Defence
The Pacific's Gun Problems
Why there are so many available
Stowed away in a Tongan Defence Force’s armoury are .303 Lee Enfield rifle and circa (early last century) still in their original packing, unfired. Also, there are World War Two automatic Bren guns, maintained and ready.
For what, academic David Capie wonders.
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Tonga, along with Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu, maintain military or paramilitary forces whose existence, he believes, has no positive rationale, but which often represent a threat to the nations they are supposed to defend.
“As none of these countries face an external military threat, it is hard to see why they have these military forces,” he says.
“A lot of the rationale is national prestige; if we want to be a state we have to have a military. Frankly, it is hard to see the justification for some of these military forces.”
The single worst example of a useless force that has become a menace to its state was the Vanuatu Mobile Force, Capie says.
“It does nothing at all, it should not exist.”
A fellow of the University of British Columbia’s Centre for International Relations, Capie’s book. “Under the Gun: The Small Arms Challenge in the Pacific” was published (by Victoria University Press) last month, detailing the nature of the Pacific’s gun problems: exotic smuggling or blackmarkets in arms are not necessary when the very forces protecting societies provide the firepower to the bad guys.
If people want to threaten a state or its government, the solution to obtaining firepower is precisely what happened in Fiji and the Solomons—obtain the weapons from the police or military.
While Capie paints a grim picture of parts of the Pacific, particularly Papua New Guinea’s Highland region where near full scale warfare occasionally exists, the solutions are largely local.
This is contrary to a popular media image of a traffic in arms from outside the region, particularly an often luridly described smuggling of weapons between Australia and Papua New Guinea across the Torres Strait, with arms said to go north as marijuana goes south.
Capie says it is small scale. There were also problems of arms crossing the porous Papua New Guinea/Indonesia border and relatively relaxed gun laws in United States’ Pacific territories in which arms can flow on into the independent Pacific such as between American Samoa to Samoa.
“While some (guns) are smuggled in from overseas, many (and in some countries, most) originate in poorly maintained military and police arsenals,” he writes.
“Weapons are frequently kept in insecure conditions and their use by authorised personnel is poorly managed. The result is that arms and ammunition are misplaced, or stolen and sold by corrupt soldiers or police officers.
“Corruption and poor discipline in law enforcement are also serious problems in parts of the Pacific. They seem to be particularly troubling in PNG and the Solomon Islands, where police have been implicated in the theft and sales of weapons.”
In Pacific societies “just a few dozen weapons” made an enormous impact.
“In several societies, there are grievances about inter-group relations, economic inequality and land that could potentially spill over into conflicts. Easy access to weapons in those situations might make the difference between a dispute being settled by peaceful or violent means.
“Nowhere is this more evident than in the Solomon Islands, where the loss of control over just a few hundred military firearms led to a coup and a state of on-going instability that has destroyed the country’s economy.
“The collapse of the Solomon Islands shows how quickly the uncontrolled circulation of a small number of weapons can reduce a country to near anarchy.”
The Melanesian country has suffered a four-year long civil war with the main combatants on the islands of Guadalcanal and Malaita.
Capie noted that the Malaita Eagle Force (MEF) managed to obtain the bulk of its arms simply but taking them out of police armouries in Rove and Auki.
“These modern military weapons immediately made the MEF by far the most powerful armed actor in the Solomon Islands.”
The military staged Fiji’s two 1987 coups, while the 2000 George Speight coup was supported by military elements that trucked arms and ammunition to the coup plotters who had seized Parliament.
“In Fiji, ill-discipline and weak controls over military stockpiles have also contrived to arm criminals and facilitate insurrections.”
Papua New Guinea military weapons were in the hands of gangs, and were now major contributors to violent crime and conflict. In the country’s Southern Highlands tribal fighting involved assault rifles, grenades and machine guns, mostly stolen from police and military units.
“The problem with the armouries is that it is now just a case of building better armouries. Some of them are shocking, some of the physical security is terrible,” he said in an interview.
“But even if you have the most secure armoury in the world, if some one has the key and wants to let some one to help themselves to the weapon or troops have been given the gun, if they cannot control it or if they lose it or sell it then that is an enormous problem.”
Better training was needed.
Possession of arms by some changed the traditional custom and authority of Pacific states. This was noted mostly in the Solomons, a society until recently largely devoid of firearms.
“A lot of the traditional patterns of authority are being undermined and a lot of young people realise power comes from the barrel of a gun and if you have a weapon you become an important person and you get access to resources and things you would not otherwise have.”
The Pacific four with military forces have problems maintaining them because the major arms suppliers do not trust them.
“While some are interested in acquiring new infantry weapons, they either do not have the necessary resources, or have not made the purchase of new arms a priority. New Zealand and Australia have provided military arms and ammunition to Pacific states in the past, although they have not done so for some years. Australia has repeatedly rejected request for arms and ammunition from several Pacific states, including Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu.”
Capie says Canberra was burnt badly during the Bougainville War when the helicopters it supplied to the Papua New Guinea Defence Forces were turned on rebels. Even its patrol boat problem has an image problem now that the Solomons and Papua New Guinea have used them to fire on villages.
“The Tongan military is in the process of updating its small arms holding. It has approached the United States to purchase new infantry weapons.
“The request was believed to be for around 300 M-16A2 rifles. It was turned down by the United States State Department after consultations with Australia and New Zealand.”
