African Church Information Service
Osman Njuguna
1 July 2002
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has set up a unit within its Nairobi offices to address concerns regarding proliferation of small arms and light weapons in the Great Lakes region.
The new unit, Small Arms Proliferation Project, is expected to strengthen UNDP's capacity, to address the small arms problem and to develop comprehensive control and reduction strategies.
It is also expected to design and implement country and regional programmes in the Great Lakes Region to address small arms proliferation from a development perspective.
The formation of the unit comes in the wake of increasing cases of violation of human rights in the region, encouraged by an increase in number of illicit weapons circulating in the region and its neighbouring countries.
A report from Tanzania said, for example, that proliferation of trade in illegal small arms in the Great Lakes Region is a threat to the country's security.
A conference, organised in the country's capital, Dar-as-Salaam recently by the International Action Network of Small Arms (IANSA), a UK non-governmental organisation, was told that the increase in illegal arms had resulted in the rise in crimes in the country's major towns of Arusha, Dar-es-Salaam, Mwanza, Musoma, Mbeya, Tabora and Shinyanga.
They were further told that guns were acquired cheaply in areas bordering countries that were at war, such as Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia.
A machine gun or an AK-47 rifle with a magazine full of ammunition sold for between ($ 150) and ($400), the conference participants were told.
A recent report on Kenya's human rights situation by the Washington, DC-based Human Rights Watch observed that weapons circulating in Kenya originate from places as far as China and the United States, but most of them passed through war zones in neighbouring countries before making their way to Kenya's illegal gun markets.
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