[Africa] Arms ban best way to fight poverty in Africa - UN official

from The Scotsman

STEPHANIE NEBEHAY
IN GENEVA

A SENIOR United Nations aid official yesterday called for a halt to arms sales to Africa, saying it would be more effective in addressing the continent's poverty than charity concerts or debt relief.

Dennis McNamara, a special UN adviser on internal displacement, criticised world powers for neglecting some 12.5 million Africans uprooted within their countries, who form half of the world's internally displaced persons.

He accused the West of supplying the weapons fuelling African conflicts which leave civilians homeless - and prey to war crimes, hunger, disease and rape - while greedy companies exploit the oil and mineral wealth.

He dismissed large rock concerts - such as the Live 8 events last July under the slogan "Make Poverty History" to put pressure on the G8 countries - as focusing short-lived attention on starving babies while distorting deeper problems.

"Guns are at the heart of the problem, There is one slogan I would like to suggest for 2006: No Arms Sales to Africa. Zero. Not an embargo, not a sanction, a voluntary cessation of all arms sales to Africa," Mr McNamara said.

"The kids on the streets of Nairobi, Khartoum, Abidjan and Monrovia have guns in their pockets or up their sleeves. We provided the arms. We the West, we the G8.

"The pop concerts save the kids for a short period of time - they do nothing about the underlying problems.

"Twenty years after Live Aid, the farms of the Ogaden of Ethiopia are as impoverished and as likely to have famine as 20 years ago. Nothing has changed on the ground, in fact it has got worse."

As Mr McNamara was speaking in Geneva, the singer Bono, one of the people behind Live 8, was quoting from Islamic, Jewish and Christian texts in Washington as he urged the United States to give an additional 1 per cent of its federal budget to poor countries.

Speaking to the US president, George Bush, and members of Congress at a prayer breakfast, the U2 star said it was unjust to keep poor people from selling their goods while singing the virtues of the free market, to hold children to ransom for the debts of their grandparents and to withhold medicines that would save lives. "God will not accept that," he told the politicians. "Mine won't. Will yours?"

Mr Bush praised the singer as "a doer" but did not comment on his 1 per cent proposal. "The thing about this good citizen of the world is he's used his position to get things done," Mr Bush said. "You're an amazing guy, Bono. God bless you."