First, CAR field investigators, working primarily in Africa and the Middle East, physically document weapons used by illicit actors in enough detail both to trace the weapons through formal channels, and to compare them with other weapons documented around the world. An independent organization established in 2011, CAR began two years ago to document and track weapons from source to use – a project set up and financed by a European Union (EU) Council Decision in 2013, with funding also from the German, Swiss and United Kingdom (UK) governments.ĬAR uses two basic tools. It is precisely this problem of weapons’ hidden histories that Conflict Armament Research (CAR) has set out to tackle. Officials will be equally familiar, though, with how difficult it is to establish risk factors based on past weapons seizures, and to identify those responsible for trafficking seized weapons, when the history of those weapons has been effectively ‘laundered’ by age and geographical movement, just as surely as the proceeds of crime are laundered by passing through multiple entities and bank accounts. Given the impossibility of physically interdicting every potentially illicit item, Customs officers and investigators have long recognized the need for intelligence-led and risk-led approaches to tackling the illicit weapons trade. Recent atrocities in Paris, France – perpetrated with military firearms originating partly in Eastern European state stocks – highlight the huge challenges of preventing illicit weapons from crossing borders even within Europe, let alone in regions with far more limited enforcement resources, and with much vaster and more remote territories. Such a scenario will be familiar to Customs and enforcement officials all over the world. It is passed on to a foreign insurgent group, discovered at a Customs post while being smuggled across another border, and is finally seized and placed in a Customs storeroom for investigation or disposal. Forty years later, with the original records of its sale long since disposed of or lost, it is stolen from a poorly guarded stockpile, and driven in the back of a truck across a thousand-mile-long border. An assault rifle is shipped to a foreign government in the mid-1970s.
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