PESHAWAR, May 22: The Sustainable Peace and Development Organisation (SPADO) has urged Pakistan to ratify the UN firearms protocol and establish a national commission to control manufacturing, proliferation, export and import of small arms and light weapons.

SPADO in collaboration with Community Motivation and Development Programme (Camp) and Human Development Promotion Group (HDPG) has also launched “Week of action against small arms and light weapons (SALW)”, to create awareness among people against the use of small arms and light weapons.

Announcing the start of the week-long international campaign on Monday, SPADO executive director Raza Shah, at a press conference, said that rallies, workshops and conferences would also be organised throughout the province.

He said International Action Network and Small Arms (IANSA) was the driving force behind the campaign, adding that over 700 civil societies were attached with the network.

He said that its members were committed to curb the proliferation of small arms and its illicit trade with a purpose to make people fell safe from gun violence and convince governments to make law to achieve the objectives, adding that 59 per cent of arms were with civilians that needed to be regularised through registration and licensing.

Regarding start of the campaign from the NWFP, he said there were 10 million small arms and light weapons in the country, out of which 7 million were in the Frontier province.

“As reciprocal measure, the government should assist arms manufacturers by providing jobs and setting up industrial units in the areas concerned,” he said, adding that the NWFP had the largest private arms manufacturing units.

Flanked by Tahir Ali, programme manager of Camp and Bashir Ahmad of HDPG, Mr Shah said Pakistan was a major victim of crime related to small arms.

Its proliferation was one such issue that had affected societies in every nook and corner of the world. Besides, it was very appropriately associated with countless social evils that plagued the entire globe, SPADO executive director said.

He said: “Almost 1,000 people die every day because of guns and many more are seriously injured.”

He said that over 10 to 14 billion rounds of ammunitions were produced annually, sufficient to shoot at every person in the world twice and involved trading of $4 billion a year.