Canada in the World: Canadian International Policy

Video Interview Robert Fox Subscribe to eNewsletter and/or Email Alerts and Podcasts

Introduction	5 min 54 sec	Windows Media | QuickTime
The Arms Trade	5 min 34 sec	Windows Media | QuickTime
Role for Canada	4 min 47 sec	Windows Media | QuickTime
Proposal	6 min 35 sec	Windows Media | QuickTime
Accepting Responsibility	5 min 07 sec	Windows Media | QuickTime

Introduction

My name is Robert Fox. I am the Executive Director of Oxfam Canada. Oxfam is a global organization committed to ending poverty and injustice. Oxfam Canada is an organization within that family that has operated for about 35 or 40 years in Canada and has programs in Africa and the Americas, as well as here in Canada.

The Control Arms Campaign is a global effort to make life more secure for the people on this planet. It is a joint effort between Oxfam, Amnesty International and the international network to control the spread of small arms. It is not aiming at disarmament at large -- disarmament the way a lot of people think about it, in terms of nuclear missiles and that sort of thing -- but the sort of disarmament that every single day is killing -- in fact, every single minute is killing -- someone on this planet. Small arms -- which may be handguns, weapons, they may be Uzis or rifles, but they are the weapons that are actually, as I say, every single day killing more men, women and children on this planet than people can begin to think about. We see that both in terms of street violence in the cities in which we live in the North, but we see that most markedly in terms of armed actions and generalized violence in countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.

The Control Arms Campaign is aimed at controlling the spread of small arms globally. It is an effort to build international support for a treaty that will restrict the trade in arms in certain circumstances, ensuring that arms are not being traded into countries in which there are systemic violations of human rights and ensuring that there are consequences when arms are being used against civilian populations.

The campaign has a goal both to reduce the impact of arms and violence but also to ensure that the funds that are freed up -- when governments aren’t spending funding on armaments -- are invested in human and public services. We see that as having a major benefit in terms of advancing human rights and improving the quality of life of people on this planet.

It is sometimes hard for people in the North to understand the extent to which violence characterizes the day-to-day existence of people in the South. I had the opportunity a few months ago to visit camps for the internally displaced in Darfur. When we look at the violence in Darfur, we are not talking about major military troop movements or about the sorts of violence that sometimes people assume we’re talking about when we talk about war. We are talking about, on the one hand, rebels who are mounted on the back of Jeeps with machine guns who are trying to assert their control over portions of the country. And we have the Sudanese army responding, themselves with relatively light arms. We have the militia armed similarly with rifles and some cases machine guns. We are not talking about sophisticated arms but about a large number of arms that were most likely diverted from what was official use at one time -- in the hands of the military or others -- and being transported across borders illegally, but also about arms that are part of a legal trade in arms, globally, that could be controlled, and must be controlled, by the governments of the world.

In the case of Darfur, we had millions of people who were displaced by the violence, hundreds of thousands of people who were killed by these small arms. We had certainly more than a million women who were raped and subject to sexual violence, many of them at the point of arms. So we are in a situation there where there are a couple of million people who have been displaced, and almost a million people who are living in camps for the internally displaced, who are waiting day to day for a level of security to be restored within their communities to allow them to return to their communities, to return to their livelihoods and to their culture and way of life. They are suffering the terror and the trauma that comes from that violence, and from not knowing when the level of security will be restored to a standard that will assure them that they can return to their homes.

Those are the sorts of situations that characterize the lives of millions throughout Africa but also in other parts of the world. That is the sort of arms trade that the Control Arms Campaign is particularly directed at addressing.

The Arms Trade

The actors are us, that is to say that the most wealthy countries in the North are the countries that produce more than 90 percent of the arms that are being traded. In fact, the five countries at the United Nations that hold the veto at the Security Council are ironically the five countries that produce 70 percent of the arms we are talking about: the United States, France, Britain, China and Russia are the principal arms producers on the planet. Canada, too, is an arms producer and there certainly would be restrictions on the export of Canadian arms to countries that have a record of systemically abusing human rights or an inability to protect their citizens from systemic abuses of human rights.

The arms trade is very profitable, but it is important to “unpack” that. While it is very profitable, it does not generate huge numbers of jobs; and the sorts of jobs that it generates could easily be converted to other sorts of uses. Moreover, we are not talking about eliminating the production of arms. That is not what the objective of this particular campaign is. We recognize that a soldier who is officially engaged in the work of protecting his or her country in this world needs to be armed. We recognize that police in many instances require arms. We are not indicating, and the objective of this campaign is not that there should be no arms. Rather, what we are acknowledging is that the current rules of the game create a dynamic where there is an official and legitimate trade in arms and there is an official, but completely illegitimate trade in arms. So because there is no coherent system to track the trade in arms, the distinction between official legitimate; official less legitimate; and clandestine, illegitimate, money-making arms trade -- that is tied into narcotrafficking, tied into organized crime, tied into terrorism and tied into banditry on a massive scale -- is not in any way tracked.

So what we tend to think of often is people who are smuggling a couple of guns over a border; or if we looked in the back of a lorry passing from one country in Africa or the Middle East to another country in Africa or the Middle East, we may find some Uzis or rifles. That is almost certainly the case. But the point is that we are talking about the shipment of billions of dollars of illegal arms across borders, or the irresponsible disposal by governments of arms that they legitimately obtained for legitimate purposes but that then are decommissioned through corruption, neglect, and contempt for human lives and the consequences of their actions.

There are various parts of the world where you can find an AK-47 in every household. These are households which may not have enough food to feed their families, in countries where they cannot find government funding for basic education and health services. Of course, these things both relate to each other and feed off each other. So the insecurity, the poverty and the social unrest that arises from the lack of investment in water services, public services, health, education and stable employment generate a dynamic where many more people are forced to take action, often armed action, to meet their most basic human needs and other people forced to arm themselves to protect their most basic human needs, their families, their herds and their homes. That is a spiral that builds on itself.

Role for Canada

We really see Canada as having a key role in providing leadership on this issue. We would love Canada to play the role on small arms that it did on landmines. I think we all recognize that in the case of landmines, when Canada took its leadership role at the outset on this issue globally, a lot of people said “it can’t be done; the big guys won’t sign on” or “it can’t be done; it’s naïve; it’s too complicated.” In fact, we moved forward, we demonstrated leadership and we worked on language that the world could adopt. We used our diplomatic muscle and we used our good offices. We demonstrated the base of support across this country and we built a base of support globally that meant that the approval of the Ottawa Protocol has changed the face of the planet.

We are still dealing with the scourge of landmines because there are landmines that are in the ground in many parts of the world and it will be generations before all those landmines are removed. We are dealing with the scourge of landmines because we are still dealing with a generation of people who have been maimed and many, in fact, who have lost their lives because of those landmines.

That said, the tremendous impact that treaty has had on this globe pays dividends every day, and those dividends grow every single day. We have that same opportunity on this issue. Canada has more leadership because of the experience with landmines and because we are not seen as a major manufacturer, as someone who is trying to advance geopolitical or geo-economic interests. We are seen here as -- again, the sort of role the Canadians like to see our government play -- an honest broker with a national commitment, not only at the state level, but at the level of our citizens, to human rights, respect for people’s livelihoods and their security of person. This is doable. This is not solving all the world’s problems tomorrow. This is not being naïve about how long it will actually take us to make a fundamental shift in terms of the extent to which people’s lives are in jeopardy day by day because of small arms. But it is recognized that just because there is no quick solution, that does not mean the solution does not start today and that we cannot build that consensus and implement good global policy, good global law that serves all of our interests. It is really what we Canadians look to our government to do, why we continue to have faith in the United Nations -- as cynical as we may be on a given day or as frustrated as we can be on any given day. We continue to look to multilateral responses to the issues that grip our planet because we are so clear that the issues that face Canadians and the future of Canada are tied into the security and health and peace of that planet.

When we talk about Canada, we have to remember that Canadians came from all over the world. When we look across our own communities, we see people who come from every single country we are talking about -- having much higher levels of gun violence than we ourselves are experiencing, who are seeing day to day the consequences of small arms on their lives and continue to have family, interests and concerns with people globally. All the more reason, then, that we should be providing leadership on this issue.

Proposal

What we are calling upon is for the governments of the world to set in place a coherent system that tracks transfers of arms from one country to another country, that that register be maintained in a public location in a transparent way, in order that any citizen of the planet has the opportunity to go to that record and find out whether arms have been transferred by a given government or by a given country to a given government or country. And to know that the transferring government did its due diligence and verified that the recipient government was in compliance with generally accepted standards in terms of human rights and protection of the rights for security, the right to life of the citizens of their country. And that they had adequate systems in place to ensure that the arms were being purchased and used for police work, for example, or for the legitimate work of the military. And not being used in other ways, not being diverted to other uses, not being decommissioned improperly.

The onus rests with the government that is trading the arms to set in place the systems required so that it can offer some of that assurance. That process would be monitored globally through United Nations processes, and governments would hold each other to account in that respect.

The people who produce arms will produce arms for anyone. In fact, though, governments have played an important and central role in determining to which countries they will allow their arms manufacturers to sell arms. Governments often use arms production as a form of community economic development within their own nations. And they use arms sales as incentives, as part of the series of goodies they have in terms of their foreign affairs relations.

There is aid, official development assistance, food aid, humanitarian aid; there are arms sales, technical exchanges, and so governments have very much used arms sales as part of currying their relationships with countries with which they have close relations or wish to garner support, garner favours and maintain close relations. They really do see arms sales as an instrument of foreign policy. Often, arms manufacturers are exempt from certain trade regulations. In the case of Canada, for example, arms manufacturers, the defence industry, is not subject to NAFTA. That is because each country -- but in the case of NAFTA, most particularly the United States -- has an interest in ensuring that the defence industry, the arms manufacturing industry, is treated as a special interest. Yes, for its legitimate security interests, but also because in fact it is a major economic lever in the country -- it’s a major element of its economic development strategy to ensure that there is arms manufacturing in every congressional district, if that is what is required.

It would be naïve to say that arms manufacturing is a private sector initiative that governments are regulating only from an arm’s length. In fact, that is not the case in the United States; it is clearly not the case in China, Russia, the United Kingdom or France.

We need to understand that governments do use the permission to sell arms, which they themselves currently regulate, in their defence interests as well as in their foreign interests. But the reality is that their foreign interests or their defence interests have often been interpreted from a very short-term time frame because it was seen as in their short-term economic interest.

The threat of small arms is deep enough that it jeopardizes our global security. I think that governments increasingly recognize that. We think that there are a number of governments who are supporting the idea of an arms trade treaty globally because they recognize that this is jeopardizing the security of our planet, in the North and in the South. I wouldn’t say that they are rushing to embrace the idea of a global arms treaty to regulate the trade in small arms. But I would say that they are increasingly open to that because they recognize that in fact it is overdue, that the economic benefits cannot continue to trump the security concerns and the human rights that are jeopardized by the status quo.

Accepting Responsibility

I have had the opportunity to work in a number of countries. One of them was Nicaragua for a number of years. Throughout Central America you see the phenomenon of young men who were either forced or voluntarily enlisted -- whether it was the government or in the mountains with guerrilla forces -- who at the age of 10, 12, 13 or 14 became soldiers. At a certain point a truce is formed, a peace is signed and a dynamic is created whereby they are demobilized from their role in either an official army or in a rebel movement. They lost the years they might have been in school, they lost the years they might have learned a trade, they lost the years where they may have sowed their crops and learned how to make a livelihood as a farmer, a campesino, a producer. They are 20 or 25, they are unskilled, they are unwanted -- and they are armed. The only skill that they have is wielding that weapon, and so it generates a spiral of banditry, kidnappings and urban gangs. We see that raising levels of security risk, threatening violence against women, we see that impeding the development of countries in Central America, in Latin America. But this is a global phenomenon.

There is at this time a spotty regime that is sometimes captured by customs regulations at the national level, sometimes at the European Community level, for example, and occasionally at the global level. But these systems basically document transfers from arms manufacturers -- and particularly official transfers from arms manufacturers -- to official government sources. They leave open for interpretation how thorough these systems are. We all know that under this era of the war on terror and the war on drugs, there are things that happen officially and things that happen unofficially by official agencies.

When we look at the record, we do not know if we are looking at the complete record, at the true record. We do not know if governments are aware of a record that you and I may not be aware of. But we do know that when we add up all of the things that are officially documented, they do not account for all of the arms that were produced this year -- the 60 million arms that were produced this year by the arms manufacturers on the globe. We know that they are not being fully accounted for by the system.

And we know that the 640 million arms that are on the planet, in use, that have been produced over the last number of years, that the second sale of those is not tracked in any official and coherent way, that the decommissioning of those is tracked in a most spotty way and in only the most superficial manner and by the most sophisticated governments. Of course, the reality is that in many of the countries we are talking about, information systems aren’t their specialty. We are dealing with governments in Africa that have weak systems to begin with, where whole governments are in jeopardy because of the capacity they are losing day to day as a result of the impact of HIV/AIDS, for example, on civil servants and on the professional class within those countries. When we look at poor countries in Latin America... when we look at Haiti today, who do we think in Haiti today is keeping track of the transfers of arms within that country? No one. That is unacceptable. There are obligations on the part of countries which are producing arms and generating huge profits from those arms, huge wealth from those arms, that they accept some responsibility for verifying who is receiving the arms and for verifying that there are systems in place for the decommissioning of those arms at the end of their legitimate purpose.

Last Updated:2006-10-16

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