets. I had my fair share of near death experience and witnessed armed violence. I saw someone shot a few feet from me. I had been threatened at gun point in many instances. In another incident, in my own home, a bullet missed my head by an inch when my brother accidentally dropped a plastic full of .45 caliber ammunition and setting off one bullet flying in every direction of the house luckily missed me and my daughter playing. I have so many tales and survived to tell those stories.
This week, we had meetings for at least six hours a day for five straight days, I cannot imagine how many arms and ammunitions have been manufactured, shipped and transited during this time. Well that’s just about weapons, but most bothering is how many lives were lost for the last 5 days that we have been discussing small arms transfer principles?
I patiently heard bits and pieces from states on how their citizens, or in general, how people’s lives are affected by the unregulated transfer of weapons to communities undermining development and fuelling human rights violations. But much has to reverberate in the halls of the meeting, that what is being discussed is a matter of utmost importance to people who live in constant fear and whose rights have been continuously violated.
The meeting is a good contribution towards recognition of the enormous problem and the task ahead. While states expressed much goodwill, the lack of capacity to control arms in the absence of an international mechanism in this highly globalized world should be recognized. States should not veer away from one of the reasons of its being – championing the rights of those who are weak, too poor or too disadvantaged.
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