Selling Arms to Rogue States
By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"

In a desperate bid to fend off sanctions, the Bosnian government
banned In October 2002 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.

In October 2002, 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 August 2002, 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 2002 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.

Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician,
Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a
United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and
the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in
The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia.

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com