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| Saturday, 11 October 2003 |
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Lanka too in global control arms campaign The global arms trade is dangerously unregulated and allows weapons to reach repressive governments, human rights abusers and criminals says a new report Shattered Lives: The Case for Tough International Arms Controls released yesterday. To address these concerns, Amnesty International, Oxfam and International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) have jointly launched the global Control Arms campaign. The campaign is being launched in over 50 countries including Sri Lanka and is aimed to reduce arms proliferation and misuse and to introduce an arms trade treaty, a Amnesty/Oxfam news release said. The staggering lack of regulation revealed by the report has allowed the arms trade to get dangerously out of control. According to the report everyday millions of men, women and children are living in fear of armed violence. Every minute one of them is killed while during the same minute 15 new guns and 30,000 new bullets are produced. Arms proliferation and misuse have reached a critical point fuelling poverty, conflict and human rights violations. The costs of armed violence are horrific both in human and financial terms. In Sri Lanka alone over 65,000 people lost their lives and over one million people were displaced or directly effected by war. Almost every family from all communities in the North and East is affected by the war as well as thousands of families in the South. It is estimated (by the Marga Institute) that the costs of war up until 1998 are about US $ 20 billion which includes war-related expenditure, damages and loss of economic output, the report states. Amnesty International, Oxfam and IANSA propose urgent and interlinked action from community level to international level to control the proliferation and misuse of arms more effectively to remedy the problem. "In Sri Lanka arms' control is seen necessary to bring about sustainable peace and the government is making initial positive attempts to respond to international efforts to control arms. We would like to see the proposed National Commission on Arms be quickly approved by Cabinet and strongly implemented. We encourage Sri Lanka to take a lead in formulating proposals for regional control on arms transfers and tracking mechanisms. At the international level, an Arms Treaty is desperately needed to stop the flow of arms into the wrong hands and to help make our world a safer place," said Phill Esmonde, Programme Representative of Oxfam. |
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