"These weapons may be small, but they cause mass destruction," UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said in an opening address to the two-week meeting that has drawn 2,000 delegates from governments, international and regional bodies.

Just before the conference opened, anti-gun campaigners presented Annan with what was billed as the world's largest photo petition -- bearing the portraits of one million people from 160 countries.

The petition urged UN member states to negotiate a strict set of international rules to curb the one-billion-dollar a year illegal trade in small arms.

Experts put the number of such weapons in circulation worldwide at 640 million.

"Arms proliferation has facilitated some of the worst human rights tragedies of our times, including massacres, mass displacement, torture and mistreatment," said Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan.

"Yet the sale and transfer of small arms continues unhindered to some of the world's worst perpetrators of human rights abuses, thanks to hypocrisy, greed and inaction," she added.

Annan told delegates that an action program put in place by UN member states five years ago for tougher small arms controls had noted significant progress.

"But the problem remains grave," Annan said, citing an urgent need for governments to update legislation, improve stockpile management, prevent weapons theft and tighten registration of gun owners.

"Weapon collection efforts have destroyed a mere fraction of the illicit weapons available in conflict zones, and on city streets," he added.

The conference has drawn the ire of the National Rifle Association (NRA), the powerful lobby of US gun owners which views it as a first step toward a global treaty to outlaw gun ownership by civilians.

Addressing those concerns, Annan stressed that there was no question of negotiating a global ban.

"Our energy, our emphasis and our anger is directed against illegal weapons, not legal weapons," he said. "Our targets remain unscrupulous arms brokers, corrupt officials, drug trafficking syndicates, criminals and others who bring death and mayhem into our communities."

The US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, made it clear that Washington would "resist very strongly" any attempt to influence domestic US policy.

"There are some groups who do have a larger agenda in terms of domestic gun control," Bolton told reporters. "That's not consistent with what we see as the prupose of this conference or its likely outcome."

The faces on the petition handed to Annan represented the million people who have been killed by small arms since 2003.

It was an initiative from the Control Arms Campaign, which brings together Amnesty International, Oxfam International and the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), an alliance of some 600 non-governmental organizations.

"We've come to the meeting this week to ask for international rules governing the arms trade," said IANSA director Rebecca Peters.

"The lack of those rules is costing us too much and every day that we wait that cost is going up by 1,000 lives," she said.

Most deaths in conflicts around the world are caused by small arms, which are mainly exported by the United States, Italy, Brazil, Germany, and Russia, according to a survey released by Small Arms Survey, the brainchild of a Geneva-based independent research project.

"Small arms" include handguns, pistols, rifles, sub-machine guns, mortars, grenades and light missiles. "Light weapons" comprise heavy machine-guns, mounted grenade launchers, anti-tank guns and portable anti-aircraft guns. Community
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