Iraq has long been a country where shady
deals are commonplace. If nothing else, the years
of sanctions prior to the 2003 US invasion meant
that many otherwise routine, legal deals had to be
conducted covertly or at least with a wink and a
nod.
And the potential for corruption when
a state is beginning to rebuild itself after
decades of rule by a dictator is, of course,
plentiful. So it should be no surprise the process
of re-equipping Iraqi military and security
services has been fertile ground for shady
dealings.
Last year, for example, it was
reported that hundreds of millions of US dollars
were misspent at the Defense Ministry during the
term of prime minister Ayad Allawi.
There
were also media reports that British arms and equipment
exported to Iraq,
specifically some of a consignment of 20,000 used
Beretta Italian police pistols, were being
diverted to terrorists.
But the latest and
most interesting development on the small-arms
front in Iraq was the news in May that the
Pentagon has secretly shipped tens of thousands of
small arms to Iraq from Bosnia-Herzegovina in the
past two years, using a web of private companies.
At least one supplier is a noted arms smuggler,
Viktor Bout, blacklisted by Washington and the
United Nations.
The US government arranged
for delivery of at least 200,000 Kalashnikov
machine-guns, together with tens of millions of
rounds of ammunition, from Bosnia to Iraq in
2004-05, according to a report by Amnesty
International, which investigated the sales. But
though the weaponry was said to be for arming the
fledgling Iraqi military, there is no evidence the
guns reached their intended recipient.
The
US and local authorities in Iraq and Bosnia when
questioned could not or would not account for the
deliveries and denied all knowledge of any weapons
purchases from Bosnia.
Private arms
brokers claim the situation in Iraq - chaos, poor
coordination, multiple government agencies, poor
record-keeping and high staff turnover rates -
heightens the possibility that "things" can "get
lost or confused". However, private contractors
have been unable or unwilling to supply documents
relating to the flights that could certify whether
the cargo aircraft arrived at their intended
destination.
The contracts are said to
have been arranged by the military attache of the
time at the US Embassy in Sarajevo. Bosnian
documentation named "coalition forces in Iraq" as
the end users for five arms shipments.
The
Pentagon commissioned the US security firms Taos
and CACI, known for their involvement in the Abu
Ghraib prison controversy in Iraq, to orchestrate
the arms purchases and shipments. They, in turn,
subcontracted to a welter of firms, brokers and
shippers, involving businesses based in Britain,
Switzerland, Croatia, Moldova and Bosnia.
The Amnesty report, "Dead on Time - Arms
Transportation, Brokering and the Threat to Human
Rights", found that the weapons and ammunition
were "reportedly shipped - clandestinely and
without public oversight - to Iraq by a chain of
private brokers and transport contractors under
the auspices of the US Department of Defense
between July 31, 2004, and June 31, 2005".
Even if they did remain in Iraq, Amnesty
is concerned that such arms are likely to have
been used for human-rights violations and abuse.
Technically, there is nothing illegal
about the Bosnian government or the Pentagon
taking arms to Iraq; the problem is one of
transparency and the way the arms deals have been
conducted.
Some of the transport and
brokering companies currently engaged with the US
government in transferring weapons from Serbia and
Montenegro to Iraq and Afghanistan have reportedly
been involved in arms smuggling in the past. The
firms have operated from a private apartment
building in Zagreb, Croatia, and a gun shop in a
provincial Swiss town, as well as locations in
Bulgaria, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Serbia and Ukraine.
The British Broadcasting Corp's File on
Four program said it was shown paperwork about
a consignment of 20,000 AK-47-type assault rifles
that shows they were imported by a company in the
north of England called York Guns Ltd, which sells
shotguns and sporting rifles. Its managing
director Gary Hyde denied having imported the
AK-47s and claimed that a third-party dealer had
legally brought them into the United Kingdom.
The Moldovan air firm that flew the cargo
out of a US air base at Tuzla, northeastern
Bosnia, was flying without a license. The firm,
Aerocom, named in a 2003 UN investigation of the
diamonds-for-guns trade in Liberia and Sierra
Leone, is now defunct, but its assets and aircraft
are registered with another Moldovan firm, Jet
Line International.
It was later reported
that Aerocom was stripped of its license by its
national authorities a day before the first
shipment. Two other companies in the complicated
sale claim to have papers proving the guns were
delivered in Iraq, but refuse to show them.
According to Washington Post reporter Doug
Farah, Aerocom shared an address and telephone
number in Moldova with Jetline, a company publicly
named as a Bout company by then senior Pentagon
official Paul Wolfowitz. But when the first
Aerocom flights were made in August 2004, the
airline had lost its vital air-operating
certificate, issued by Moldova. The certificate
expired on August 6, 2004, before the flights and
has not been renewed.
Farah noted that
Bout has "double-dealt with all sides of every war
he has supplied. He has routinely rerouted weapons
shipments for his own commercial gain, and that
does not inspire much confidence. A person who can
supply the Taliban and the Northern Alliance at
the same time, and who has experience dealing
weapons in Bosnia, would be unlikely to flinch at
the thought of further weapons diversions."
The US shipments were made over a year,
from July 2004, via the American Eagle base at
Tuzla, and the Croatian port of Ploce by the
Bosnian border.
Aerocom is said to have
carried 99 tons of Bosnian weaponry, almost
entirely Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles, in four
flights from the Eagle base in August 2004, even
though, under pressure from the European Union,
the firm had just been stripped of its operating
license by the Moldovan government because of
"safety and security concerns".
Amnesty
said there was no available record of the guns
reaching their destination.
After the
Amnesty report was published, Bosnian Defense
Minister Nikola Radovanovic confirmed that the
country had exported arms and ammunition to Iraq,
but said it had been a legal sale for the
requirements of the Iraqi armed forces. Over the
past year Bosnia sold to Iraq a little under
200,000 infantry weapons and 28 million pieces of
ammunition, Radovanovic said.
A North
Atlantic Treaty Organization official described
the trade as the largest arms shipments from
Bosnia since World War II.
The Guardian
newspaper reported that European administrators in
Bosnia, as well as non-governmental organizations
working for a British government-funded project to
oversee the stockpiling and destruction of weapons
from the Bosnian war of the 1990s, are furious
that the Pentagon's covert arms-to-Iraq program
has undermined the disarmament project.
The international administration running
Bosnia-Herzegovina repeatedly sought to impose an
arms-export moratorium, but under US pressure it
was suspended several times to enable the arms
shipments to go ahead.
David
Isenberg, a senior analyst with the
Washington-based British American Security
Information Council (BASIC), has a wide background
in arms control and national security issues. The
views expressed are his own.
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