From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rights groups slam big powers over UN arms meeting By Irwin Arieff UNITED NATIONS, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Human rights and anti-gun groups accused the major world powers on Monday of trying to gut a U.N. conference on small arms trafficking by targeting only illegal sales while ignoring legal arms deals. The groups urged the conference, scheduled for July, to adopt a global system of controls on government and commercial trade in small arms as well as the illegal weapons trade. But they predicted the meeting would fall short of that goal because some of the most powerful U.N. member states were more worried about protecting their profits from legal arms sales than preventing gun deaths and injuries. "Virtually all illegal small arms in the world began at one point as legal weapons, either in the possession of states or police forces or civilians," said Wendy Cukier, president of Canada's Coalition for Gun Control. "It is critically important, therefore, that any effective strategy control the movement of legal small arms, in order to prevent diversion to illegal markets, because gunrunners don't differentiate between conflict zones and gangs in inner cities," Cukier told a news conference. The groups delivered their message as delegates from the U.N. General Assembly's 189 member states began a 12-day meeting to prepare for the conference, to be held July 9-20 in New York. The small arms category includes some pretty powerful weapons including grenades, mortars and anti-tank guns as well as handguns, machineguns and assault rifles. The General Assembly voted in 1999 to hold the conference, blaming these weapons for some 300,000 deaths a year from armed conflicts and 200,000 from murders, accidents and suicides. Joost Hiltermann of New York-based Human Rights Watch said the five permanent Security Council members -- the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China -- were among those flooding the world with small arms. Russia and China, he said, were completely opposed to controls on legal sales because they profit from light weapons sales while France "seems to be asserting its neocolonial interests" by slipping weapons to its allies in conflicts in Africa. BRITAIN "SHORT ON ETHICS" Britain, he said, while priding itself on ethical foreign policy, "so far has come up short on ethics" and the United States, though switching to a new administration, had been unhelpful in the past in cracking down on the gun trade. "I would not be surprised if (Washington) were counting on Russia and China to torpedo this process for it," he said. Conference Chairman Carlos Dos Santos of Mozambique has recommended in a working paper that the meeting focus on conflict zones and areas where arms proliferation needed urgent attention. The paper is silent on legal arms deals. Conmany Wesseh, Director of the Center for Democratic Empowerment in Liberia, said he hoped the conference would look closely at Sierra Leone, Guinea and his own country Liberia in West Africa, where small arms are "the weapon of choice." In the region, a bloody rebellion in Sierra Leone, fed by a deadly trade in smuggled diamonds for guns involving neighboring Liberia, has recently spilled over the border into Guinea, killing thousands and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes. "Working on this issue portends a great deal of danger. There is a very serious risk in working on issues of small arms," Wesseh said. He said that just a few weeks ago, a mob he blamed on Liberian authorities had attacked his offices and threatened to kill him in protest at efforts to rein in the arms trade. Cybershooters website: http://www.cybershooters.org List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ____________________________________________________________ T O P I C A -- Learn More. Surf Less. Newsletters, Tips and Discussions on Topics You Choose. http://www.topica.com/partner/tag01
