|
|
|
|
  |
 |
 |
 |
|  |
Le Canada et l’ONU > Newton Bowles Reports Ce document est disponible seulement en anglais.
Armaments: Dis or Dys? The short report for 1998 goes like this. Mass Weapons Nuclear
Chemical Convention to Control - 118 ratified or acceded
Biological
Conventional Weapons U.N. Register (heavy weapons)
Small Arms
Land Mines
Secretary-General Kofi Annan is giving disarmament a big push. He lifted Disarmament in-house to a "Department" on the same level as Political Affairs and Peacekeeping. (Functionally these Departments are closely interrelated and are coordinated by an inter-departmental Executive Committee.) To run Disarmament, Kofi Annan has installed Jayantha Dhanapala, a brilliant and seasoned diplomat from Sri Lanka with extensive experience in disarmament, not only in the U.N. but also outside (the Canberra Commission on Nuclear Disarmament, the Monterey Institute in California). Kofi Annan has been outspoken on critical issues; addressing the G.A.'s First Committee on 12 October 1998, he said: "Disarmament lies at the heart of this Organization's efforts to maintain and strengthen international peace and security." The continuing nuclear impasse means that there are still as many as 35,000 of these dread weapons, and thousands still on trigger alert (20 minutes to Armageddon). Nuclear disarmament remains bilateral, US-Russia. The second phase of their nuclear rundown, Start II, is stalled in the Russian Duma which must ratify it. Their conventional army is in shambles, what else do they have? The U.S. is pushing NATO to their borders and now is talking about reviving "Star Wars." Not conducive to handshakes. The Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva is the formal place where specific disarmament conventions are hammered out (e.g., the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, the 1968 NPT, the 1972 Biological Convention, the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention). The CD acts (or doesn't) by consensus. In 1996, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, fully elaborated in the CD, was blocked by India, so that Australia took it directly to the G.A. Now the C.D. can't move on nuclear disarmament because the U.S. won't allow it. The only CD move in 1998 was a Committee to start work on a convention to stop future production of fissile materials (not touching large stocks already on hand). The CD also revived an ad hoc committee to work out some kind of assurances that the nuke powers won't nuke the nukeless. Ho hum. You would think that the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests (May-June 1998) would jar CD into action. India said it has to have nukes for its security: why should only the five declared nuke states, identified in the NPT, have nukes? Pakistan said India provoked them into testing. Condemnation all 'round, the Security Council , the General Assembly. Economic sanctions-- U.S., IMF. That's it, so far. By chance, eight "middle powers" had got together before the India/Pakistan tests and developed a comprehensive proposal, a "New Agenda" for action by the G.A. to get moving on a serious nuclear run-down with the clear objective of eliminating nukes altogether. The sponsors were Brazil, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, Slovenia, Sweden, and South Africa. (At the G.A., Slovenia withdrew. Heavy U.S. pressure.) Fortuitously, this was exactly what the citizen's Middle Power Initiative, inspired by our own Senator Doug Roche, was aiming at, two converging forces. An amended "New Agenda," guts intact, was adopted: 114 yes, 18 no, 38 abstain. Canada abstained. Reluctantly? Obviously, this was a very sensitive political decision that had to be made in Ottawa. This issue is of such concern to Canadians that I am reproducing, in Annex 6, the text of the "New Agenda" resolution as adopted, and the Canadian "explanation of vote" which strains to avoid saying something. Instead of saying something-- ever hear of NATO?-- the "explanation" was that the Canadian government didn't want to jump the gun-- an apt expression-- and awaited the views of the people via the ongoing Parliamentary review: "Canada and the Nuclear Challenge." Bill Graham's Committee on Foreign Affairs released its excellent report in December 1998-- if you haven't seen it, get it-- a comprehensive and serious study. NATO is now having another look at its nuclear doctrine-- Cold War deterrence, etc.-- to come to a head in April 1999. Maybe Canada can help NATO get out of its obsolete nightmare. What about "conventional weapons" (i.e., everything other than nuclear, chemical, and biological)? Still no comprehensive approach, of course. The U.N. voluntary Register of imports and exports of Conventional Weapons (the heavy sophisticated things, what Ethiopia and Eritrea are now throwing at each other in their crazy war over a pile of rocks) has come through six years. The number of reporting governments went up from 85 (1996) to 95 (1998), so there is on public record a pretty full picture of this element of the arms trade. Along with China, Iran failed to report in 1998. Only half of the top 10 importers reported. The picture is also incomplete because the formal register excludes stocks on hand and local production; and while stocks and production are still outside the formal register, governments have been encouraged to send in that information anyway. And so for the first time the 1998 U.N. report includes information on local procurement provided by 23 governments. Then there is the plague of small arms (light weapons), any that can be carried by hand or on a light vehicle. Among these are anti-personnel land mines. Two treaties bear on mines, the Convention on Inhumane Weapons which restricts their military use; and the Treaty to Abolish land-mines (the Ottawa Treaty) which prohibits production and use, and requires their destruction. As you know, Canada led in marshalling world-wide support for this Treaty in an international campaign outside the constipated CD, a campaign that got the Treaty in place in record time. This would not have happened without the participation of an international NGO coalition, recognized in the Nobel Peace Prize. With over 40 ratifications, the Ottawa Treaty goes into effect in March 1999. Land mines are bad enough, but small arms are even worse, flooding countries in turmoil-- cheap, portable, durable. They don't self-destruct. It is hard to get at the illicit arms trade, mixed up with drugs and criminal commercial exploitation of countries in conflict. We don't even have good information about the legal trade in small arms. So far the only relevant international regulation is the OAS Treaty to stop the illicit trade in the Americas and the Caribbean. In 1997, the European Union adopted a voluntary programmer to combat the illicit trade; and in 1998 adopted a code of conduct for the legal trade, curbing exports to troubled areas. In 1997, the G.A. approved recommendations for reducing supplies of small arms and curbing the traffic. In unstable areas, excessive supplies of small arms need to be collected and destroyed, an activity that is given some attention-- so far, not too effective-- in U.N. peacekeeping operations. One of the more successful efforts is in Mali and its neighbors in their moratorium on production and trade in small arms. In July 1998 a training workshop on practical disarmament was held in Yaounde, Cameroon; and in November 1998, in Guatemala City, there was a workshop on weapons collections and the integration of fighters into civil society, drawing on the experiences of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Cambodia. An expert report on ammunition as one way to approach the small arms problem will go to the next G.A. The current General Assembly decided to convene an international conference on the illicit arms trade by the year 2001. These first U.N. steps into the small-arms jungle will be reinforced by a sophisticated NGO Network coalescing around small arms. While benefiting from the land mines experience, NGOs are aware that curbing small arms will be much more complicated, calling for persistence and step-by-step attacks over the long haul. This is a tough campaign with domestic and international dimensions. That the Security Council can't ignore small arms is clear from its post-conflict peacekeeping operations in many countries, and most spectacularly in Iraq-- the first time that the U.N. has attempted to eradicate a nation's mass weaponry. This is certainly a learning experience and it aren't over yet-- formidable technical and political obstacles. With prostrate enemies after World War II, it was done-- but President Saddam Hussein won't lie down. In the Assembly, the NAM, the "South," continue to press for another Special Session on Disarmament. The North is reluctant. The first Special Session in 1978 succeeded in setting the U.N. disarmament agenda. The next two Special Sessions yielded no advance. Are we ready for another? The formal decision of the Assembly now is, O.K., en principe, another Special Session on disarmament, provided we (North and South) can agree on objectives and agenda. In other words, yes and no. Meantime, this world of ours continues to spend over $700 billion a year on arms. |
