Global Courant
Download logo
Shoppers in Mali’s Gao, Timbuktu, and Ménaka regions can pick up AK-pattern assault rifles for $750 and cartridges for 70 cents each, from locally handcrafted handguns to smuggled French and Turkish machine guns, while a dizzying array of illegal guns dot market stalls across the Sahel, a 6,000 kilometer wide belt in the middle of Africa.
In this feature, part of a series on the fight against human trafficking in the Sahel, UN News focuses on the illicit arms trade that fuels conflict and terrorism.
In the Sahel, where 300 million people live, it is a buyer’s market for weapons. Insurgency and banditry plague the region, rooted among other things in endemic intercommunal tensions, clashes between farmers and herders, a spread of violent religious extremism and competition for scarce resources such as water and arable land amid extreme climate shocks.
“Non-state groups are fighting among themselves for supremacy, pushing states to the margins and causing untold misery for millions of people who have had to flee their communities to seek safety,” said Giovanie Biha, officer responsible for the United Nations Office for West Africa. and the Sahel (UNOWAS), the UN Security Council said when presenting the Secretary-General’s report on the region.
‘We bought more guns’
Behind the chaos and misery simmers a thriving illegal arms trade.
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), there are many arms trafficking hubs in the edges of the Sahel or transport routes where multiple criminal activities take place. Illegal markets – often hidden in towns and villages along strategic corridors – were not hampered by the presence of authorities.
According to a recent UNODC report on the firearms trade, all groups involved in clashes are now dealing with firearms and ammunition. As the number of group members increases, so do the business opportunities for traffickers.
The report tracks cases to better understand the phenomenon and its causes. When Nigerian authorities asked a suspect how his group spent the $100,000 ransom paid to free the schoolgirls they kidnapped, he said “we bought more guns,” the report said.
Cascade of consequences
Over the past decade, a cascade of repercussions has spread across the region, destabilizing nations and spreading a wave of arms trafficking to towns and cities. In Nigeria, Boko Haram expanded its control area and invaded Cameroon, Chad and Niger.
In the first article on human trafficking in the Sahel, we described the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011 as a pivotal moment. Tuareg soldiers serving in the Libyan army looted weapons and returned to Mali, where a series of uprisings created a dangerous, chaotic security vacuum.
Extremist groups captured Malian army and police bases and added new stocks of weapons to their growing arsenal. The Liptako-Gourma cross-border area became a battlefield and trading ground for a burgeoning illegal arms trade.
The chronic violence has killed thousands and displaced more than two million Sahelians since December 2022.
Meanwhile, the ongoing conflict in Sudan has caused further disruptions, said Mar Dieye, head of the UN Integrated Strategy for the Sahel (UNISS).
“Soldiers are selling their guns to get food, and this will add fuel to the fire,” he told UN News. “This is extremely serious and we call on all international actors to scale up their support.”
Terrorism tailored to Africa
Against this background is the ever-present threat of terrorism, according to the Executive Directorate (CTED) of the UN Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee.
Since 2017, in an effort to appeal to the local public, members of the Islamic State (ISIL) have attempted to “Africanize” references and languages, using African literature to justify the terrorist group’s views, said CTED in its report ISIL in Africa: Key Trends and Developments.
Currently, Lake Chad and the central Sahel have emerged as epicenters and breeding grounds of terrorism and violent extremism, authorities warned.
In the background, the illegal arms trade perpetuates the chaos. The UNODC report found that the flow of illegal weapons from Libya has expanded since 2019 to include newly manufactured assault rifles.
Partners against crime
As a result of this sinister trend, gun seizures have increased by 105 percent between 2017 and 2021, and sting operations continue, said Amado Philip de Andrès, UNODC’s regional representative for West and Central Africa.
Joint investigations and cross-border cooperation are a winning combination, he said. One such operation shut down a terrorist network’s firearms supply route in December, and new partnerships are flourishing, including Niger’s military cooperation agreements with Benin and Burkina Faso.
To combat terrorism and violent extremism, concerned countries in the region launched the Accra Initiative in 2017, deploying joint operations, initiating confidence-building efforts in hotspot areas and calling for the operationalization of a multinational joint task force of 10,000 soldiers.
For their part, the UN and countries in the region are working to strengthen the resilience of border communities and facilitate the return of displaced persons. The African Union’s pioneering Silencing the Guns initiative is also underway, with a UN task force supporting an annual amnesty month and providing technical assistance in small arms control.
To build on these successes, UNODC has recommended that Sahel countries strengthen their efforts to collect firearms trafficking data to improve understanding of and halt national and transnational flows.
But political and operational support from partners remains essential to stabilize the region, said Martha Ama Akyaa Pobee, the UN’s assistant secretary-general for Africa.
“Desperate progress is needed in the fight against terrorism, violent extremism and organized crime in the Sahel,” she said. “Without significant gains, it will be increasingly difficult to reverse the security trajectory in the Sahel and the continued expansion of insecurity into coastal countries in West Africa.”
‘We are all Burkinabe’
The backlash from the illegal arms trade is felt most strongly on the ground. In the village of Bolle, Burkina Faso, a fragile security landscape crumbled frighteningly in 2019, when fierce fighting between heavily armed groups along the Malian border drove more than 100,000 people to the area to seek safety.
Sahelians like Chief Diambendi Madiega have worked together to welcome as many people as possible.
“My concern was how to take care of the displaced,” he said when he received an award in 2021 from the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, for hosting more than 2,500 people.
“The responsibility is mine,” he explained. “Anything I can do to help them, I will do. I am happy with what this community has done. This shows that we are all Burkinabe.”
UN in action
The UN, partners and Sahelians themselves working for peace in the Sahel are advancing and introducing new efforts, including these:
UN peacekeeping has adopted a strategy for disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of former combatants. The UN Regional Center for Peace and Disarmament in Africa (UNREC) and the UN Development Program (UNDP) in a joint project helped nine Sahel countries adopt a regional action plan to combat illicit arms trafficking. UNDP facilitated the voluntary surrender of more than 40,000 small arms and light weapons in West Africa, built more than 300 houses, nearly 300 market stalls and clinics and schools in northeastern Nigeria, and provided livelihoods for youth to protect them from drifting into poverty or being recruited for violent extremism. The United Nations Counter-Terrorism Office (UNOCT) is supporting the regional G5 Sahel Force in a project focused on criminal justice, border security and the prevention of radicalization and violent extremism. A United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) program helps adolescents learn about the danger of small arms, combining basic gun safety education with leadership development, vocational training and conflict resolution techniques. UN regional directors and UNOWAS approved in November the launch of a “renewed and security offering” for the Sahel and is working with the Timbuktu Institute and non-governmental organization Dialogue sans frontières on an initiative aimed at strengthening traditional dialogue and platforms for building trust between communities in the border regions of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.
Distributed by APO Group on behalf of UN News.
This press release is issued by APO. The content is not checked by the African Business editors and none of the content has been checked or validated by our editors, proofreaders or fact-checkers. The publisher is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.
