Also Read
Russian Roulette - The Security Apparatus
In a desperate bid to fend off sanctions, the Bosnian
government banned yesterday all trade in arms and
munitions. A local, Serb-owned company was
documented by the State Department selling spare parts
and maintenance for military aircraft to Iraq via Yugoslav
shell companies.
Heads rolled. In the Republika Srpska, the Serb
component of the ramshackle Bosnian state, both the
Defense Minister Slobodan Bilic and army Chief of Staff
Novica Simic resigned. Another casualty was the general
director of the Orao Aircraft Institute of Bijeljina - Milan
Prica. On the Yugoslav side, Jugoimport chief Gen Jovan
Cekovic and federal Deputy Defense Minister Ivan Djokic
stood down.
Bosnia's is only the latest in a series of embarrassing
disclosures in practically every country of the former
eastern bloc, including all the EU accession candidates.
With the crumbling of the Warsaw pact and the
economies of the region, millions of former military and
secret service operators resorted to peddling weapons and
martial expertise to rogue states, terrorist outfits, and
organized crime. The confluence - and, lately,
convergence - of these interests is threatening Europe's
very stability.
Last week, the Polish "Rzeczpospolita" accused the
Military Information services (WSI) of illicit arms sales
between 1992-6 through both private and state-run
entities. The weapons were plundered from the Polish
army and sold at half price to Croatia and Somalia, both
under UN arms embargo.
Deals were struck with the emerging international
operations of the Russian mafia. Terrorist middlemen and
Latvian state officials were involved. Breaching Poland's
democratic veneer, the Polish Ministry of Defense
threatened to sue the paper for disclosing state secrets.
Police in Lodz is still investigating the alarming
disappearance of 4 Arrow anti-aircraft missiles from a
train transporting arms from a factory to the port of
Gdansk, to be exported. The private security escort claim
innocence.
The Czech Military Intelligence Services (VZS) have long
been embroiled in serial scandals. The Czech defense
attaché to India, Miroslav Kvasnak, was recently fired for
disobeying explicit orders from the minister of defense.
According to Jane's, Kvasnak headed URNA - the elite
anti-terrorist unit of the Czech National Police. He was
sacked in 1995 for selling Semtex, the notorious Czech
plastic explosive, as well as weapons and munitions to
organized crime gangs.
In late August, the Czechs arrested arms traffickers,
members of an international ring, for selling Russian
weapons - including, incredibly, tanks, fighter planes,
naval vessels, long range rockets, and missile platforms -
to Iraq. The operation has lasted 3 years and was
conducted from Prague.
According to the "Wall Street Journal", the Czech
intelligence services halted the sale of $300 million worth
of the Tamara radar systems to Iraq in 1997. Czech firms,
such as Agroplast, a leading waste processing company,
have often been openly accused of weapons smuggling.
"The Guardian" tracked in February a delivery of missiles
and guidance systems from the Czech Republic through
Syria to Iraq.
German go-betweens operate in the Baltic countries. In
May a sale of more than two pounds of the radioactive
element cesium-137 was thwarted in Vilnius, the capital
of Lithuania. The substance was sold to terrorist groups
bent on producing a "dirty bomb", believe US officials
quoted by "The Guardian". The Director of the CIA, John
Deutsch, testified in Congress in 1996 about previous
cases in Lithuania involving two tons of radioactive
wolfram and 220 pounds of uranium-238.
Still, the epicenters of the illicit trade in weapons are in
the Balkan, in Russia, and in the republics of the former
Soviet Union. Here, domestic firms intermesh with
Western intermediaries, criminals, terrorists, and state
officials to engender a pernicious, ubiquitous and
malignant web of smuggling and corruption.
According to the Center for Public Integrity and the
Western media, over the last decade, renegade Russian
army officers have sold weapons to every criminal and
terrorist organization in the world - from the IRA to al-
Qaida and to every failed state, from Liberia to Libya.
They are protected by well-connected, bribe-paying, arms
dealers and high-level functionaries in every branch of
government. They launder the proceeds through Russian
oil multinationals, Cypriot, Balkan, and Lebanese banks,
and Asian, Swiss, Austrian, and British trading
conglomerates - all obscurely owned and managed.
The most serious breach of the united international front
against Iraq may be the sale of the $100 million anti-
stealth Ukrainian Kolchuga radar to the pariah state two
years ago. Taped evidence suggests that president Leonid
Kuchma himself instructed the General Director of the
Ukrainian arms sales company, UkrSpetzExport, Valery
Malev to conclude the deal. Malev died in a mysterious
car accident on March 6, three days after his taped
conversation with Kuchma surfaced.
The Ukrainians insist that they were preempted by
Russian dealers who sold a similar radar system to Iraq -
but this is highly unlikely as the Russian system was still
in development at the time. the American and British are
currently conducting a high-profile investigation in Kyiv.
In Russia, illegal arms are traded mainly by the Western
Group of Forces in cahoots with private companies, both
domestic and foreign. The Air Defense Army specializes
in selling light arms. The army is the main source of
weapons - plastic explosives, grenade launchers,
munitions - of both Chechen rebels and Chechen
criminals. Contrary to received opinion, volunteer-
soldiers, not conscripts, control the arms trade. The state
itself is involved in arms proliferation. Sales to China and
Iran were long classified. From June, all sales of materiel
enjoy "state secret" status.
There is little the US can do. The Bush administration has
imposed in May sanctions on Armenian and Moldovan
companies, among others, for aiding and abetting Iran's
efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction. Armenian
president, Robert Kocharian, indignantly denied
knowledge of such transactions and vowed to get to the
bottom of the American allegations.
The Foreign Policy Research Institute, quoted by Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty, described a "Department of
Energy (DOE) initiative, underway since 1993, to
improve 'material protection, control and accountability' at
former Soviet nuclear enterprises. The program enjoys
substantial bipartisan support in the United States and is
considered the first line of defense
against unwanted proliferation episodes."
"As of February 2000, more than 8 years after the collapse
of the USSR, new security systems had been installed at
113 buildings, most of them in Russia; however, these
sites contained only 7 percent of the estimated 650 tons of
weapons-usable material considered at risk for theft or
diversion. DOE plans call for safeguarding 60 percent of
the material by 2006 and the rest in 10 to 15 years or
longer".
Russian traders learned to circumvent official channels
and work through Belarus. Major General Stsyapan
Sukharenka, the first deputy chief of the Belarusian KGB,
denied, in March, any criminal arms trading in his
country. This vehement protest is gainsaid by the
preponderance of Belarusian arms traders replete with
fake end-user certificates in Croatia during the Yugoslav
wars of secession (1992-5).
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Steven Pifer said that
UN inspectors unearthed Belarusian artillery in Iraq in
1996. Iraqis are also being trained in Belarus to operate
various advanced weapons systems. The secret services
and armies of Ukraine, Russia, and even Romania use
Belarus to mask the true origin of weapons sold in
contravention of UN sanctions.
Western arms manufacturers lobby their governments to
enhance their sales. Legitimate Russian and Ukrainian
sales are often thwarted by Western political arm-twisting.
When Macedonia, in the throes of a civil war it was about
to lose, purchased helicopter gunships from Ukraine, the
American Embassy leaned on the government to annul the
contracts and threatened to withhold aid and credits if it
does not succumb.
The duopoly, enjoyed by the USA and Russia, forces
competitors to go underground and to seek rogue or
felonious customers. Yugoslav scientists, employed by
Jugoimport and other firms run by former army officers,
are developing cruise missiles for Iraq, alleges the
American administration. The accusation, though, is
dubious as Iraq has no access to satellites to guide such
missiles.
Another Yugoslav firm, Brunner, constructed a Libyan
rocket propellant manufacturing facility. In an interview
to the "Washington Post", Yugoslavia's president Vojislav
Kostunica brushed off the American complaints about, as
he put it disdainfully, "overhauling older-generation
aircraft engines".
Such exploits are not unique to Yugoslavia or Bosnia. The
Croat security services are notorious for their collusion in
drug and arms trafficking, mainly via Hungary.
Macedonian construction companies collaborate with
manufacturers of heavy machinery and purveyors of
missile technology in an effort to recoup hundreds of
millions of dollars in Iraqi debts. Albanian crime gangs
collude with weapon smugglers based in Montenegro and
Kosovo. The Balkan - from Greece to Hungary - is
teeming with these penumbral figures.
Arms smuggling is a by-product of criminalized societies,
destitution, and dysfunctional institutions. The prolonged
period of failed transition in countries such as Yugoslavia,
Macedonia, Bosnia, Moldova, Belarus, and Ukraine has
entrenched organized crime. It now permeates every
legitimate economic sphere and every organ of the state.
Whether this situation is reversible is the subject of heated
debate. But it is the West which pays the price in
increased crime rates and, probably in Iraq, in added
fatalities once it launches war against that murderous
regime.