halt to arms sales to Africa would be more effective in addressing the continent's poverty than charity concerts or debt relief.
“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”
Dennis McNamara
This was the statement made by Dennis McNamara, who heads the United Nations Division that deals with Internally Displaced Persons or IDPs, accusing the West of supplying the weapons fuelling African conflicts which have internally displaced 13-million civilians, left homeless and without any form of assistance.
“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, adding: “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 UN official dismissed large rock concerts as focusing short-lived attention on starving babies while distorting deeper problems: “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”, McNamara insisted.
According to the UN official, also debt relief is a good idea, but is only a part of a much bigger issue. “The rape victims of eastern Congo don't give a damn about debt relief. They want to know who is raping them, who has provided the guns and can they get HIV tests”, McNamara
emphasized, concluding: “It is all very well to have these important slogans, but it is not enough. The food aid and humanitarian aid is often a substitute for real political, economic and security action. This is the danger of humanitarian aid. It is a palliative, a necessary palliative, but we should stop kidding ourselves that it is a solution ... In fact, it detracts from solutions”
(From MISNA)