February 29, 2000
Group seeks global gun control
By Ben Barber
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
International organizations and diplomats this week began a final push for a global treaty to control exports of automatic weapons to terrorists, guerrillas, drug runners and criminal gangs.
Advocates of the plan have changed tactics from two years ago, when the U.S. Congress killed a proposed "Code of Conduct" that would have barred U.S. weapons exports to countries that do not respect human rights and democracy.
This time, the concerns of American sovereignty advocates are being considered and the National Rifle Association has a representative present while proposed treaty language is being drafted at a U.N. conference in New York.
Former French Premier Michel Rocard has been lobbying in Washington for the last several days to build support for the cause.
"The mounting death toll of excessive accumulations of small arms poses one of the great humanitarian challenges of our time . . . yet the international trade in small arms remains largely unregulated," he said yesterday at American University.
Mr. Rocard is co-chairman of an eminent persons group (EPG) of 20 current and former leaders seeking to limit the flow of light machine guns such as Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles responsible for most of the slaughter in the world.
"I call on the international community to take all steps necessary to begin early talks on a universal, comprehensive and nondiscriminatory small arms control regime," Mr. Rocard said.
Today he goes to the United Nations in New York where a preparatory committee is drafting a treaty to be presented at an international conference next year.
In an interview Sunday, Mr. Rocard conceded that no enforceable convention was likely without the support of the United States, where any treaty is likely to be viewed with suspicion by gun-rights supporters and sovereignty advocates.
"In today's international scenery, nothing is possible without the American will," he said.
Aware that the U.S. Constitution protects the right to bear arms, Mr. Rocard's EPG as well as more than 200 nongovernmental organizations pushing for a treaty limiting small-arms sales have lowered their immediate goals.
They seek an agreement that governments will:
* Sell light machine guns only to other governments or official security forces. * Mark weapons so they can be traced if they are re-sold. * Promise that if they distribute weapons to national liberation forces such as the Afghan Mujahideen, they will collect the small arms after the conflict ends.
Mr. Rocard said hundreds of thousands of Kalashnikov assault rifles provided by the United States to the Afghans to fight the Soviet Union's occupation army in the 1980s are now being used by Islamic militants in India and elsewhere.
Mr. Rocard joined with the leader of Mali, Alpha Oumar Konare, to chair the EPG after Mali successfully rounded up thousands of arms at the end of an insurgency in 1995.
Mali's success led West African nations to pass the world's first treaty controlling small-arms transfers in 1998.
"There are half a billion small arms in illegal circulation," said a spokesman for the EPG yesterday.
"Conflicts in which they were used over the last 30 years have left 7 [million] to 8 million dead, 90 percent of whom were civilians and most of them children. Small arms kill 10 times as many people as land mines."
The EPG includes Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, head of the Organization of African Unity Salim Ahmed Salim and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat.
The NRA opposes banning sales of light machine guns to individuals. It does not object to marking guns, but it does object to the plan to collect weapons after a conflict ends.
The EPG ideas "have not been thought through and amount to unilateral disarmament in favor of governments and the status quo," said NRA spokesman Tom Mason.