du Royaume du Maroc
Genève / /
Presentation by Abderrazzak LAASSEL, Minister Plenipotentiary at the Permanent Mission of the Kingdom of Morocco in Geneva. of session 2: Assessing biological threat to international Security: The threat from NonState Actors and bioterrorism
Beijing, 4 November 2010
At the outset, I would like to extend to the people and Government of Popular Republic China my sincere thanks for the warm hospitality they provided to us. My thanks go to the State of Canada and ISU staff for this initiative aiming at strengthening international efforts to prevent the proliferation of Biological Weapons and reinforcing the role of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.
I will try, together with my colleague Chris Park, from United States, to introduce this second session dealing with assessing the biological threat to international Security, particularly,the threat from non state actors and bioterrorism. Mr Richard Lennane from ISU will present the strengths and weaknessesof the existing mechanisms: The BWC and its evolving role.
While trying to frame the different faces of this topic, the first difficulty I faced is how to define the non state actors. This concept encompasses a large range of organizations starting with NGO's, civil societies, private sector. But what is relevant to the topic is the concept of ViolentNon -State Actors. The second concept that we need to define here is what the bioterrorism is. After clarifying these two concepts, i will try to explore the threats that they represent to peace and security and the possible guidance to reduce it.
Violent non-state actor (VNSA) refers to any organization that uses illegal violence (i.e. force not officially approved of by the state)to reach its goals, thereby contesting the monopolyof the state. Nation-states were characterized in 1919 by Max Weber as having a "monopoly on violence" within a territory. Phil Williams, in an overview article, argued that "in the 21st century, the state monopoly on violence is being reduced to a convenient fiction. Relatively few of the sovereign states of the United Nations can truly claim a monopoly on force within their territorial borders. Williams pointed out that while Europe benefited from the "state-building impetus of the total wars of the 20th century", other parts of the world did not undergo that cementing experience.
Williams identifies various types of violentnon-state actors like. Warlords and militias have a territory over which they exercise some of the control functions of a government. Insurgencies are engaged in a civil war to take over the state or a portion thereof. Criminal organizations and youth gangs are essentially illegal business organizations. ("Crime for them is simply a continuation of business by other means".) Terrorist organizations are sometimes an early stage of an insurgency.
Motives of VNSAs can be either mainly materialistic (like the Mafia), or mainly political/ideological (like the ETA), or religious (like Al-Qaedaor AQMI), or a mix of these. In reality these distinctions are often not clear. Hamas or FARC for instance might be viewed by their supporters as freedom fighters, and by their detractors as terrorists or criminal conspiracies.
Bioterrorism refers to the deliberate, private use of biological agents to harm and frighten the people of a state or society, is related to the military use of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. Formally, the use of such weapons by one state to threaten or attack another state is warfare, although such warfare may violate the laws of war, and any use of such weapons by private individuals is terrorism.
The use of biological weapons for terror is ancient. Assyrian politicians (c. 650 B.C.) dumped fungus from rye into their opponents' wells, giving them fatal ergot poisoning. Armies besieging a town relied on increased disease among the defending populace and threw dead animals into water supplies to encourage it. Fourteenth-century Tatars spread bubonic plague by catapulting diseased corpses into towns.
With the advent of the germ theory of disease, greater knowledge of microbiology, and military bioengineering, the potential devastation due to biological weapons grew exponentially. In 1876, the German biologist Robert Koch first proved that anthrax is caused by bacteria. In World War I (1914–1918), biological weapons developed by the United States and Germany were perhaps used to contaminate animal fodder, and the Germans used Burkholderia mallei to cause glanders in enemy support animals. During World War II renewed concern over "germ warfare" fuelled both sides' research regarding biological weapons, but there is no record of their being used. The height of the development of "weaponized" biological agents was the Cold War (1946–1991), in which both the United States and the Soviet Union created arsenals of biological agents for use both in battle and against civilian populations. This research led to propagandist charges of using such weapons; during the Korean War (1950–1953), North Korea accused the United States of dropping bombs containing diseased flies. Since the 1975 ratification of the Biological Weapons Convention, the United States, Russia, and most states have publicly claimed that they have destroyed their stockpiles and now research biological warfare only to defend against it. Even so, during the Persian Gulf War of 1991, Iraq equipped, but did not fire, rocket warheads containing anthrax.
The danger of the use of biological weapons by terrorists has grown as knowledge of such weapons and the military technology for them has become more widely available following the end of the Cold War. Acts of bioterrorism have increased in frequency and severity since then. In 1984, the pseudo-Buddhist Rajneeshee cult distributed salmonella in restaurants and a grocery store in The Dalles, Oregon, attempting to poison civic leaders to gain control of local government; 751 people developed gastroenteritis. Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese cult, killed twelve people and injured thousands in the Tokyo subway through a Sarin gas attack in 1995 and has made further, but unsuccessful, attempts to release airborne biological agents in the subways.
In 2001, letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to television news anchor Tom Brokaw, U.S. Senator Tom Daschle, and others, leading to the deaths of five people and the hospitalization of at least twelve others, although the targeted individuals were unhurt. The attacks coincided with the attacks by the Islamic terrorist group Al Qaeda on New York City and Washington, D.C.
Almost thirty years after the entry into force of the Biological and toxin weapons Convention in 1975, the use,exclusively by Violent Non State Actors, of biological Agents and toxin persists, which raise the question on the role of the Convention in preventing bioterrorism, by VNSA.
The challenges are obvious in the world which is at the beginning of what some are already calling the “Biological Century”. Discoveries in the life sciences have the potential to reshape the worlds of health, food production, energy, and climate change; to produce new fuels, heat- and drought resistant food crops, and to eradicate deadly infectious diseases. But biotechnological discoveries also have a dark side- potential immense harm may be caused through accidental or intentional release of designer pathogens. The glob is also facing a myriad of natural biological threats. Fifteen million people die each year of deadly infectious diseases, with new ones emerging each year, such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Avian Flu or H1N1. In a world of 700 million international air passengers yearly, and almost all on flights shorter than the incubation period of infectious diseases, national health has become only as safe as global health.
The challenge to biological security is two fold:
First: developed and developing countries alike must benefit from a strong global public health regime that controls disease outbreaks and builds local capacity to sustain the health of their citizens. Effective public health is also crucial against the threat of bioterrorism. Given the global diffusion of dangerous techniques and substances, prevention will be difficult and therefore defences in both global and local public health systems must be robust.
The International Health Regulations (IHR-2005) of the World Health Organisation (WHO) stipulate State responsibilities in the strengthening of national and global disease surveillance and response. What is needed now is full implementation of these regulations and the building of local health capacity in developing world.
Second: There is a need to promote the promising side of biotechnology and to protect against its dark side. A new regime for biotechnology safety and security must to be introduced. The existing international regime to stop biological weapons is too slow and state centric to address the dark side of biotechnology. Article X of the Convention provides for this collective cooperation as a mean to strengthening its role and facilitating its universality.
this lead us to explore the shortcomings of the Convention and the possible ways of strengthening its role
Shortcomings of the BTWC
Currently, the BTWC includes 163 state parties, 13 signatories, 19 states have neither signed nor ratified the treaty. Its main provisions (articles I and II) are intended to fully prohibit any acquisition or retention of biological or toxic weapons. Article III prohibits the encouragement or assistance to others (both states and non states actors) in acquiring biological weapons, and article IV calls for national implementation measures to be put in effect. However, article V states that the peaceful uses of biological science and technology are to be protected and encouraged.
The BTWC has fewer states parties compared to the NPT, 189, or CWC 188. Moreover, there exists today no organisation to serve as implementing body for its provisions. In this, the BTWC departs from other international treaties. For example, the NPT is administered by International Atomic Energy Agency; Chemical weapons are similarly governed by the CWC and administered by OPCW. For Biological weapons, the BTWC states parties have created in 2006, a small Implementation Support Unit. As a result, the BTWC has no verification mechanism in place, as is the case with the OPCW.
Finally, since the BTWC was written, at a time when the main concerns were state based biological weapons programmes, its provisions are inadequate to combat the procurement and use of biological weapons by Violent Non State Actors.
The changes ushered in with the 21st century have made necessary a revision of the BTWC's objectives and an expansion of its areas of concern. The terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 brought awareness of the new significance of the threat of bioterrorism in the future.
The likelihood of such an event had increased with the rapid growth of biotechnology. An Example of the scale of this growth is to be seen in the sheer number of facilities which could be involved in the process of developing biological weapons. It is estimated that over 50 000 such facilities exists around the world today. By contrast, IAEA estimates that there are today only 1000 facilities which could produce components for nuclear weapons and the OPCW estimates that the corresponding figure for chemical weapons is 5000. These figures demonstrate the difficult challenges in striving to regulate or to verify that these research facilities are not used as a threat to humans or to the earth's environment.
In conclusion, the 7th review conference should seize the opportunity to explore means for the establishment of a permanent mechanism for strengthening the cooperation between Un Agencies dealing with the fight against bioterrorism, namely Interpol, WHO, World Organisation for Animal Health, and FAO.
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