Reducing the availability and use of small arms in places where fighting has ended has become increasingly important to Africa's development prospects as the number of conflicts has increased over the past decade. While the international community searches, so far unsuccessfully, for agreement on the regulation of the global trade in small arms, a growing number of African countries, UN agencies and non-governmental organizations are grappling with the human and development consequences of gun violence and seeking to reduce both the supply and the demand for what Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called "the weapons of choice for the killers of our time." In fact, small arms, which include rifles, pistols and light machine guns, are filling African graves in ever-increasing numbers - from the killing fields of Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo to the streets of Lagos and Johannesburg. "The young ones, they don't respect elders." "If you don't have a weapon," added another, "your grave is open." "Guns are changing things," one young Pokot man told the Washington Post newspaper. The impact of modern military weapons on the Pokot and surrounding communities was brought tragically home in early 2001, when Pokot youth opened fire on a rival settlement, killing 47 people, burning down the village and transforming the almost-ceremonial tradition of cattle raiding into an occasion for human slaughter. But in less than a generation the pastoral Pokot people and their neighbours have gone from protecting their herds with spears to outfitting their young men with cheap, reliable and deadly automatic rifles from the war zones of Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan. The dry rolling plains of northern Kenya seem an unlikely place for an arms race.
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