The Gun (59 page)

Then the system fell. Mikhail S. Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985, and by 1986 the party was loosening its hold and allowing reforms. For those in Eastern Europe under communist rule and Soviet occupation, the desire for independence—suppressed by violence several times since World War II—was rekindled. In early 1989, the formerly banned trade union, Solidarność, exacted a commitment from Poland’s communist government to hold elections, which it won overwhelmingly in June, creating an irreparable crack. Events accelerated. Czechoslovakia held its Velvet Revolution in November 1989; the Berlin Wall fell the same month. Romanians revolted in December. Hungary held free elections in spring 1990, and Bulgaria in June. Ukraine declared its independence that July, followed by Azerbaijan and Armenia. Georgia and the Central Asian republics announced their independence the next year. Albania voted its communists from office in 1992.

Violence marred communism’s last hours. Deposed President Nicolae Ceauşescu of Romania was executed with his wife after a hasty victor’s trial; they were shot, husband and wife standing side by side with hands tied behind their backs, by soldiers firing Kalashnikovs on Christmas Day. Elsewhere in the Soviet Union, much more blood was spilled, sometimes by officials trying to maintain power, other times because of ethnic tensions that had been both stoked and contained under Soviet rule. Riots were put down with Soviet force in 1986 in Almaty, in 1989 in Tbilisi, in 1990 in Baku, and in 1991 in Riga and Vilnius. Fighting broke out between Azeris and Armenians in early 1988, igniting a six-year war. In 1991, Georgia attacked separatist South Ossetia, and Chechnya declared its independence from Russia, setting a course for a larger and more costly war that would see human-rights abuses by Russia and its proxy forces on a grand scale, and the separatists’ adoption of the tactics of terror.
Yugoslavia was fracturing, heading into a series of ethnic wars. Civil war erupted in Tajikistan in 1992, the year fighting broke out in Transnistria, and between Georgia and the Abkhaz.

During these years, an arms-pilferage drama unfolded across the Warsaw Pact. The events in the German Democratic Republic provided one example. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, pitching the country on a new course. During more than forty years of communist rule, East Germany had become an armed police state and well-stocked military front. The arsenals were large and varied, augmented by the secret production in the Wiesa rifle plant. The Nationale Volksarmee, or National People’s Army, was the most heavily armed organization. But the police, the secret police, and the border guards had arms stores as well, and as many as four hundred thousand military weapons had been cached in factories, positioned to arm workers’ militias ahead of national uprising or war. Party officials had another one hundred thousand small arms. The dismantling of the wall marked the beginning of German reunification. But the procedures of uniting the nation and its property were neither immediate nor clear. Nearly a year passed before the West German Bundeswehr, the federal defense forces, assumed responsibility for East German arms stores. By then, the depots were no longer full—large numbers of weapons had drifted from state custody into the possession of collectors, criminals, and faraway rebel bands. Adding to the arms-bazaar atmosphere was the presence of the garrisoned Soviet troops, some of whom remained on German soil into 1994. These soldiers and their officers were implicated in sales and diversions, too.

Increasingly, Soviet soldiers are caught peddling small arms, hand grenades, and larger hardware to German citizens in exchange for alcohol, pornographic movies, and
Deutschmarks.
Pistols can be had for less than US$100, AK assault rifles along with ammunition is [
sic
] being sold on the black market for US$200 to US$300. Two journalists scored a scoop last autumn when they succeeded in buying from a Soviet major for a total of 3,000 Deutschmarks (approximately US$2,000) a number of hand grenades, an AK74, ammunition including an anti-tank mine along with one perfectly operational SAM-7, the Red Army’s equivalent to the US Stinger shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile.

Within the last year black market sales of ex-NVA or Soviet weaponry has grown to unprecedented proportions in Germany. In Berlin everything including 120mm mortars had found their way into the hands of collectors. Much more of a problem than misguided gun-nuts are smuggling rings that recently have come to the attention of the police. One of these rings was uncovered when Stuttgart authorities got hold of two independently operating groups in the vicinity of that southwestern industrial city. Receiving AKs, pistols and ammunition from a Turkish connection in East Berlin, the two groups dispatched the guns to Yugoslavia’s rebel groups in Kosovo province. One at a time, the weapons were carried past border checkpoints by returning Croatian and Serbian migrant workers using the weekly shuttle buses that travels [sic] from the Stuttgart area where many of the migrant workers have found work in the heart of Germany’s automobile industry.

Various incidents prove that the above examples are not exceptional occurrences but rather are the tip of a small arms iceberg.
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The iceberg extended beyond Germany. Other nations had larger stockpiles and less capable successor governments. In the early 1990s, Albania maintained a veneer of control over its postcommunist affairs. Appearances did not hold. Its leaders knew little of business, and beneath their assurances that an orderly transition from totalitarian bunker state to market economy was under way, the country’s economy was carried along by Ponzi schemes fronting as legitimate investments. A large fraction of the population poured savings into these traps. In 1996 the end came. The schemes ran dry. The funds defaulted. The population’s savings vanished. Panic came quickly as the pyramids collapsed. In 1997, public anger turned to rage. Rioting broke out early in the year, driven by popular fury at the government for not protecting the people from nationwide fraud. Citizens ransacked government buildings and turned on the army and the police. Just as had happened in Moroto in Uganda, crowds seized the state’s guns. The Kalashnikov factory at Gramsh was picked clean. Armed gangs formed, and in many regions anarchy prevailed. The highest pitch of disorder lasted several weeks, during which hundreds of people were killed. By the fall, when the government offered an assessment of what it had lost, the numbers were staggering: nearly seven hundred
thousand firearms, 1.5 billion rounds of ammunition, more than 3 million hand grenades, and a million land mines. As much as 80 percent of the army’s small arms were missing. Researchers later claimed the official estimates were low.
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Some of these weapons were recovered through government offers of amnesty. Most were not. Many went north to the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, which at the time was listed by the State Department as a terrorist group. The next year, the KLA was fighting a war against Serbian troops.

Ukraine provided another example, both of the incredible size of the stockpiles and of a means of leakage. In the early 1990s, after the Warsaw Pact had dissolved, Soviet military units gradually left the lands they had occupied. They turned toward home—long, deflated columns rolling eastward by train and by truck. The remnants of the Soviet army lacked the organization, will, and resources to carry all its equipment. It did try to carry much of its weapons and ammunition. Many columns reached Russia. Others made it only to Ukraine, where their journey stopped. Ukraine, already a prestaged conventional arsenal, became an arms dump along the army’s road home, a nation where rail cars crammed with munitions were abandoned in the open air. (In the area around Odessa, 1,500 standard freight cars full of ammunition were idled and exposed; near Chudniv another 330 cars were unattended; near Slabuta roughly 1,000 freight cars came to a stop.) The burden taxed Ukraine in extraordinary ways. After trying to count its inheritance, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense claimed to own between 2.44 million and 3 million tons of ammunition in as many as 220 depots, and an estimated 7 million military small arms
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—roughly one hundred firearms for every soldier.

Once this sort of material was available, factors that ensured its travel went to work: international demand, inadequate inventory procedures, an overwhelmed and inexperienced government populated by corrupt officials, weak international controls, and networks of brokers ready to match buyers to goods. Little in the gun-runner’s world is shared in public; transparency is typically accidental. The exact amounts of arms and ordnance that leaked from Ukraine, and their destinations, will never
be publicly known. But two deals arranged by one particular broker, a debaucher of cartoonish proportion, did tumble into view.

In August 2000 the police in Italy raided a suite in a hotel outside Milan and arrested a large, naked man well into a night of prostitutes, drink, and cocaine. The man was Leonid Minin, a Ukrainian-born arms smuggler who had become a naturalized citizen of Israel. Arms dealing, to a large degree, had once been conducted between European courtiers and salesmen who wanted to be perceived as gentlemen. The Gatlings and Maxims and the former military officers in their company, with their fine dress, presented themselves as refined in experience and learning. Gatling insisted on being called Doctor. Maxim cultivated England’s elite. Samuel Cummings, to the end, had panache. Theirs could be a dark business, but many practitioners put on airs. The upscale touch had its reasons. Some salesmen demonstrated weapons before princes and presidents, or generals who hailed from military academies where cadets learned to use their spoons. Minin was another sort. He was corpulent, hard-partying, and coarse—a dealer who moved casually through the post-Soviet underworld and all of its crudities, assessing weapons stocks and making useful friends. He fit a niche. He could hobnob with the warlord in need of weapons in one country and in another country speak the language of the shabby colonel whose nation had lost the Cold War and had excess weapons under lock and key. He was fifty-two years old, had many aliases, and was a streetwise businessman and able slob. In his possession at the time of his arrest, aside from the drugs, were five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of unrefined diamonds and hundreds of pages of documents related to his business dealings, including the business of running guns. The documents showed that in a productive run of years seeking profits in the husk of the Soviet Union, Leonid Minin had assembled the social connections and basket of shell companies to obscure the movements of illicit cargo with paper shuffles that no one had managed to unwind. Some of these papers, once translated from multiple languages, offered a view of two weapons shipments to Africa from Ukraine.

For the first transfer, in March 1999, Minin organized the air shipment to Burkina Faso of three thousand AKM rifles, a million rounds of M1943 ammunition, twenty-five rocket-propelled grenades, and one type each of antiaircraft and antitank missiles, with eighty missiles in all. The shipment, sixty-eight tons of freight on an Antonov-124 cargo jet,
was enough to arm a midsized rebel force. Though these weapons were officially listed as bound for Burkina Faso, they were not for that country’s use. Once the plane landed in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, the weapons were offloaded and transferred to another aircraft. This second aircraft, owned by Minin, shuttled the weapons by back-and-forth flights to Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, which was under United Nations arms embargo at the time. The second transfer, organized the following year, was larger. It included 10,500 Kalashnikovs, 120 sniper rifles, and 8 million rounds of ammunition. The cargo was flown out of the same Ukrainian airfield, at Gostomel, northwest of Kiev, and carried on the first leg by the same Antonov-124. The flight landed on July 15, 2000, in Abidjan, the capital of Côte d’Ivoire, and the arms aboard were reshipped to Liberia via a smaller cargo plane, which operated with a faked registration. Once in Liberia, the weapons and munitions were transferred overland to the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF, a rebel group in Sierra Leone backed by Charles Taylor, the former guerrilla who at the time was the warlord president of Liberia.

Under international rules, legal arms shipments are required to be accompanied by documents known as end-user certificates. These certifications, provided by the nation receiving the shipments, officially declare who the final recipient of the weapons will be. They serve as a government’s seal of consent on arms deals on its territory. Minin’s operation revealed how easily the rules could be sidestepped. He had provided the Ukrainian state arms export agency with end-user certificates signed by officials from Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire; the documents claimed that these countries were the end users. They weren’t. (Such records, arms dealers say, are easy to obtain, as simple as paying a bribe to a defense attaché on duty in Asian and African embassies in Europe. The paperwork can be arranged over dinner, even lunch. Brussels has been a favorite stop for procuring them, the dealers say, because many impoverished nations that have no representation in Eastern European capitals where arms deals are made have diplomatic representation there.)
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The fraudulent certificates gave the Ukrainian arms export agency, which was riddled with corruption, plausible deniability, though many Ukrainian state officials were said to profit from the deals. By the time Minin was arrested in Italy, the weapons were already in the field, in the hands of the RUF. Minin’s operation had other elements that easily skirted international controls,
including shell companies registered in Gibraltar and the British Virgin Islands and banks that accepted wired deposits in Hungary, Cyprus, and the United States.
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With air traffic control over Africa spotty, he had entered a business that was surprisingly secure.

If all of this looked complicated, it was complicated only in its unraveling. In practice, it was rather simple: Minin was a broker, a man who had access to both ends of an illegal arms deal—the people who wanted weapons in one country, and the people who controlled weapons stockpiles in another. With a bevy of bank accounts and shell companies created for the cost of registering them offshore, he assembled the mechanics of black-market transfers. The deals, to a casual observer, were masked by the patina of legitimacy. And once customers were assured of this, Minin passed along the prices for purchases and shipment, arranged transit, and ensured that each party at each leg had the necessary paperwork to present to the authorities, such as they were, to stamp, sign, or seal. All that was required was money, and contacts, and a willingness to break the law.