February 28, 2002
Eight grim-faced militiamen had gathered under a cotton tree to bid a dramatic farewell to arms.
Under the watchful gaze of United Nations troops, they took turns smashing their rifles with a sledgehammer. Afterward, they received a handshake, the equivalent of $15 in pocket money and the promise of vocational training in the months ahead — all part of a $31 million campaign to disarm and demobilize the thousands of young killers who have turned Sierra Leone into a slaughterhouse. One watchful U.N. officer, however, wasn't celebrating. "These can be repaired," said Lt. Col. Thomas Lovgren, a skeptical Swede who examined the battered guns. "That is the problem."
Unless destroyed, Africa's enormous stockpiles of weaponry will be continually recycled into new conflicts. Arms-control researchers in South Africa, for example, recently found an AK-47 assault rifle that had seen action in Angola, Mozambique and Sudan. Unfortunately, disabling tons of guns — most of them made of high-tensile steel — is neither cheap nor easy.
Lovgren, the chief of the U.N. disarmament program in Sierra Leone, at first tried incinerating the thousands of pistols, machine guns and assault rifles surrendered in Sierra Leone, a small country that has been torn by civil war for years but where, for the moment, a cease-fire is holding. The metal parts of the guns emerged from Lovgren's bonfires intact.
Then he tried squashing rifles with a bulldozer. Though the guns were bent, many components could still be salvaged. Lovgren lopped guns in half with blowtorches. He melted others down into farm implements. But he and his colleagues finally decided those solutions were either too expensive or too complex.
"We even tried to dump them at sea," Lovgren said. "But the environmentalists objected. So now we are blowing them up." Surmounting such technical hurdles is only half the gargantuan battle to disarm Africa.
Rebel forces rarely surrender their guns freely because a rifle is an impoverished fighter's most valuable possession. Not only can he sell it, he can live off it as a common bandit. Mozambique, which endured 13 years of bloody civil war, has worked to overcome those obstacles with a guns-for-tools swap. Other nations have offered lump sums of cash for loose guns, often a prohibitively expensive proposition.
And a few countries, such as Angola, have never bought into disarmament programs despite years of pressure from the U.N. Not surprisingly, Angola is chronically at war. In Sierra Leone, about 37,000 combatants have turned in their weapons since last year, thanks largely to demobilization campaigns funded by the European Union.
The deadly scope of Africa's arms trade is exposed for all to see in this blighted nation, where brutal rebels have hacked off the limbs of thousands of civilians in past rampages. U.N. experts say that up to 40,000 small arms still may be floating around Sierra Leone — more than double the number of telephones in the country.
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