Arms control in the Western Balkans
Croatia/Western Balkans, 14 May 2008 – Violence and fear of violence stand in the way of sustainable human development and prosperous communities. In the former Yugoslavia, the legacy of conflict and the presence of organized trafficking operations mean that small arms and light weapons are widespread. UNDP works in Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia and Albania to tackle the threat these weapons pose to the people who live with them.
Over the last half year, public events have been held in every county in Croatia to promote amnesties, aimed at removing weapons from private hands. At the final event in May, residents of the Croatian capital Zagreb and the surrounding area will be encouraged to present their guns and bullets to the police without fear of arrest. The amnesties, from September 2007 to March 2008, collected 552,000 rounds of ammunition and 15,000 firearms, as well as over 450 kilograms of explosives. This is one of the most successful campaigns worldwide when considering money spent per weapon collected (currently $11 per weapon collected).
Levels of gun ownership in the Western Balkans are high, a legacy of the conflicts and insecurity which have plagued the region, and more recently related to the activities of organized criminal groups. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, it is estimated that one in five households possesses a weapon, the vast majority being held illegally. Since 1998, around 60,000 civilian-held weapons have been collected, around 15 percent of the total. There are an estimated 400,000 weapons in circulation in Kosovo, and 900,000 unregistered weapons in Serbia, in addition to over one million registered arms. While these figures are broad estimates, they illustrate the scale of the challenge.
SEESAC
UNDP has been supporting the registration, collection and destruction of weapons in Western Balkan countries for several years. Since 2002, UNDP and the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe have cooperated closely in running the South Eastern and Eastern Europe Clearinghouse for the Control of Small Arms and Light Weapons (SEESAC). The overall aim of these activities is to help a National Commission on SALW in each country to implement a SALW Strategy and Action Plan. These strategies cover a range of areas:
- Cross-border control
- Legislative/regulatory framework
- Management information
- SALW awareness and communication strategy
- SALW and ammunition collection
- SALW and ammunition destruction
- Stockpile management
- Linkage to security sector reform
and have thus far been adopted in all the countries involved except for Albania and Serbia. In addition to technical support across functional areas, SEESAC also has a valuable role developing capacity to monitor the effects of SALW control processes and better inform and guide further work in the region. Examples include the National SALW Surveys and the Analysis of National Legislation on Arms Exports and Transfers in the Western Balkans. Regional micro-disarmament standards and guidelines on SALW control have been developed and are maintained by SEESAC.
The collections in Croatia have been accompanied by legal reforms, meaning that private citizens wishing to keep guns must satisfy clear criteria and legally register their weapons. In the last few years, governments in the Western Balkans have adopted laws on weapons (Kosovo’s proposal goes to the parliament in May 2008), which regulate gun ownership and lay the legal basis for governmental authorities to issue and refuse to issue licenses.
Within efforts to regulate ownership of small arms, a further contribution of UNDP and SEESAC in the region has been to link weapons regulation to efforts to stop violence against women. While women make up just 1-2 percent of the perpetrators of firearms offences, a much higher proportion of the victims of attacks are female – in 2007, for example, 13 percent of reported cases in Bosnia and Herzegovina and 40 percent of victims in Croatia.
Efforts to reduce the use of firearms in domestic violence cases (and by extension in other cases of violence) include denying firearms licenses to people with a record of violent behaviour or with disturbed family relations. In Kosovo, women are involved in the development of policies on SALW, and the gendered behaviour expectations among boys and young men are also addressed.
Inclusion of media partners in arms control initiatives has been crucial. Supported by a strong media campaign, a one-month weapons collection in two Sarajevo municipalities collected over 300 weapons and 5000 rounds of ammunition, and its success was further broadcast on CNN. On 1 April, 2008, UNDP in Bosnia and Herzegovina co-hosted a seminar for journalists on professional reporting related to SALW. Eye-catching posters (1|2) have formed a central part of the Croatian “Less Arms, Less Tragedies” campaign, focusing on the dangers of having weapons casually available in the home. A national television campaign and a dedicated YouTube site have helped the message to reach as many people as possible. The launch of the Montenegro Demilitarization Project got wide international media coverage, from CNN World Report (.wmv) to the Indian press, putting a positive global highlight on this part of the Western Balkans after 15 years of conflicts.
Educational campaigns have been run on various themes related to living with small arms and light weapons. One theme pursued in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Macedonia, for example, is the danger posed by celebratory gunfire. The campaign in BiH helped reduce the number of firearms-related incidents during New Year’s and religious holidays from 24 in 2004/05 to three in 2005/06.
Stockpile management and destruction
A related challenge is the management of stockpiles of weapons and ammunition which have been collected. There is a massive surplus of small arms and light weapons and associated ammunition across the region. UNDP-supported activities and amnesties to collect weapons and ammunition in Montenegro ceased in 2006. Subsequently UNDP, OSCE and the Government of Montenegro have begun a programme for the disposal of over 9,900 tons of surplus conventional ammunition. Destruction of that stockpile is ongoing. During 2007, 2,600 tons of unstable ammunition in Bosnia and Herzegovina was destroyed, with destruction of a further 5,700 tons underway. In Macedonia there is annual destruction of all confiscated weapons; and in Croatia, UNDP recently commenced the largest post-war destruction of military small arms, with 25,000 destroyed in March 2008 alone.
Methods for destruction of ammunition and weapons include use of converted weapons factories and heavy industrial plants, while portable methods such as the Explosive Waste Incinerator are particularly useful with small caliber ammunition. Capacity for decommissioning weapons, both in terms of appropriate facilities and trained personnel, is often limited, and there are serious risks associated with ammunition stockpiles. These dangers were made tragically clear by events in Albania on 19 March, 2008, in which nineteen people died in a series of explosions at an ammunition demilitarization factory. This followed explosions at storage sites in Montenegro and Serbia in 2006.
The reasons for these explosions include the fact that large amounts of ammunition and explosives remain in military storage facilities. Much of it is dated, and some is unstable, contributing to the relative increase in explosions (none occurred from 2000 to 2006) and the urgency of effective management; the fact that civilian property has been damaged in these explosions indicates that international best practices for the safe storage of ammunition and explosives are often not being followed within the region. This is of tremendous concern to UNDP, and projects are in place in many countries in the region to address these issues. Incidents like these not only endanger human lives and property but can have further negative impact by deterring foreign investments and the development of the tourism industry.
In addition to arms in civilian possession, national armed forces often have an excess of both arms and ammunition. The Bosnian Ministry of Defence estimates that 25-30,000 tons of its ammunition – out of a total 35,000 tons – is surplus to future requirements (and therefore constitutes a stockpile requiring careful management). Since 2005, UNDP and the MoD have destroyed over 95,000 SALW that were surplus to future requirements.
Over the course of UNDP’s involvement in small arms control, knowledge of how to manage arms has got stronger and interventions have become more targeted – an amnesty in Kosovo in 2003, for example, did not adequately consider that at a time of high tension, people were not willing to give up their weapons, and very few weapons were collected.
More recent efforts there have focused on increasing public confidence in the police and security institutions, in order to decrease the perceived need for private firearms. In addition, in March 2008, police stations in Kosovo were equipped with the means to destroy illegal small arms and light weapons which have been confiscated or handed in voluntarily.
During a similar project – Safer Communities – in several municipalities in Macedonia in 2006, which aimed to address the root causes of private gun ownership by increasing public confidence in the police, overall crime fell by between 30 and 50 percent. And weapons collection itself has an impact on violent crime: in two municipalities of Sarajevo, armed violence and armed robberies fell by over 50 percent following a one-month weapons amnesty in 2006.
In all these activities, UNDP works with national governments and civil society partners, including the media. Through SEESAC and regional activities of the UNDP Conflict Prevention and Recovery bureau, knowledge is shared and relevant lessons from national experiences are applied elsewhere.
Alongside other work including its mine clearance projects, UNDP work on small arms and light weapons helps to get rid of some of the most brutal legacies of the troubles this region has seen, and removes one more obstacle to the security and happiness of its people.
For more information on the “Less Arms, Less Tragedies” campaign, contact Leo Lisac at UNDP Croatia: +385-1-23-61-644 / leo.lisac@undp.org
The campaign website is at http://www.undp.hr/show.jsp?page=85964.
SEESAC regional standards and guidelines on micro-disarmament (SALW control) can be found at http://www.seesac.org/index.php?content=&page=crse§ion=2.
UNDP offices in Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, FYR Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia.
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