Beijing: China's arms sales to African countries are fuelling conflict in the continent which has also been the foremost factor in forcing people out of their homes leading to mass internal displacement, media reports said.

Almost all sub-Saharan countries are in the grip of low and high-intensity armed conflicts with the Sub-Saharan region of Africa bearing the brunt of mass internal displacement, reported Inside Over.

Who is to blame for all this? It is the proliferation of small arms and light weapons which is to be held responsible. Now, the proliferation of weapons can be attributed to bad governance, corruption, porous borders, poverty, deprivation, and unemployment, reported Inside Over.

According to the experts, unless countries like China bring a change in their approach to weapons' transfer and place conditionalities on the sale of their arms to African countries, the menace of the illegal spread of arms cannot be stopped across the continent.

As per Jane's Defence Weekly, nearly 70 per cent of armoured military vehicles in all 54 African countries are of Chinese origin, while nearly 20 per cent of all military vehicles in the continent have been supplied by China, the media portal said.

Citing a report by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the outlet pointed out that emerging as the fourth global arms supplier, China accounted for 4.6 per cent of total global arms exports between 2017 and 2021.

Out of this total global arms exports, a total of 10 per cent were with African countries. Ethiopia, Sudan, Nigeria, Tanzania, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Gabon, Algeria, Namibia, Ghana, Burundi, Kenya, and Mozambique emerged as major importers of Chinese arms in the last five years.

Because of this arms proliferation, it is estimated that since the 1990s, millions of people have died in the conflagration of conflicts in Africa.

As per a study published by The Lancet medical journal in 2018, five million children under the age of five died as a result of armed conflicts between 1995 and 2015. Of them, approximately three million were infants aged 12 months or younger.

It also sheds light that conflicts and violence have also been the foremost factors in forcing people out of their homes.

According to figures published by the Norwegian Refugee Council's Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, of the total 14.4 million people displaced across the world due to conflicts or violence in 2021, as much as 11.6 million or 80 per cent of the total people were displaced in the sub-Saharan region.