The Pacific region lives up to its name with disarming success

The Conversation
27 February 2015
Author: Philip Alpers
Adjunct Associate Professor, Sydney School of Public Health at The University of Sydney

Just over a decade ago this boy posed in front of a mound of weapons handed in during a gun amnesty in the Solomon
Islands. Today he lives in a nation that is gun-free by law. AAP/Military Public Affairs/W02 Gary Ramage

Recent headlines are clear: our world is a fearful place, spattered with blood, angry men and loose
guns. But not everywhere.
One sprawling region has largely avoided, and at times even reversed, the steady proliferation of
illegal firearms and death by gunshot. Twelve out of 16 Pacific Islands Forum nations are patrolled
by routinely unarmed police. Ten have no military. With little or no opposition, island communities of
the south-west Pacific have both resolved in law and been actively encouraged to remain unarmed.
This is no mere accident. When the nine-year war of secession in Bougainville ended in 1997, as
many as 12,000 to 15,000 people had died. Since then, Pacific governments have done their best to
disarm the neighbourhood.
Thats quite a change. Decades ago Australia stocked the state armouries of newly independent
Papua New Guinea with many thousands of assault rifles and handguns. Later, Canberra was
dismayed to learn that three-quarters of the countrys police and military firearms were no longer on
the books. By then, from the PNG Highlands to Bougainville, from the Solomon Islands to Fiji, guns
given to governments had fuelled a string of military coups and mutinies, tribal and ethnic violence,
rising armed crime and gun homicide.
As realisation dawned with the new century, the clean-up began. Pacific nations forged a largely
unnoticed but, in retrospect, startling regional consensus, which now sets us apart from much of the
world.

Taking a different path in a world full of arms

Instead of rushing in more guns to restore peace, in Melanesia we tried the opposite. For the rule of
law and human rights to be re-established, for health care and justice to be accessible, for good
work to proceed in a safe environment, firearms were seen as the most immediate impediment to
recovery and redevelopment.
In 2001, deliberately unarmed peacemakers and a locally designed Bougainville peace process tied
disarmament and weapons disposal to aspirations for political autonomy and independence. Many
guns were locked away and shootings are now rare.
Police and military armouries in a dozen Pacific states, some of them no more than tin shacks,
became a sudden priority of donor nations. Australia and New Zealand deployed advisers,
construction crews and millions of dollars to lock up and, in many cases, to destroy guns held by
their Pacific Island neighbours.
Canberra quietly began to persuade and later to assist and fund the Papua New Guinea Defence
Force to destroy more than a third of its small arms. The PNGDF went on to achieve one of the
highest firearm destruction ratios of any military force in the world.
By 2003, when the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) landed in Honiara to
help the country out of crisis, the number one priority of Pacific governments remarkably, with no
audible argument was the immediate collection and destruction of every firearm, both police and
civilian. Amid overwhelming public support, more guns were destroyed than the country even knew
it had. By law, Solomon Islands is now a gun-free nation; only a handful of specially trained police
are permitted to carry firearms.
Gun controls do make a difference
What Im calling the Pacific consensus for disarmament became a trend, and not just in the
islands. Australia, the regions big brother nation, led by its most conservative leader in decades
and described by then-president George W. Bush as Americas sheriff in South-East Asia, did what
remains unthinkable in the United States. Australia banned the semi-automatic rifles originally
advertised by the gun trade as assault weapons, along with rapid-fire shotguns and handgun types
favoured by criminals.
Shocked by a string of mass shootings, in which 100 people
were killed, Australians turned on their gun culture. Amid
polls showing up to 95% popular approval, two federally
funded firearm buybacks and dozens of smaller, police-led
gun amnesties sent more than a million firearms, or onethird of the countrys privately held guns, to the smelter.
More than 18 years after firearm laws were tightened in
which time a minority have continued to push for a
relaxation the risk of dying by gunshot in Australia remains
less than half what it was. Until five months ago, when a gun
owner shot dead four members of his family and then
himself, those years also passed without a mass shooting.
Domestic gun-control measures and foreign policy moved in
tandem as Australia and New Zealand, hubs for Pacific
commerce, clamped down on the island arms trade. New
Zealand denied an export permit to ship ammunition to a
Vanuatu gun dealer for fear of fuelling ethnic violence in the
Solomon Islands. Australia choked off exports to Papua
New Guinea, creating such a shortage of bullets that
mercenary gunmen in the Southern Highlands complained
of difficulty servicing their clients.

John Howards tightening of gun laws in 1996-97

has made Australia safer to this day. AAP

Although they remain the largest players in the local arms trade, New Zealand and Australia now
contribute more to arms control in Oceania than to arms proliferation.
Flow of weapons fuels killings and war
And heres the contrast. This week US President Barack Obama once again mulled shipping
firearms to Ukraine. Across the Middle East, the standard response to conflict has been to fly in
more guns to enforce peace.

President Barack Obama laments the toll of shootings in America, but still considers supplying weapons as a solution to
conflict around the globe. EPA/Olivier Douliery

In just one case in Iraq, Washingtons own Government Accountability Office found that 200,000
assault rifles and Glock pistols newly imported for US allies could no longer be found. In the CIAs
own terminology, blowback means that todays freedom fighter could be tomorrows criminal, or
even terrorist.
But heres the more Pacific approach. In 2006 a regional intervention force landed in Dili, the capital
of Australias island neighbour Timor Leste. Its first priority was to disarm the Timorese military and
police, then to strip local gangs of their weapons. We will be disarming everybody in Dili, said
Brigadier Mick Slater. Two months later, peacekeepers were confident that most illegal firearms had
been surrendered.
Granted, Pacific neighbours all tend to be good friends, with no nearby conflict zones or armstrafficking routes. Organised crime, cocaine and opium cultivation have not thrived. Aside from a
post office worker importing a couple of hundred Glock pistols for Australian criminals, no
interdiction agency can point to a sizeable shipment of illegal small arms or ammunition reaching
this region since the 1980s.
Of course we have an ant trade one or two guns at a time, often smuggled in parts via US Mail
but a quirk of calibre spared us the AK-47 plagues of Africa and South Asia. Global alliances
dictate that Pacific law enforcement and military choose NATO-calibre firearms and ammunition.
After local police and soldiers supplied the most destructive firearms used in crime and conflict, and
after even a PNG police minister admitted indiscriminate sale of ammunition to the public by police
officers, it was easy to see supply dictating demand. In Oceania, ammunition to fit Eastern Bloc
weapons is very rare. And without bullets, even an AK-47 is just a club.

Clearly our points of difference as a region and as Pacific people created todays pacific climate. But
which difference is key? Are we less violent people?
Interviewed about lethal crime in America, eminent criminologist Franklin Zimring discounted that
notion:
Youre just as likely to get punched in the mouth in a bar in Sydney as in a bar in Los
Angeles. But youre 20 times as likely to be killed in Los Angeles.
The difference, Zimring said, is guns.
Oceania has quite unconsciously forged a new attitude, all on its own. For the time being at least,
weve re-written a popular American slogan. Our regional bumper sticker now reads: An unarmed
society is a polite society."

Disclosure Statement
Philip Alpers receives funding from the United Nations Trust Facility Supporting Cooperation on
Arms Regulation, the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs and the Joseph Rowntree
Charitable Trust. He does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any
company or organisation that would benefit from this article. He has no other relevant affiliations.
The Conversation is funded by CSIRO, Melbourne, Monash, RMIT, UTS, UWA, ACU, ANU, ASB,
Baker IDI, Canberra, CDU, Curtin, Deakin, Flinders, Griffith, the Harry Perkins Institute, JCU, La
Trobe, Massey, Murdoch, Newcastle, UQ, QUT, SAHMRI, Swinburne, Sydney, UNDA, UNE, UniSA,
USC, USQ, UTAS, UWS, VU and Wollongong.