The United Nations recently has decided to take on the international arms trade which it believes helps fuel international conflicts in places like Africa. In July it plans to host a conference on the world’s small arms trade. The only problem being that the disarmament program the UN touts as its most successful the most turns out to have been a disaster.
In April the National Post obtained a copy of an internal evaluation of the UN Development Program’s disarmament project in West Africa. Although the project spent more than $9 million, the internal evaluation reported that, “very few results that could be described as tangible have been identified as a result of [the project’s] activities.”
According to the Post, the report mentioned several “financial irregularities,” including the project’s director, Ivor Richard Fung, using project vehicles for personal use. Fung, for his part, rejected the report until he was removed from his position after the report was circulated.
Beyond the problems with any given United Nations program, the bigger problem here is the UN’s bizarre method of dealing with warfare. Namely it seems to think that it can seriously stem the supply of weapons into places like West Africa without the parties in those areas first resolving their difference. This is, of course, absurd.
International efforts to stop the diamond trade in West Africa have been an utter failure, as will attempts to solve the region’s problems by stemming the flow of weapons. The United Nations seems to have cause and effect reversed. It is not the case that there is war in West AFrica and elsewhere because there are weapons, but rather that there is a large demand for weapons precisely because there are ongoing armed conflicts.
Source:
UN’s African gun control program firing blanks; Canadian-backed project has ‘very few results that could be described as tangible. Steven Edwards, National Post, April 14, 2001.