Campaign seeks UN treaty on small arms trade

UNITED NATIONS, June 26 (Reuters) Anti-gun activists alarmed by a booming global trade in Kalashnikov assault rifles urged the United Nations today to negotiate a new treaty regulating international transfers of such conventional arms.

The Kalashnikov has become the world's most universal military weapon, with an estimated 70 million in use in countries ranging from Afghanistan, Britain, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Iraq to Mexico, Sierra Leone, the United States, Venezuela and Yemen, the Control Arms Campaign said.

The plea by the campaign, a coalition of Amnesty International, Oxfam International and the International Action Network on Small Arms, came as the United Nations opened a two-week conference weighing an expanded crackdown on the 1 billion dollars-a-year illicit global trade in small arms.

But the call for a new treaty, while a topic for discussion at the conference, would require the U.N. General Assembly's approval after it opens its next annual session in September.

Campaigners plan to present U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan with a petition backing a new treaty and signed by a million people from more than 160 nations -- symbolizing the number of people killed by guns since the last U.N. small arms conference in 2001.

While many governments favor a treaty, Britain has announced plans to instead seek international guidelines while the United States has said no new agreement was needed.

With no global accord to regulate sales of such weapons and no international organization to monitor international transfers, Kalashnikovs have become ''truly a global commodity, now traded, warehoused and produced in more countries than at any time in their 60-year history,'' said the campaign.

RIFLE'S INVENTOR 'SAD AND FRUSTRATED' Kalashnikovs are found in the arsenals of at least 82 countries and are made in at least 14 nations on four continents. Because they are so poorly regulated, they are likely to remain the most widely used weapon in conflict zones for at least the next two decades, the campaign said.

Most recently, Venezuela announced plans to build its own Kalashnikov rifle and ammunition factory near Caracas, with Russian help, after Washington banned U.S. arms sales over concerns about President Hugo Chavez's policies. The plant would be the first of its kind in the Americas.

''Of course I feel sad and frustrated when I see armed skirmishes with the use of my weapon also for conduct of predatory wars and for terrorist and criminal purposes,'' 86-year-old Mikhail Kalashnikov, the rifle's inventor, told the campaign.

''But it is not the designers who must ultimately take responsibility for where guns end up. It is governments who must control their production and export,'' he said.

The original AK-47 model was first used in the Red Army in 1949 and is easily recognizable from its characteristic banana-shaped magazines.

Favored for its reliability, it has long been the guerrilla's weapon of choice, able to fire 600 bullets a minute and available in parts of Africa for as little as 30 dollars.

Reuters SI DB1017