Philip Alpers: Removal of guns a lifesaver

Although the families of New Zealanders flying off to East Timor are surely right to be concerned for their safety, a unique regional characteristic could save more lives than we will ever know. The top priority in the trouble spot was quickly stated by the first Australian military commander to arrive: "We will be disarming everybody in Dili. The only people in Dili carrying weapons will be the international forces."

New Zealand and Australia did the same in Bougainville and the Solomon Islands. Even on tiny Pitcairn Island police preparing for a 2004 sexual abuse trial impounded the rifles used by islanders to shoot breadfruit out of trees. In our region, an unarmed society is a polite society.

Normal behaviour? Hardly. Not all arriving forces, invited or otherwise, share the Pacific mindset.

According to the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva think tank, the invasion of Iraq let loose seven to eight million small arms, most of which are still in the hands of civilians and criminals. Yet, instead of seriously tackling saturation levels of illicit weapons in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Sudan, Indonesia, the Philippines and other trouble spots, gun-making nations immediately shipped in, and widely distributed millions of additional small arms.

Unsurprisingly, for those trying to deliver aid and development assistance, illicit firearms have become a major barrier.

Now, with 1000 people killed each day by gunshot worldwide, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan is referring to small arms as the true "weapons of mass destruction." And two weeks from today in New York, at the United Nations Small Arms Review Conference, New Zealand has an opportunity to promote the alternative, Pacific way.

Egged along by the global Control Arms campaign (Oxfam, Amnesty International and the 700-NGO International Action Network on Small Arms), the UN has reached a crucial five-year decision point; to seriously tackle the proliferation of illicit small arms, or to be cowed by the gun-makers' determination to stifle debate in New York.

Of the estimated 640 million firearms on the planet (three to four million of these are in the Pacific), 60 per cent are held by civilians. While legitimate reasons exist for many to own a firearm, the fact remains that every factory-made illegal gun began as a legal gun, in the hands of a lawfully entitled owner. It's this leakage of lethal weapons from licit to illicit use, and its consequences for violence prevention and crime control, that is the sole concern of the UN process.

To overthrow the elected government of Fiji, George Speight began with just a boot-load of army assault rifles, illustrating our region's main source of illicit weapons. Very few guns are smuggled here from abroad. Across 20 Pacific nations (and now in East Timor), the most destructive firearms used in crime and conflict were leaked from lawfully imported police, military and civilian holdings.

In Papua New Guinea, tribal fighters, mercenaries and criminals have upskilled from bows and arrows to assault rifles, almost all of them originally provided by Australia and the United States to equip PNG's military and police.

Locally, much has already been done. New Zealand and Australia have strengthened state armouries across the Pacific Islands Forum, and a "good neighbour" choke on ammunition exports from both countries to PNG caused local prices to soar.

As one mercenary gunman in the Highlands complained to me, suddenly his client tribes could barely afford the bullets to shoot each other.

But on the world stage, New Zealand could do much more.

In the next few days, when Minister for Disarmament Phil Goff signs off on this country's position at the UN conference, he should ensure that our support for a global Arms Trade Treaty is as energetic as the international community has come to expect from this country.

He should protect New Zealand's development personnel around the globe by insisting on continued, and serious UN discussion of the escalating risk to aid workers and even more so to aid recipients of the global proliferation of small arms.

And finally, by way of encouraging others who must deal with epidemics of gun violence far more intransigent than ours, he could do a bit of trumpet-blowing for the Pacific. We've shown that to lessen the risk of people being shot, it seems a good start to remove guns. Although the recent sacking of Honiara's Chinatown was awful for all concerned, imagine what might have ensued, had Ramsi's first order of business not been to round up so many loose firearms.

* Philip Alpers is spokesman for the Gun Policy lobby group and an adjunct associate professor at the school of health, Sydney University.