The highest casualties were reported from the Northeast and J&K. Manipur, in 2009, with 485 killings, became the State with the highest number of gun killings. If the death, injury and disability resulting from small arms were categorised as a disease, it would be an epidemic.
I have seen and felt the sense of fear that the gun instills. When I came to Delhi from Manipur, I felt a need to understand the weapon that controlled our lives all along the Indo-Burmese border. Growing up in the N-E, I thought that combing operations, encounter killings, insurgents seeking shelter were natural. It was only after I came to Delhi that I realized that the situation was abnormal. I researched for two years and published my findings in a book South Asia's Fractured Frontier. I discovered 57 types of small arms which flooded the N-E from 13 countries — China, Pakistan, Belgium, Thailand, Russia, USA, UK, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Burma and Israel. The effect of this proliferation has been alarming. The youth have taken to gun violence resulting in death, decay and destruction socially, politically and economically. In Manipur and many parts of the N-E, not a day passes without a gun killing.
In 2001, the UN addressed the issue of small and light weapons for the first time in history when it launched the UN Programme of Action on Small Arms and Light Weapons (UNPoA). The UNPoA has become a dead paper for many bations, but for some concerned citizens it was an opportunity to take further action against gun violence. We organised meetings in Manipur, Delhi, Jammu, Mumbai and Chennai and urged the Government to implement it. However, even as India kept submitting report after report to the UN on the small arms issue claiming that it was adhering to UNPoA, the work was never translated on the ground. In 2004 we formed the Control Arms Foundation of India in New Delhi (CAFI). Its aim is to address issues relating to proliferation of small and light arms as they affect civil society, particularly women, children and the elderly, and also to create a movement in the sub-continent where defence and security issues are debated. The CAFI proposes new ideas about security, for instance to look at women-led disarmament policies.
Working with Women in Manipur
As a woman from a conflict zone, I have felt the damage, the pain, and the tragedy which comes to our lives because of a continuing lack of peace and justice. It is time to turn the table because it is through our lens that we know where it hurts, that we know where the weapons are, that we know that weapons alone or militarisation alone does not resolve conflicts. It’s we who feed our children. It’s we who feed the world. Hence an important area of our work against gun violence takes the form of direct intervention in the lives of women gun survivors.
The Manipuri Women Gun Survivor Network (MWGSN) came from an incident on December 24, 2004. That Christmas eve, I witnessed the aftermath of the killing of 27-year-old Buddhi Moirangthem in Wabgai Lamkhai village in Manipur. Three gunmen dragged Buddhi from his car-battery workshop and shot him dead. Even today, his 24-year-old widow Rebika Akham does not know who the killers were and why they killed her husband. We contributed Rs 4,500 to buy a sewing machine for Rebika. This intervention enabled her to stitch clothes for villagers and secure a living. The MWGSN was formed in 2007 to help women like Rebika Akham. The MWGSN’s direct intervention is based on a gender sensitive approach to the gun crisis, and by supporting women economically it brings them forward to play a crucial role in small arms policy. It assists small-scale entrepreneurial work and works towards building sustainable livelihood measures for gun-affected women in Manipur.
Working with friends to tackle gun violence
We have been working since 2003 with several organisations from around the world — especially International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) for the UN Programme of Action on Controlling Illicit Small Arms and Light Weapons. Easy availability of small arms and their wrongful use destroys our future. We also have been working closely with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and Cluster Munition Coalition on the impact of landmines. For now, we are focused with work to make the international Arms Trade Treaty happen at the UN by 2012. If you lose a weapon, there is no international system in which you can track it. As a result, small arms and light weapons are flooding one conflict zone to the other. A global Arms Trade Treaty will bring in a major change in regulating these arms, prevent right violations and bring the desired peace in the end.
(The writer is a civil rights activist and co-founder of CAFI)
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