Country is centrepiece of Toronto filmmaker's connect-the-dots study of global arms tradeSo much blood has drenched the red dust of Somalia that it forms a dry river of death beneath the feet of the latest killers and victims.
Last week, another 80 people died in battles between African Union peacekeepers and Islamist rebels, as terrified civilians fled the capital Mogadishu and the town of Hudur to the south.
During the Islamists' two-year struggle to dislodge a teetering transitional government, some 16,000 people have been killed, a million others forced from their homes and more than one-third of the country's 9.5 million people surviving only with the help of outside aid.In spite of a UN arms embargo, Somalia is awash in weapons. It is a land where chaos reigns supreme, fuelled by an arms trade that begins in capitals half a world away.The trade is directed by profiteering middlemen who depend on pilots and truckers willing to take on some of the world's most dangerous assignments. The deadly connections are documented in Running Guns: A Journey into the Small Arms Trade, airing tonight on History Television.The film, by Toronto-based Shelley Saywell, recounts a three-year investigation of a trade that stretches unchecked from the Horn of Africa to Bosnia, Paris, the former Soviet Union and beyond.This week in New York, international diplomats are meeting to work out an arms treaty aimed at plugging some of the legal loopholes that allow an unfettered gun trade so prolific that 8 million new weapons a year are added to a massive global stockpile that already supplies one gun to every 10th person on the planet.In Somalia, shipments of weapons arrive by sea from Yemen. The Mandera Triangle – where Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia meet – is a conveyer belt that moves arms to and from all three countries, and across the African continent. After two decades of anarchy, guns have become ingrained in Somali society."There's no economy ... so we use guns to rob people to feed our families," a militia member in a Somali border town admitted to Saywell. Another added chillingly: "We steal things and rape women with them."..more..http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/594793
Last week, another 80 people died in battles between African Union peacekeepers and Islamist rebels, as terrified civilians fled the capital Mogadishu and the town of Hudur to the south.
During the Islamists' two-year struggle to dislodge a teetering transitional government, some 16,000 people have been killed, a million others forced from their homes and more than one-third of the country's 9.5 million people surviving only with the help of outside aid.In spite of a UN arms embargo, Somalia is awash in weapons. It is a land where chaos reigns supreme, fuelled by an arms trade that begins in capitals half a world away.The trade is directed by profiteering middlemen who depend on pilots and truckers willing to take on some of the world's most dangerous assignments. The deadly connections are documented in Running Guns: A Journey into the Small Arms Trade, airing tonight on History Television.The film, by Toronto-based Shelley Saywell, recounts a three-year investigation of a trade that stretches unchecked from the Horn of Africa to Bosnia, Paris, the former Soviet Union and beyond.This week in New York, international diplomats are meeting to work out an arms treaty aimed at plugging some of the legal loopholes that allow an unfettered gun trade so prolific that 8 million new weapons a year are added to a massive global stockpile that already supplies one gun to every 10th person on the planet.In Somalia, shipments of weapons arrive by sea from Yemen. The Mandera Triangle – where Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia meet – is a conveyer belt that moves arms to and from all three countries, and across the African continent. After two decades of anarchy, guns have become ingrained in Somali society."There's no economy ... so we use guns to rob people to feed our families," a militia member in a Somali border town admitted to Saywell. Another added chillingly: "We steal things and rape women with them."..more..http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/594793
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