NARRATOR: Somalia. Albania. Sierra Leone. Countries at war. Countries in chaos.

What do they have in common? Vast quantities of small arms and light weapons on the loose -- killing, destabilizing, fueling the nation's collapse.

["America's Defense Monitor" program introduction.]

NARRATOR: The euphoria that came with the end of the Cold War has been dampened by the continuing outbreak of bloody conflicts throughout the world. Some of these conflicts have resulted in the complete breakdown of governments, leading to what has been dubbed "failed states."

Prof. MICHAEL STOHL: Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, and Bosnia are examples of state failure from this decade. In each of these cases, the central government ceased to function, was unable to provide for the common welfare of its population or protect it from internal and external threats.

NARRATOR: Michael Stohl is dean of International Programs at Purdue University and coordinates a research group that studies why states fail.

Prof. STOHL: To understand what a failed state is, it is important to understand a successful state. At its core, a successful state provides for the basic security of its population, protecting it from both internal and external threats. It also has the capacity to provide for the health and welfare of its population. In the United States, we generalize this in terms of the notion of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

NARRATOR: States fail when they are unable to provide basic functions for their citizens. The economy collapses. Education and health care are inadequate. Physical infrastructure deteriorates. Crime and violence run rampant. These conditions foster opposition groups which often turn to armed rebellion.

More often than not, the weapons of choice are small arms, light weapons and explosives because they are cheap, plentiful, durable, easily transported and simple to use. Throughout the world, small arms are attractive to government forces and opposition groups alike.

The United Nations claims that small arms and light weapons are responsible for 90 percent of all war casualties since World War II. All but three of the 49 conflicts since 1990 have been fought exclusively with small arms and light weapons.

Retired Lieutenant General Arnold Quainoo commanded a West African peacekeeping force in Liberia and now runs the Center for Conflict Resolution in Ghana.

ARNOLD QUAINOO: The conflicts that we have had in Africa, the conflicts that we have had in our subregion, West Africa, would not have taken such dimensions, such bloody dimensions without the easy accessibility and mis-use of small arms.

NARRATOR: Hans-Henrik Holm is a professor of International Relations at the Danish School of Journalism and an expert on state failure.

HANS-HENRIK HOLM: With the proliferation of weapons in that area, all of a sudden could take their grievance and turn it into a revolution or a revolutionary-type of situation with disastrous consequences for the state.

NARRATOR: Today's wars, fueled by light weapons, create huge population shifts and refugee crises, long-term food shortages, failing economies, and the death of large numbers of civilians due to disease, starvation and direct conflict.

EDWARD LAURANCE: A significant percentage of the casualties in conflict now are to civilians and they're from these weapons. So, you're really talking about human suffering now, no question about it.

NARRATOR: Ed Laurance directs the Program on Security and Development at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

Dr. LAURANCE: The proliferation and the aggregation, the accumulation of these weapons in societies has destabilized these societies, disrupted economic development, militarized societies in the sense that conflict resolution now is more and more military in nature.

NARRATOR: Combatants in destabilized nations never have trouble finding weapons. During the Cold War, arms sales to fragile regions were often undercover. Both the US and Soviet Union secretly shipped millions of dollars in weapons to groups in developing countries fighting proxy wars on their behalf.

BETHUEL KIPLIGAT: There are a lot of weapons because the weapons have been flowing in into the region from the 1960's because of the conflicts in the Horn of Africa, as a whole, including the Great Lakes.

NARRATOR: Bethuel Kipligat was a top diplomat at the Kenyan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He now works at the International Resource Group in Kenya.

Amb. KIPLIGAT: The Soviet Union poured in a lot of arms to Ethiopia and so on, and it has been going for all these years.

NARRATOR: Small arms sales have been soaring in the 1990's as suppliers replenish the arsenals of nations that received weapons from the US and Soviet Union during the Cold War. Many of these wartorn regions recycle weapons from one conflict to the next.

Prof. HOLM: The international arms trade has played a big role in exacerbating this situation simply by making it very, very easy for politicians or groups in these very often unstable Third World countries to get access to the most modern weapons. I mean, when you go to Africa -- we saw it very much in the Rwanda-Burundi conflict, you've seen it in the Congo, all the other countries around them are supplying them with relatively cheap firearms.

NARRATOR: Weapons are commonly supplied through black market channels and are smuggled from hot zone to hot zone. The term "modern warfare" conjures up images of sleek fighter jets and rumbling tanks, but in fact it is small arms and light weapons that are now killing the most people around the world.

Small arms leave a devastating legacy long after a conflict has officially ended. They continue to be used for other forms violence, such as crime and interference with the delivery of food and medicine to people in dire need of relief. Refugees are often afraid to return to their homes because of the large number of weapons still in the hands of former combatants who have not been demobilized.

Prof. HOLM: Just think about what it would be like if you distributed handguns at a big college football game and had everybody whipped into a frenzy about this, and there was plenty of beer available and there were guns under each seat. Not exactly a good cocktail. But that's the kind of thing we're seeing in these countries.

NARRATOR: The unregulated flow of weapons can and often does spill over into neighboring countries, where a new culture of violence develops, trapping whole societies in an endless cycle of war. Nations are often destabilized when there is competition for control of natural resources such as oil or diamonds. Equally volatile are ethnic, religious and cultural divisions, the legacy of colonialism, and corruption of the judicial and political systems.

There are many other factors that can put a country at risk of failure: A lack of democracy, limited economic ties with other countries, a high infant mortality rate -- usually a result of poverty. But one factor makes all these others more dangerous: The presence and proliferation of small arms.

Ted Gurr is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Maryland.

TED GURR: I think the general principle is that the greater the stock of light arms in a society, the greater the potential for escalating conflict, if the other conditions are present.

NARRATOR: In short, the more weapons, the more likelihood of conflict, especially when coupled with the conditions that fuel instability.

One of the most devastating consequences of having large numbers of lightweight weapons around is that children as young as eight can be taught to fire an assault rifle. The UN estimates that 300,000 children worldwide are being used as soldiers, often replacing a dwindling adult male population resulting from years of war, disease, and poverty.

Both government and anti-government forces use children as soldiers, spies, porters, even sex slaves. The use of society's most innocent members as combatants is a dramatic indication of the extent to which the social order in so many countries has deteriorated.

The cases of three small countries -- Somalia, Albania, and Sierra Leone -- illustrate the role of small arms in the destruction of a society's infrastructure, government institutions and political process.

NARRATOR: Somalia has been engulfed in civil war since 1991. Since then, Somalia has not had an internationally recognized government and no group has been able to carry out normal state functions.

Amb. KIPLIGAT: In Somalia, which of course is a collapsed state, if you are working as an NGO in relief work, you have to hire security people. And it is not four or five, you need about 10, 15, and they set the price. They are the ones who determine how much you are going to pay for a day. And this is, again, because of the availability of weapons.

NARRATOR: Rival clans compete for power. And with arms continuing to flow from Ethiopia and Eritrea, Somalia's civil war could easily last another decade.

Prof. GURR: So, it's a free-for-all. It's an arms bazaar, and will continue to be.

NARRATOR: When US Marines arrived in Somalia in 1992 to assist with famine relief, they faced well-armed rebel groups equipped with -- among other weapons -- American-made M-16 assault rifles. Mohammed Aideed's faction -- the force which killed 18 Americans troops in Mogadishu and precipitated the US withdrawal from Somalia -- had very few heavy weapons, but was well-supplied with small arms.

Prof. STOHL: The easy access to weapons in Somalia had prevented a peace from being established and prevent the opportunities for peace to be established in the future because of their destabilizing effects.

NARRATOR: The sheer quantity of small arms in Somalia has had a destabilizing effect on other countries in the region, as well. Lax border controls provided a conduit for both explosives and people to carry out the horrific terrorist bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in August, 1998.

UN Secretary-General KOFI ANNAN (24 September 1999):

"The proliferation of small arms, and munitions and explosives has also aggravated the violence associated with terrorism and organized crime. Even in societies not beset by civil war, the easy availability of small arms has in many cases contributed to violence and political instability. These, in turn, have damaged development prospects and imperiled human security in every way."

NARRATOR: In 1997, Albania's democratically elected government was toppled by a population which had been massively defrauded by pyramid schemes that cost the majority of Albanians their life savings. Protesters raided and looted military bases, bunkers, arms depots and police stations. Eighty percent of Albania's total weapons stocks and over a million tons of ammunition disappeared from military and police control. Some of the weapons were smuggled into neighboring Kosovo, Macedonia, Greece, and Italy.

Prof. GURR: The international community stepped in and helped the Albanians recreate a state. But, of course, that didn't stop the problem of dispersion of arms. A lot of arms, including lots of automobiles and lots of other portable means of wealth got exported from Albania.

NARRATOR: The Albanian government, assisted by the United Nations, has begun a series of weapons collection programs to recover weapons still in the country. The UN offers development assistance, such as road-building, as an incentive to turn in guns.

Outside the city of Gramsch, weapons that were turned in are destroyed in a bonfire. This woman's daughter was killed by a stray bullet in Albania's upheaval.

Albanian Mother (through translator):

"I wish all arms would be burned like this. I lost my daughter. She was the same age as this girl, 15. This was her best friend in school."

Prof. GURR: If we're going to get the people in Kosovo or the people in Albania to turn in their guns that they have stashed away, they need to have a feeling that they can trust society, and we can't really provide that trust. We can put soldiers in there, but as we've seen in Kosovo, we can't guarantee that people feel safe when they go into their fields whether they're a Serbian or a Kosovar.

NARRATOR: So far, Albanians seem committed to the removal of weapons from their society.

Albanian Student:

"Is there anybody here that wants a death? No, anybody. If we want to do something for our future, we mustn't have Kalishnikovs because they kill our life, they kill our future, and we are the youth of this city."

NARRATOR: With Albania awash in weapons, some towns, especially those bordering Kosovo, have become literal arms bazaars. During the recent Kosovo conflict, the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, relied primarily on small arms, many of which were smuggled from Albania. Now the NATO peacekeeping force in Kosovo is charged with seizing and collecting weapons from private homes if the weapons are not voluntarily surrendered.

Lt. ALISTAIR TRUETT, NATO Peacekeeper in Kosovo:

"They normally hand over one or two initially and one has to be quite firm, say you have to take all of the weapons and all of the ammunition."

Prof. GURR: Right now it's a matter of encouraging the moderates within the KLA leadership, encouraging them and at the same time marginalizing the militants, the ones who don't want to lay down their arms, and eventually recognizing that they are the basis for a new independent state -- we'll call it a statehood. They're not going to give up their arms; they're going to keep at least some of them.

NARRATOR: But promoting trust and disarming the KLA is a key goal of NATO's peace-building effort in Kosovo.

Prof. HOLM: Disarming is first and foremost about building trust. And then later on, when that trust is there, either the guns will rot away in the ground where they've hidden them or they will simply be turned in.

NARRATOR: The small West African nation of Sierra Leone has been involved in civil and cross-border conflict for almost a decade. In the early 1990's the civil war in neighboring Liberia spilled into Sierra Leone. Liberians helped organize and support the Sierra Leone rebel group, the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF. Armed with Liberian-supplied weapons, the RUF has waged a vicious terror campaign. In Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, children are kidnapped and used as soldiers, mass mutilations are used to terrorize the population, and pillaging is widespread.

Although Sierra Leone is one of the poorest nations in the world, neither the government nor the rebels have had any difficulty in financing their weapons purchases.

Prof. GURR: The availability of light weaponry has made it possible for both the RUF and the government to fight a war.

NARRATOR: Much of the weaponry acquired by the RUF has been financed with diamonds from mines in RUF-controlled territories.

LG. QUAINOO: The rebels in Sierra Leone today have all moved to the diamond areas and are still controlling the diamond areas. So, you will discover that it is easy accessibility to these commodities that promote the ability of rebels, for example, to purchase weapons and are managing to fuel their war effort.

NARRATOR: In addition, weapons from previous conflicts in Mali, South Africa, and Mozambique have all made their way into Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone government hired a South African mercenary organization called Executive Outcomes to help train and support its forces. Now bankrupt, the government must rely on the international community and, more specifically, the West African peacekeeping force to make peace with the rebels.

Although the region has been plagued by war for a decade, West Africa's political leaders understand the connection between weapons availability and the continuation of conflicts. In 1998, 16 West African governments agreed to a moratorium on the import, export, and production of small arms.

While international agreements have symbolic importance, they have had little impact in the failing state, which has been unable to control its borders or provide for the security of its citizens.

Somalia, Albania, and Sierra Leone may be far removed from the daily concerns of the American public, but when states collapse, there are international consequences. The United States Government has already recognized the dangers inherent in state failure and has begun to address the problem.

Prof. GURR: State failures generate pressures, political pressures on the United States Government to do something, either solely or in cooperation with international and regional organizations.

NARRATOR: Since the end of the Cold War, the United States and other countries have begun to realize that it saves both lives and money to intervene before conflicts erupt.

Prof. STOHL: Failed states are important to the United States because of the demands that they foster. They bring increased refugees, human starvation, the causing of disease across borders, and they create insecurity in the states that surround the failing states, thus causing demands for the United States to intervene.

NARRATOR: As a result, the US Government has been working on strategies for dealing with the increasing frequency of state failures.

Prof. GURR: I think there's been a real shift in American foreign policy during the 1990's. There's been a shift away from reaction toward prevention.

NARRATOR: One result of this emphasis on prevention is the creation of a multi-agency task force in Washington.

Prof. GURR: The State Failure Task Force was initiated at the request of Vice President Gore late in 1994. His original idea was that if we knew more in a systematic way about the causes of state failure, then it would be possible for the United States in collaboration with the other Atlantic democracies to devise joint programs of action.

NARRATOR: But identifying high-risk states is only the beginning. The harder task is deciding what, if anything, can be done.

Prof. GURR: The question about what the United States can or should do in response to state failure has got an easy answer, an easy superficial answer. And the answer is: You respond early. If you anticipate a state weakness, if you anticipate serious internal conflict, you do things like designing long-range development programs in ways that will minimize the risks.

NARRATOR: Unfortunately, progress has been slow, mainly because there are no international standards or treaties to control the flow of small arms. Yet there are measures the international community can undertake if the political will can be found.

Prof. HOLM: The question of what we can do is, on the one hand, a very simple and, on the other hand, a very complicated one. If we look at it straight up front, it really is a very simple one because it basically has to do with controlling the traffic of arms.

NARRATOR: But Holm recognizes that controlling the small arms trade is an uphill struggle.

Prof. HOLM: There are too many, far too many powerful economic interests, first and foremost, in preventing governments from actually instituting such a control on guns. And secondly, within these countries, politicians and prospective -- people who want to be leader of a group, or a clan, or whatever it is go to extreme lengths to get hold of these weapons.

NARRATOR: There are steps that could reduce the danger of collapse in unstable nations: Convince countries to cooperate in reducing the legal small arms trade. Control the black market trade in small arms. And destroy surplus stockpiles of weapons.

UN Secretary-General ANNAN (24 September 1999):

"From the Balkans to East Africa, to East Asia, small arms have become the instrument of choice for the killers of our time. We must do our part to deny them the means of murder."

NARRATOR: But until the demand for small arms is greatly reduced, fragile regions will be plagued by war regardless of the international community's efforts.

Amb. KIPLIGAT: Why is there a demand for arms? There are demands because there are political problems which have not been resolved. And we need, therefore, to put a lot of effort to focus also on the root cause for that demand. Because so long as those problems are unresolved, people will find ways of getting arms.

LG. QUAINOO: Well, I think mostly Africa, and especially in Africa, the demand for small arms comes about because of underprivileged class feeling that they have been underprivileged not because of a natural order, but because of social injustice, because of human injustice, because of mismanagement, corruption and with a feeling that with the support of weapons, they can bring about a change in the status quo, the demand increases for small arms in order to effect a change.

NARRATOR: Change will not occur as long as the disaffected believe violence is the mechanism to achieve their goals.

Dr. LAURANCE: You create norms within a society as to who can possess weapons and who cannot possess weapons. A big problem in many of these countries that we're working in now is the fact that individual civilians have almost unlimited supply and possession of assault rifles and hand grenades. These are weapons that were designed for responsible militaries and they're being used illegally by citizens to kill other citizens.

NARRATOR: The 21st Century will surely see changes in the world's political landscape. Change need not be violent, but the proliferation of weapons to high-risk regions fuels instability and violence that can destroy a country. A foreign policy that focusses on preventing small arms proliferation will save lives and money.

UN Secretary-General ANNAN (24 September 1999):

"Controlling the easy availability of small arms is a prerequisite for a successful peace-building process as it is for conflict prevention."

NARRATOR: A preventive foreign policy will also encourage peaceful and democratic solutions to state instability before the country collapses and creates an international crisis.

Prof. STOHL: State failure is not something the international community must live with. The community has the tools to confront failed states both in their existence and particularly, most importantly, before they occur. We must use those tools to prevent state failures in the future.