By Sahra Caffarate, Control Arms Campaigner.
It’s the morning after our first event and as the rest of team head back down to the UN I thought I’d send you a quick update on what happened yesterday.
We kicked off the first series of Control Arms events we have planned over the next few weeks. ‘From The Front Line’ bought together the slightly unlikely sounding combination of a war journalist, 3 retired military leaders from around the world, UN ambassadors and a mountain of sandwiches to discuss the ATT.
Now if you’d told me 2 years ago when I first started at Oxfam that I’d be sat on a podium staring out at the huge room in the UN you see on TV, packed full of ambassadors & representatives I wouldn’t have believed you! (Mind you in my 2 years here I have had to dress a shark, wear top-to-toe spandex & don a giant Tony Blair head all in the name of campaigning so I really shouldn’t be surprised I guess!)
The Generals & the journalist however took it all in their stride & made most of their experiences in war zones around the world to give passionate & moving speeches on the need for current loopholes in the sales of arms to be firmly and quickly shut.
One moment was particularly poignant – General Cammeart from the Netherlands took to the stand & spoke of his last posting before retirement, commanding a deployment with the UN in the Congo. All the speakers were incredible, but at this particular story seemed to get through to the room the most, perhaps they were not expecting such a heartfelt story from a former military commander. From my vantage point on the podium I could see from their faces that it had got through to them.
“I thought I’d seen it all in my years of military service, but I hadn’t. Whilst in the Congo we heard news of 50 women and children being herded at gunpoint into a hut & burnt alive. When we got there the smell & sight was awful, we found two young extremely traumatised boys who had somehow avoided the gunmen & survived, they told us the militia had gone back into the bush so we tracked them. We eventually found them & were shocked to discover that they had brand new guns and ammunition, someone had sold these people brand new guns & ammunition. This is why we need an ATT, the current situation is like mopping the floor with the tap still on.”
I hope that story & the feelings they felt at that moment stays with them, all through the many many meetings they will have to go to on the ATT, so that they don’t forget that the ATT is not just another UN process & series of meetings that they have to go to as part of their working lives, but something that has the power to transform the lives of actual, real people.
1 Comment
November 28, 2007 at 10:23 am
[...] We also brought together the slightly unlikely sounding combination of a war journalist, 3 retired military leaders from around the world and UN ambassadors (and a mountain of sandwiches to help fuel the debate) to discuss the Arms Trade Treaty in our event, ‘From The Front Line’. [...]