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Kenya calls for strict laws to curb proliferation of illicit small arms (2) |
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08:56, August 11, 2007 |
"It is really hard to fight against because we do not know precisely where these arms are. It also remains really hard to estimate how many of these illegal arms are circulating in the country -- they could be 4,000 or 7,000," Munya told journalists in Nairobi.
The assistant minister said global action needs to be directed at the nature of flows of these weapons and not on the weapons themselves.
He singled out neighboring Somalia which has been wrecked by heavy fighting between the transitional government and insurgents as one of the sources of illicit weapons.
He said that the Horn of African nation was only a gateway and that the arms originally came mainly from Europe and the Middle East.
"We know they (small arms) mainly come from Somalia these days and that they often come in with the refugees who come into Kenya, " Munya said.
Sub-Saharan Africa alone is reported to have close to 30 million weapons in circulation, the vast majority of which are in private hands.
A proliferation of machine guns, rifles, grenades, pistols and other small arms has caused the deaths of millions of civilians in Africa and the displacement of millions more.
In April 2004, 11 countries from the Great Lakes and the Horn of Africa signed an agreement in Kenya to combat illicit manufacturing, trafficking and use of small arms in the sub region.
The states that signed the declaration called for the destruction and disposal of these weapons.
The Nairobi Protocol which was signed in 2004 obliges signatories, including Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Rwanda, the Seychelles, Sudan, Somalia, Uganda and Tanzania, to take concrete action, such as passing legislation, to back up earlier more abstract pledges.
Source: Xinhua
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