Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (43 page)

There was an air of peace so different from this day in 1975, when the Portuguese had pulled out. Realising that colonialism had had its time, they left, destroying cars and pouring concrete down wells, and in so doing they planted the seeds of anarchy and violence that were to blossom into a bloody civil war less than a decade later.

Fearing the communist ideals that captured the imaginations of Mozambique’s newly liberated leaders, Rhodesia and South Africa set out to destabilise their neighbour. They manufactured a guerilla movement, the Renamo, and packed it with mercenaries and disaffected Mozambicans. But the white South Africans and Rhodesians
had no wish to govern. Their intent was destruction. Roads were blown to bits, landmines scattered in their millions, and the country was flooded with guns.
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Atrocities were committed on a horrific scale: children and adults were tortured and murdered, populations were starved, and over a million people were killed.
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I walked past the low-level villas with their balconies and pistachio-green and lime-yellow walls and, passing three unarmed security guards asleep in the languid light, entered a courtyard framed by purple frangipani. Artists were painting to the low sound of soft rock. It was an arts centre, a cooperative, and I had come here to see a certain type of response to gun violence. What I sought was out the back: a room filled with fantastical creatures. One was a cruel, hunched insect, another a pointed, furious dog. But these were no ordinary animals – their bodies were made from the wooden stocks of rifles, their legs the stripped-down parts of an AK47. One had a long tail made from the coiled spring of a semi-automatic rifle. Another had holes pierced into a trigger guard, forming beady eyes.

They were the work of Makulo, a forty-seven-year-old Maputan. It was part of a charity-funded project where old arms left over from the civil war had been collected, and in return the charity had given the gun owners farmyard picks and hoes. ‘Guns for ploughshares’ they called it. And the artists here had turned the tortured gunmetal into hallucinatory sculptures. Shovels and sculptures – a form of gun control you could hold.

Makulo wore a paint-stained overall, a heavy woollen cap, despite the heat, and chains of shells around his neck. ‘I like to make art,’ he said, stumbling on the English words. ‘It relaxes my mind. It makes me forget everything: war, the fighting.’ His vision was the liberal lobbyist’s dream: art used to defeat violence. ‘If you destroy the gun to create something of beauty, it is one way to help stop violence.’

Others had done this, too. Mexican artists had turned guns into musical instruments,
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making shovels with which to plant trees.
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In New York, guns were made into bangles and cufflinks.
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AK47s were turned into watches for the liberal elite, costing $195,000.
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But, as I admired the sculptures, the peace here was coming undone. In
central Mozambique Renamo troops had recently began killing, and the spectre of war was rising fast again.
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The next day I met Albino Forquilha. He was, like so many Mozambicans, smartly dressed. A cream-suited, kind-eyed forty-five-year-old, he was, as I was, here as part of a conference promoting the end of landmines. He was a lobbyist for their clearance in Mozambique, but landmines were just part of what he did. His main focus was guns, and he had spent his life working on the destruction of those left over from the war.

We sat down at a creaking table in a restaurant beside the conference hall. In the next room, diplomats from around the world, their country’s nameplate before them, were listening on translator’s headphones, charting the battle to rid the world of landmines and cluster munitions. Nobody here but us was talking about guns, or about what was unfolding in the north. For Albino, though, guns were what he knew. He had once been a child soldier, forced to join a rebel group when just twelve years old. He had had to kill.

‘They were kids who had tried to escape. The commander called us all around and said that every one of them had to die,’ he said, his voice soft. So he had shot seven of them in the head.

He had a low opinion of guns. ‘They are just an indication that I am not correct and they help me force my point,’ he said. Twenty years before, he had dedicated his life to clearing his country of them. A lobbyist seeking a county without guns, his work had been extensive – over the years his charity had collected almost a million of them. For a time he had been funded by the Japanese, Germans, Americans, Norwegians, Swiss and Swedes – and they had destroyed a mountain of steel muzzles and wooden stocks.

‘Most of the guns were Russian. We had South African and American guns, but the most were the Russians.’ So many that the Mozambicans even put the AK47 on their flag. ‘We once arranged a huge explosion to destroy some of them – over 2,000 weapons in one go.’

His work was far from done. ‘The numbers of weapons are still estimated at more than a million – there are still many weapons in Mozambique that need to be collected.’ But he struggles to complete his life’s work. Few countries are supporting him any more.

‘Now we don’t have the funding to restart the project. This is the problem,’ he said. ‘The money that is given to combat landmines is huge, much more than to destroy small arms.’

He was right. In 2012, just over 3,600 people were killed or injured by landmines and explosive remnants of war around the world – the lowest number recorded since the tracking of landmine victims began.
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This was, in part, because $681 million was given in support of mine action that year.
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This was why, in Maputo, the mood was buoyant. Financially supported political will was working – money had been found to tackle the scourge of landmines.

Nothing like it existed in the international attempt to stop small-arms deaths. I once applied to a European government for a grant to do a global count of mass shootings. It was a modest proposal, but my application was rejected. Of course, there are countries funding ways to address the hurt that guns bring, but far, far less money is spent on addressing the pain and suffering they cause than is made selling them.

Despite this, there is still a small group of people – lobbyists against violence – who have dedicated their lives to challenging the guns’ ubiquity. Underfunded and all too aware of the enormity of their task, they labour on, seeking to get gun reform on the agenda. But for them it was often a Sisyphean task. The complexities of what guns can be – a hunter’s tool, a policeman’s power, a soldier’s life – and the vastly differing opinions that exist surrounding them, make them the hardest of all weapons to regulate. Nuclear weapons – sure, you can see why people can envisage a world without them. A world without guns? That’s a world without people.

Later, outside the Centro Cultural Franco-Moçambicano, a brightly coloured building in blues and oranges and vibrant pink, I saw another statue. This one was built from old European gunmetal collected by Albino’s group. The sculpture was caught in the moment of death – shot in the chest. In the gathering dusk, it cast an ugly, shadowed shape. An obscene piston of an erect penis stood between his legs: hyper-masculinity in death.

The Institute was playing an outdoor film. I peered through the century-old iron railings:
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
. A clipped English voice crackled over the warm twilight air – Captain Nemo.

‘To be of benefit,’ he said, like a warning, ‘goodness must be constant, forever building. It must have strength!’

It sounded hopeless.

I had no strength. The sight of the damp, peeling paint in the upper corners of the room and the slow drip of the tap did not help. Nausea flooded over me, and the ache spreading across my bones felt like a bad blessing. On the twelfth floor of a slowly decaying hotel on 1st Avenue, my hotel was close enough to the United Nation’s building to see it from the windows. But I lay in a foetal position in the dimly lit room and wrapped myself in sweat-soaked sheets, unable even to open the curtains. Malaria or flu, I had no idea what I had, but it sapped me of all will.

Three hundred metres away history was being made, and I did not care.

It was late March 2013, and the UN General Assembly was on the verge of agreeing a new accord: the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). Ever since it was formed, the UN has always been trying to reduce the impact of weapons around the world. Its first resolution, the shock of Hiroshima still clinging to the conscience of the world like an atomic shroud, was about disarmament. Now, teams of delegates and officials, charity workers and lobbyists were engaged in furious last-minute pleas and deals. The wording of the Arms Treaty was crucial, and they had limited time to agree upon them.

It was an ambitious attempt to regulate the global arms trade. Groups such as Oxfam and Amnesty said the Arms Trade Treaty could reduce the trafficking of weapons to outlaw regimes and rebel groups involved in horrific atrocities against civilians.
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It wasn’t going to end armed violence tomorrow, they said, but it was a start. Behaviours like the ones I had glimpsed in the smuggling worlds of Ukraine and Mexico and Somalia needed to be changed over time, and this was one way to do it.

As it was, the treaty went to the wire, hampered partly by
denunciations from Iran, Syria and North Korea.
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But on 2 April 2013 it was agreed.

This all sounds promising, but, however noble its ambition, the treaty’s global impact on firearms is far from guaranteed. As one lobbyist said to me, ‘We need to keep in mind the limitations of the ATT. The Treaty is not about banning transfers; it is about regulating them. And it is only about their transfer; it does not set rules about domestic control once they reach their destination . . . progress will take time.’

There is also the issue of getting key countries to agree to it. By early 2015, of the top fifteen gun-producing countries in the world only six had signed and ratified the treaty.
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The Arms Trade Treaty was not the first attempt to address the global scourge of guns, either. While that accord was about a wider array of weapons – from tanks to missiles – the UN had also seen attempts to specifically address the harm that guns cause. The most hopeful of these was the 2001 UN implementation of something called the Programme of Action.
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This was designed to encourage governments to combat the problem of illegal guns. It tried to ensure stockpiles were not plundered and spare guns were destroyed; that systems for marking and tracing guns were put in place; that things like end-user certificates were regulated so as to control the smuggler’s trade. All noble sentiments. But its progress has been slow. In 2012 four of the top fifteen small-arms producers – Austria, Belgium, China and North Korea – did not send a gun report to the UN.
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And some ask if the relationship of states with the Programme of Action is like ‘a loveless marriage, going through the motions with a fair amount of apathy, resignation, and lack of excitement or novelty’.
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Another endeavour, the UN Firearms Protocol, also set out to address the illicit trafficking and manufacture of guns.
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But, once again, of the top fifteen gun-producing countries in the world, only four – Belgium, Brazil, Italy and Turkey – signed and ratified it.
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The issue, then, does not seem to be the quality of the treaties and agreements on offer. Rather it is the lack of support for them from those who truly matter. Of the top fifteen arms producers in the world, only Italy has engaged fully in all three of the most important gun-related treaties.
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Perhaps the reason for this is that
for many countries the idea of regulating the world’s guns sends their governments into paroxysms of concern. After all, guns are used in plenty of legitimate roles. Nations have the right to defend themselves, and there is always the issue of the personal right of self-defence, as Asher John in Pakistan or Gayle Trotter in Washington had argued. Though the protection of these rights should be weighed up against the overwhelming evidence that show more guns mean more murders.
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There is even some truth that comes from the mouths of hawkish American commentators: ‘The awful consequences of disarmament must not be ignored. Northern dough-faces agreed with the southern slavocracy that black people should not have guns; American progressives agreed with Stalin and Mao that only the government should have guns.’
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I have been blindfolded and led down humid paths to meet rebel groups fighting for their independence in the southern Philippines, or sat and spoken to the armed guards of refugee camps whose presence is the only thing that stops a massacre from happening. And in each place you are struck by that deep quandary – that there comes a time when a gun seems to be the only thing that prevents a human rights tragedy, as well as threatening to cause one.