There are some legal 3.1 million fire arms in the Pacific, according to the report called "Small Arms in the Pacific", the first published attempt to estimate the size of legal stockpiles of small arms in the region.

"This is 50 percent above the world average," said co-author Philip Alpers.

"Given that a full regional analysis may never be possible, we can only estimate that there are hundreds of thousands of illegal weapons in the Pacific region," he said.

The proliferation of small arms in the Pacific is causing serious disruption to the lives of many people, Pacific Forum secretary general Noel Levi said at the launch in Fiji of the report Wednesday.

"I would like to make a special plea at this point to those countries that are supplying small arms to the Pacific Islands to do more to stop this supply at the source," Levi said.

The report says 26 nations legally export arms to the Pacific, but more than half of the weapons come from the United States.

"I appeal to the countries where arms are coming from to provide us with the necessary assistance to prevent the social destruction that is propagated by the increasing trade in small arms," Levi said.

Of 20 countries studied in the report, Australians and New Zealanders privately own majority of the firearms in the South Pacific.

New Zealanders own 22 guns per 100 people, twice as many as Australians. The 2,000 residents of Niue own 400 firearms between them; Australia and Samoa come next with an average of 10 guns per 100 people.

There are 226,000 firearms in the combined security forces of the Pacific region, and civilian-owned guns outnumber security forces' weapons by a ratio of 14 to one, according to the report.

Alpers said rebel groups in Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea treated security forces' armouries as "gun supermarkets" that can supply arms for their campaigns.

This is what happened in the May 2000 coup in Fiji, he said.

"Witness Fiji where just a boot-load of stolen assault rifles (from the Fiji Military Forces armoury) enabled a tiny band to overthrow an elected government and hold a nation to ransom.

"Perhaps the message is that particularly in very small nations, even small numbers of firearms can be used to dreadful effect," Alpers said.

The report examines the inconsistent legislation in the region which it said could make it vulnerable to gun-running, with loopholes in archaic legislation in some countries making them potential "soft entry points" for traffickers.

Australian legislation was commended the "most up-to-date and comprehensive" in the region, while New Zealand's was the "most permissive" and facilitated easy ownership leading to it having to the region's largest unregistered stockpile of private guns.

It acknowledges the "lack of capacity" in some island states to even enforce existing laws.

In the Cook Islands police believe there are as many unregistered firearms as there are legal ones, it says. In Papua New Guinea it is believed that thousands of illicit weapons, including homemade ones, still exist.

The report looks in detail into the conflict in Fiji, Bougainville in the Solomon Islands, where 10,000 to 20,000 people have been killed in fighting, and in unrest in Papua New Guinea.

Co-author Conor Twyford finds that damage in these conflicts and enabled by small arms "would take years to erase and that public confidence in the institutions of state has been badly shaken in all three communities."

Solutions lie in capacity-building and legislation changes, said Alpers.

SPACE.WIRE