Security
Guns that Travel
Neglected Armories Endanger Pacific States
As the Australia-led intervention in the Solomons moves from gun amnesty to disarmament, the issue of small arms as a danger to small state stability becomes ever clearer. In the Pacific there is one gun for every 10 people. This, according to Small Arms in the Pacific, a report issued last March jointly by the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat and the Small Arms Survey in Geneva, Switzerland.
The figure might seem surprising, but it is not high by world standards, especially when considering that New Zealand and Australia, both with heavily-armed populations, are included in the 20-nation survey. The U.S. is by far the biggest legal exporter of small arms to Pacific countries.
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David Capie, a research fellow and co-director of the Armed Groups Project at the Center of International Relations in Vancouver, Canada, has been researching Pacific small arms issues for many years. Capie says that, in regard to the issue of trafficking patterns for small arms in the Pacific, "There's a lot of hype about this right now, but in truth, there's very little organized trafficking. There's a lot of exaggerated claims. I'm not going to say there are no weapons being smuggled, but the real danger in places like the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea is from weapons that are already there."
Capie says the protection and security of armories is an issue all through the region. "Most of the weapons used in crime in the region actually started their lives as legal weapons. Either a house is burgled and guns are stolen that way, or a police or military armory loses track of their inventory or the weapons are outright stolen." One of the first questions in a recent four-person killing in Fiji was whether the weapon in question originated from the Fiji Defense Forces arsenal. (Police said it did not.) But guns that went missing during the 2000 coup are still circulating in the country and being used in crimes.
"How armories are administered is a problem all through the Pacific," Capie says. "You have to build a really strong physical structure, but it is only good as the person with the keys." As in, a person who is not corrupt-not willing to sell arms for profit or to supply them free to political sympathizers.
These poorly-guarded, poorly administered armories, says Capie, "are the biggest danger to human security and political stability" in many countries. Aside from what's already happened in the Solomons, he says his biggest worries in this regard are PNG and Vanuatu. "In both these places you have a dangerous combination of weak state institutions, populations with long-standing grievances and large stocks of weapons that are poorly secured."
What happened in the Solomons is a textbook example of armories destabilizing a weak state. On June 5, 2000 the police station at Rove was raided. This armory stored virtually the entire stock of the Solomon's government small arms. Although the police forces in the country had been unarmed, these weapons had been accumulated to be used for a mobile "field force," which was to be deployed to handle border incursions from Bougainville and the western provinces. According to Capie, some of the weapons had been legally purchased from Singapore, others in the inventory were gifted by various regional defense cooperation programs.
For the most part, it is the weapons from this armory raid in 2000 that have circulated in a political and financial underground and led to the extortion and compromise of politicians and government officials-and the routine intimidation of civilians on the Weathercoast and in the streets of the Solomon's capital, Honiara. These are the same weapons which started as legal property of the government.
In Vanuatu there have long been tensions between the Vanuatu Police Force and the Vanuatu Mobile Force, its paramilitary counterpart. Both the VPF and the VMF are armed, with the VMF having the biggest fire power. At one point in the mid-1990s, the VPF kidnapped the country's president and in 2002 the VMF and VPF almost came to blows. The VMF has machine guns and SLRs (self-loading rifles) gifted to them by Australia.
"Tonga is also a concern," Capie adds. "The Tongan Defense Services, with about 350 personnel, have hundreds of rifles and shotguns. They recently tried to buy modern M16-A2s from the U.S., but the sale was stopped by the U.S. government."
So what should be done?
In places like the Solomons, Capie says, "The key thing is to rebuild confidence in law and order. The police have been part of the problem. They now need to be part of the solution. There might be some legitimate reasons for police to have a few weapons, like for hostage situations or VIP protection, but you have to take a hard look at the number and kinds of weapons they say they need. In the past, Australia and New Zealand have seen it as important to strengthen Pacific militaries, but now improving law enforcement and taking a human security approach is much more useful."
