| Nonviolence
/ THE FACTS
| The posters
on these two pages are from Micah Wright’s
Propaganda Remix Project. Micah takes US propaganda posters
and remixes their messages to reflect US war involvement
today. You’ll find hundreds of these posters at:
homepage.mac.com/leperous/PhotoAlbum1.html |
|
SUPPLY AND DEMAND
The world’s most powerful governments – who are also the
world’s biggest arms suppliers – should have the greatest
responsibility to control the global trade. Yet the five permanent members
of the United Nations Security Council – France, Russia, China,
Britain and the US – together account for 88% of the world’s
conventional arms exports, and these exports contribute regularly to
gross abuses of human rights.8,10
Out of
the top seven suppliers of major conventional weapons from 2000 to
2004, six were members of the G8 (The
Russian Federation, US, France, Germany, Britain and Canada).
 THE
CARNAGE ASSESSED
Estimated deaths by war and oppression during the 20th
century:1
Genocide
and tyranny (includes intentional starvation): 83 million
Military deaths in war: 42 million
Civilian deaths in war: 19 million
Human-made famine (excluding intentional starvation): 44 million
TOTAL: 188 million. Of these, an estimated 92 million deaths
have been caused by those from communist regimes and 96 million deaths by
those from non-communist regimes. The
number of wars and armed conflicts has steadily fallen over
the past decade – from 62 in 1993 to 42 in 2004.2 Nevertheless,
the collateral damage remains shocking:
• Out
of 13 million deaths in large-scale conflicts from 1994 to 2003,
over 9 million were in sub-Saharan Africa.3
• There
were nine military casualties for every civilian death in war
at the start of the 20th century. Those proportions are now reversed:
nine civilians die for every one soldier.4
• Massive
displacement and death in the Majority World often misses attention
by the Western media. The long-standing conflicts in Uganda,
the Democratic Republic of Congo, Colombia, Somalia and Chechnya
were each cited by Médecins Sans Frontières in
the Top 10 most under-reported humanitarian stories of 2004.
‘War
does not determine who is
right – only who is left’.
Bertrand Russell, philosopher, (1872-1970) |
 THE
MONEY WASTED
$1,035 billion was spent on militaries worldwide last year. The US expended
47% of this world total.5 Some creative
redistribution of these amounts can significantly reduce poverty. For
instance, Brazil has delayed
the purchase of $760 million worth of jet fighters and cut its military
budget by 4% to finance an ambitious anti-hunger programme.6 Here
are some other possibilities:
• Universal access to water and primary education in addition to reducing
infant mortality by two-thirds by 2015 = 7.5% of world military expenditure
for the next 10 years ($760 billion).7
• Enabling every girl and boy in Africa, Asia, Middle East and Latin America
to go to primary school = half of the amount spent on arms purchases
by countries in those regions ($11 billion).8
• Saving 14 million lives worldwide by fighting infectious diseases like
TB, malaria and AIDS = the estimated amount that could be saved by removing
outdated and unnecessary programmes in the US military budget ($51 billion).6
• Vaccinating
10 million children worldwide with the best vaccines = 6 Trident II
missiles ($350 million).9
•
Providing more than three years of basic food, HIV/AIDS medication, childhood
immunization and clean water and sanitation for the world’s neediest
people = the estimated cost of war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan
as of June 2005 ($230 billion).9
‘Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket
fired, signifies... a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those
who are cold and are not clothed’
Dwight D Eisenhower, 34th US President, 1953
ARMED
FOR PROFIT 5
The value of the combined arms sales by the top 100 arms-producing companies
in the world (excluding those in China) in 2003 increased by 25% from the previous
year to $236 billion: roughly equal to the combined national output of the 61
lowest income countries during that year. Of the 100, 38 are US-based and 1 is
Canadian – together accounting for nearly two-thirds of the sales within
the top 100.
‘The
only groups who win in armed
struggle are the arms manufacturers’.
President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez
 
|
 THE
REAL WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
Every minute someone is killed by firearms – more than 500,000
every year: about 300,000 people (mostly civilians) in wars, coups d’état
and other armed conflicts, and another 200,000 people in homicides, suicides,
unintentional shootings and shootings by police. Another 1.5 million
are wounded.11
•
In that same minute in which one person dies from armed violence, 15
new arms are manufactured for sale. There are nearly 640 million small
arms in the world today – one for every ten people. Nearly 60
per cent of them are in the hands of private individuals – most
of them men.11,12
•
Globally, firearms are used in 40% of homicides.11 An attack with a gun
is 12 times more likely to end in death than an attack with other weapons.
Women suffer disproportionately. In South Africa, a woman is shot dead
by a current or former partner every 18 hours. For more than half a century,
homicide rates in the US – where guns are freely available – have
consistently been four times higher than in neighbouring Canada.13
• Experts estimate the impact of small arms on health costs in Latin America
average 14% of GDP, including 25% of GDP in Colombia. In Canada, gun-related
injuries cost an estimated $5 billion per year.14
‘The death toll from small arms dwarfs that of all other weapons
systems – and in most years greatly exceeds the toll of the atomic
bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In terms of the carnage
they cause, small arms, indeed, could well be described as “weapons
of mass destruction”.’
UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, 2000.
Sources:
1 Calculations
of people who have died through conflict vary considerably. The
following estimates are based on a review of a range
of calculations. They are prepared by M White, Historical Atlas
of the Twentieth Century, 2001.
2 The Worldwatch Institute, Vital Signs
2005,
WW Norton & Co, New York, 2005.
3 The United Nations, The Millennium
Development Goals Report 2005, UN, New York, 2005.
4 M Lattimer ‘Modern
War kills nine civilians for every soldier’ in The Independent (Britain), 1 January 2000.
5 Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute, SIPRI Yearbook 2005, Oxford University Press, 2005.
6 The Worldwatch
Institute, State of the World 2005, WW Norton & Co, New York,
2005.
7 Calculated from figures used in the World Bank’s
The Costs of Attaining the Millennium Development Goals, www.worldbank.org.
8 Amnesty
International, Oxfam and IANSA (International Action Network on Small
Arms), Control Arms Campaign: key facts and figures, Press Release,
June 2005.
9 Figures and analysis provided by Frida Berrigan
of the World
Policy Institute in June 2005.
10 I Khan ‘Eliminating the means
of violence’ in Global Future, First Quarter 2005.
11 Small
Arms Survey 2004, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004.
12 Amnesty
International,
Oxfam and IANSA (International Action Network on Small Arms), The
impact of guns on women’s lives, Alden Press, Oxford, 2005.
13 MB Steger, Judging Nonviolence – the
dispute between realists and idealists, Routledge, New York, 2003.
14 Small Arms Working Group,
Small Arms and
Public Health, One of a number of factsheets produced for the UN
Biennial Meeting of States held in July 2003, which can be read at
www.iansa.org
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New
Internationalist 381
