Good article about smuggling to Iraq.
Iraq buying arms in East Europe's black markets
Two Czechs and a German were arrested in the latest
smuggling case.
By Arie Farnam | Special to The Christian Science Monitor
PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC – The Bush administration may not be
ready to make its plans for war with Iraq official, but
Saddam Hussein appears to be rearming and preparing for
aerial assault in earnest.
The pull of Iraq's need for weaponry can be felt a thousand
miles from Baghdad in Central and Eastern Europe. Several
illegal weapons transfers to Iraq have been uncovered in
postcommunist Europe during the past few months, and
experts on organized crime estimate that most are still
successfully hidden.
Most recently, two people were arrested in the Czech
Republic, a new NATO member, for allegedly organizing
illicit exports of Russian, Ukrainian, and Bulgarian arms.
Investigators will not discuss the case, which opened two
weeks ago, saying only that the Czech pair, a 28-year-old
man and a 69-year-old woman, were at the center of a ring
smuggling weapons to "Middle Eastern states under United
Nations embargo."
Michal Zantovsky, chairman of the Czech Senate Committee
for Defense and Security Policy, confirmed that the group
is suspected of selling weapons to Iraq, Iran, and Syria
over three-years.
Czech, German, and Swiss police searched homes in Prague,
discovering catalogs offering military equipment to
"interested persons in Arab states." A third suspect, a
Russian man with Canadian citizenship, was apprehended in
Germany. Investigators say a number of deals had already
been successfully concluded, including sales of
Russian-made Mi-8 and Mi-17 combat helicopters, Kalashnikov
rifles, antitank grenades, and mobile anti-aircraft missile
systems.
Within the past year, US intelligence sources have said
that Iraq has a Eastern European radar system that can
detect US stealth bombers.
Roman Kupcinsky, head of Crime, Corruption and Terrorism
Watch, a publication of US-funded Radio Free Europe, says
that the latest case indicates that arms-smuggling groups
are using a NATO country as a base for money laundering and
organizing deals. "This one group has probably been
crippled, but it represents just a tiny fraction of the
arms-trafficking underworld here. Eastern European arms
continue to go to unstable Arab states and there is
virtually no system in place to control them."
In the back room of a pub overlooking Prague's medieval
quarter, a Russian, who does not want his name revealed,
explains how the arms-trafficking system works. "I got my
first taste of the arms trade while working at a
refrigerator company in the Ukraine a couple of years ago,"
he says. "We were approached by military men with flashy
brochures of weapons at bargain prices. They asked us to
act as a front company to sell the weapons as
'refrigerators' and to ask no questions."
Prague, the former Russian military information officer
says, is now the favored base of operations for middlemen
selling weapons to the Arab world. "This is the ideal
headquarters if you want to sell weapons to Iraq," he says.
"The Czechs have a good cover by being in NATO. They have
all the right contacts from the old days, and they are
willing to do anything for easy money. That's what the arms
business is: unbelievably easy money."
The end of the cold war left East Bloc countries with
massive stockpiles of unused Soviet-era weapons and a
hunger for quick cash. In recent years, billions of
dollars' worth of weapons have passed out of Eastern Europe
into Third World conflict zones.
"Eastern European countries are not very choosy about who
buys their weapons, and their economies tend to be highly
dependent on arms exports," Mr. Zantovsky says. "It is
altogether possible that individuals within the civil
service are involved in illegal deals. It may not be
policy, but corruption is rampant."
Western experts on Iraq suspect that weapons from Central
and Eastern Europe pass through Jordan and Syria to reach
Iraq. Iraq appears to be paying for the weapons with
unauthorized oil exports, which are reexported as Syrian
oil. Syrian oil exports have unaccountably increased by
100,000-200,000 barrels per day in the past year.
"It is not that difficult to smuggle weapons to Iraq....
There is basically no control of ships coming into Syrian
ports and trucks take the cargo over the border into Iraq,"
says a Western diplomat who is an expert on Iraq.
Iraqi Army deserters say they witnessed the delivery of
Czech-made missiles and guidance systems to Iraq last
February. "It involved weapons worth $800,000. The freight
was unloaded in the Syrian harbor of Latakia and then
transported to Iraq," three Iraqis told the British
Guardian newspaper earlier this year.
The Iraqi government denies that it is importing weapons.
Large Russian and Ukrainian military delegations have
visited Baghdad in recent months to assess Iraq's weapons
needs. Officially, deliveries will only be made if UN
sanctions are lifted. But recent smuggling scandals in both
vendor countries point to illegal arms transfers. Iraqi
Trade Minister Mohammed Mehdi Saleh told the visiting
Russian delegation that Baghdad could order more than $10
billion worth of Russian weapons, according to press
reports. A source within the Ukrainian delegation told Mr.
Kupcinsky that they, too, were given a huge shopping list
of weapons the Iraqis wanted, and then the Ukrainians sang
"Happy Birthday" to Saddam.
Earlier this year Ukrainian bodyguard Nikolai Melnichenko
revealed recordings of the private conversations of
Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma to a court in San
Francisco. The tapes, which were inspected by
Virginia-based BEK TEK experts, captured a discussion in
which Mr. Kuchma approved the sale of three Kalchuga radar
systems to Iraq through a Jordanian middleman for $100
million. The Kalchuga is a mobile, passive radar system
which can overcome US stealth technology and detect air and
land targets up to 500 miles away.
Czech arms company Tesla Pardubice has produced a similar
system, called Tamara, which brought down two US bombers
during the 1990s Balkan wars. Czech arms dealers tried to
sell Tamara systems to Iraq in 1997, but at least one deal
was halted in Turkey.
During the cold war, Czech arms companies supplied much of
the Third World, including Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and
North Korea, with high-tech military equipment and
explosives. Sanctions against clients have drastically cut
into profits, but sales continue in various shades of gray.
Last year, despite pressure from NATO allies, the Czech
Republic officially sold 20 L-39 Albatross light jet
fighters to Yemen, a country notorious for reselling
weapons to embargoed states such as Sudan.
Meanwhile, several recent arrests suggest that the
black-market trade in Czech-made Semtex, a virtually
undetectable plastic explosive popular with terrorist
groups, is booming. |
