The Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development was launched in 2006. Last September 12, 2008, a Ministerial Review Summit was held in Switzerland and organized in cooperation with the United Nations Development Programme. Two years into its implementation, the Summit examined the Geneva Declaration’s progress, as well as drew further guidelines for continued execution. Most of all, the Summit aimed to define practical measures that will strengthen the concept of security and development, having stated the conclusion that armed violence deters development.

The Geneva Declaration calls upon states to:

achieve demonstrable reductions in the global burden of armed violence and improvements in human security by 2015.

There are more than 90 signatory countries of the Geneva Declaration. These include Zimbabwe, Rwanda, and Afghanistan. Leading the implementation is the Core Group of 13 states: Switzerland, Brazil, Guatemala, Finland, Indonesia, Kenya, Morocco, the Netherlands, Norway, the Philippines, Spain, Thailand, and United Kingdom.

Two years after the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development was launched, the following facts remain:

• In the recent past, at least 700,000 people have died directly or indirectly each year from armed violence

• Armed violence has had tremendous economic costs of lives lost.

• Despite the 1997 Ottawa Treaty, landmines are still prevalent throughout the Third World. The TS-50 anti-personnel (AP) mine is still common in Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Ecuador, Georgia, Kurdistan, Kuwait, Iraq, Lebanon, Rwanda and the Western Sahara. In common with most AP mines, the TS-50 is designed to maim and cripple anyone who stands on the pressure pad bearing a small explosive blast charge. The victim is rarely killed but sustains horrendous injuries to extremities. Many of the world’s estimated 500,000 mine survivors are amputees as a result of coming into contact with AP mines. As they occur mainly in Third World countries, no precise record exists and many more are thought to be effected. Due to a very small amount of metal used in its construction, the AP mine is very hard to detect.

The first report on the Global Burden of Armed Violence was also presented at the Summit. This report contains:

the incidence, severity, and distribution of different types of armed violence in both conflict and non-conflict situations, from both large and small-scale violence, in criminally motivated and politically motivated contexts.

Here are some of the facts contained in the Global Burden of Armed Violence report:

1. More than 740,000 people die each year as a result of conflict-related and homicidal violence.

2. More than 540,000 of these deaths are violent, with the vast majority occurring in non-conflict settings.

3. At least 200,000 people – and perhaps many thousands more – have died each year in conflict zones from non-violent causes (such as malnutrition, dysentery, and other easily preventable diseases) that resulted from the effects of war on populations.

4. Between 2004 and 2007, at least 208,300 violent deaths were recorded in armed conflicts – an average of 52,000 people killed per year. This is a conservative estimate including only recorded deaths: the real total may be much higher.

5. The annual economic cost of armed violence in non-conflict settings, in terms of lost productivity due to violent deaths, is USD 95 billion and could reach as high as USD 163 billion – 0.14 percent of the annual global GDP.

6. Armed violence occurs mostly in the developing world, and the vast majority as a result of small arms and light weapons.

7. Many armed violence reduction interventions continue to focus at the national level, yet violence is often concentrated in particular regions and among specific groups.

The Summit produced the Summit Statement stating that the Geneva Declaration shall:

reaffirm that armed violence can undermine a country’s development prospects and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals; reaffirm that underdevelopment and inequality can fuel the incidence of armed violence; and call for further steps to address this challenge at the international, regional, and national levels.

The resolution from the Geneva Declaration that the summit drafted is on ‘Promoting development through armed violence prevention and reduction.‘ This resolution will request the UN Secretary-General to submit to the UN General Assembly a report on the relationship between armed violence and development.

All the UN gabfest and bureaucratic rigmarole only serve to state the obvious, and merely discuss plans. This is what happens when people who are supposed to directly deal with development are found in plush offices seated on cushy expensive chairs in front of their huge state-of the art desks, and tinkering on their fully loaded PCs and laptops. These planners of development depend on churners of statistical tables who, in turn, depend on reports from independent survey agencies on field.

This path of information and general trend of producing data are the reasons why the so-called development remains a dream.

The United Nations, simply put, does not have its ear to the ground. It is small wonder, therefore, why it has no teeth.

So long as the UN persists to chew on a huge chunk of scope that may be the wrong chunk to chew, the issue of armed violence will not be addressed and hundreds of thousands will continue to die every year.

The UN merely focuses on tragic results and works around them, such as ‘Promoting development through armed violence prevention and reduction.’ It hardly hammers out solutions to address the cause. No wonder that development remains to be its ever-shining slogan.

The biggest arms exporters in the world are: USA, Russia, EU, Germany, France, UK, Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, and China (in that order).

The biggest arms importers in the world are: China, India, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates (in that order).

China is both a seller and buyer of arms.

The United States is not a signatory of the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development.

Go figure.