Charles Nasibu: Africa's weapons of mass destruction

This is a week that will always haunt me. Three years ago, on 14 August, I was working in Burundi. I began the day as usual by listening to the morning radio bulletin. These bulletins rarely bore good tidings. But still nothing prepared me to hear the bloody events that had occurred during the night: 156 refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo had been shot and burned as they slept in an United Nations refugee camp in Gatumba, some 2.5 miles from the Congolese border. As a journalist and researcher based nearby, I felt compelled to see the horror and hear the survivors' testimonies for myself.

I doubt many editors would publish photographs of the scenes I witnessed that morning. Men, women, children and babies, their charred bodies riddled with bullets, were scattered on the ground. One of the corpses was of Pastor Jacques Rutekereza, a fellow campaigner with the International Action Network On Small Arms (IANSA). A tall, statesman-like figure, he had been killed along with six of his children: Mushambaro, 18, Igiraneza, 16, Nyamasoso, 12, Ndatabaye, nine, Nyazahabu, six, and Nyamuryango, four. The four-year-old twins, Aimée and Debora Gatoni, also lay dead.

Who was responsible for this atrocity? The refugees were from the DRC and belonged to the Banyamulenge tribe, who have a long line of historical disputes with the majority Bantus. The Banyamulenge had fled from Congo to Burundi after being accused by the Bantus of supporting two rebellions against the Congolese dictators Joseph Mobutu and Jospeh Kabila. Whether revenge was the motive of the killers or not, we will probably know. A subsequent UN investigation was unable "to conclusively identify who authored, financed, or carried out the killings".

But the blame cannot solely be placed on warring factions. And analysis of the bullet casings on the scene at Gatumba showed that the bullets were not made in the DRC or Burundi, but in foreign countries including Bulgaria, China and the former Republic of Yugoslavia. The same was probably true for the guns that fired those bullets. How did these weapons come to be in the hands of a non-state group prepared to inflict such barbaric cruelty on a group of refugee families?

The South Kivu province of the DRC was under a strict UN arms embargo. Why was this not monitored and adhered to? The answer is that there is no international record of arms sales, no international regulatory system, so we do not know.

The absence of such information makes it difficult to investigate and prosecute such outrageous crimes. Without a global regulatory system, it is impossible to control the international movement of the weapons that made this tragedy possible.

There is some hope in sight, however. The UN has taken the first step toward a solution by beginning a process to develop an international arms trade treaty. More than 90 governments have sent their views on such a treaty to the United nations secretary general.

Cynics might say that rebel groups and rogue regimes always find suppliers to stock their deadly arsenals. However, the treaty will at least make it far more difficult, by cutting off many of the original sources, reducing the quantity and range of weaponry available and driving up the prices of the remainder. This is because the principal sources of conventional arms are government military stockpiles and government-licensed factories in the industrialised world. Weapons move easily from legitimate to illegitimate hands through direct sales, indirect brokered deals or via a chain of diversions, with little legal impediment.

The proposed treaty would not only be relevant to the countries that manufactured the arms that killed the people at Gatumba; it would ensure that no massacre is ever committed from gun barrels produced here in Britain, or British companies based overseas. All governments have a duty to ensure that arms and security equipment manufactured, assembled or supplied by companies within their jurisdiction do not facilitate violations of international human rights law or international humanitarian law. The nuclear states adopt stringent controls on all international transfer of nuclear material, because they are aware that poor oversight could lead to future proliferation. Similar controls should apply to the transfer of guns, which are Africa's weapons of mass destruction.

The nations that manufactured the bullets that killed the sleeping twins Debora and Aimée have not been held accountable. But with a legally binding treaty, one day they might.

Charles Nasibu is a Congolese journalist living in Norway

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