The Gun (61 page)

Assault rifles did more than amplify the war. They gave it stamina, a duration it otherwise could not have had. The children sensed this. “The Arabs gave Kony many weapons, and up to now that is how he has been able to resist,” said one former soldier. “Without the guns it would have just been sticks.”
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The Lord’s Resistance Army—its crimes and their consequences, along with its longevity—condensed the perils of assault-rifle proliferation. The simplicity of the Kalashnikov allowed Kony and his commanders to convert columns of abducted children, roped together
like slaves, into a terrifying irregular force. Young and illiterate fighters, some as young as eight or nine, could be instructed on how to load and shoot their rifles, and how to keep them clean. “It takes only one week,” said Colonel Alero. The boy soldiers were not good shots.
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But in short-range ambushes and surprise raids, running and spinning and firing, often targeting civilians, they turned their own homeland into a hell.

The Kalashnikov’s traits also allowed the LRA to keep its campaigns alive for years. Kony’s brigades cached guns crudely. The Ugandan climate was harsh. And yet if the weapons were buried with a modest amount of care—first coated with oil and sometimes also with charcoal and ash to
repel insects—they could be retrieved as long as four years later and still be made to fire.
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Ammunition was also stored underground, stuffed into jerry cans. One former child soldier, Dennis Okwonga, abducted at age thirteen, was ordered to restore rifles pulled from hiding. The Kalashnikovs had been buried in caves, towering ant colonies, or holes dug into the earth. Before being hidden, they had been oiled, bundled within tent tarps, and placed on a sheet of plastic in pits. A second plastic sheet had covered them, then a layer of rocks and dirt. Dennis helped dig apart an anthill that contained 240 Kalashnikovs and four 82-millimeter mortar tubes. The work began.

Some were rusted and the ants had eaten the handgrips. We had to shape new hand grips with wood. It didn’t take long to make them all work. There were three of us, sometimes more. We worked for one month to recondition them and we reburied them. We test-fired them—they all worked. We at first used water to wash them, to get rust off. Then we used oil, gun oil. One pit had 240 guns but they brought us guns from other places—898 in all. A storekeeper had to keep track of the numbers. AK-47s and mortars. All 898 worked after we cleaned them.
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In this way, the Acholi insurgency progressed from Alice Auma’s hapless spirit show to Joseph Kony’s organized brigades. The LRA was not alone in its use of child soldiers. But its development from sideshow movement into a near-permanent presence along Uganda’s northwest border and the frontiers of Congo served to illustrate how such a force can be mobilized, set loose, and then survive. Armed with Kalashnikovs, Kony’s brigades displaced more than a million and a half Ugandans. They punished suspected informants mercilessly and cut away the lips and noses of residents as a warning not to pass information to Museveni’s soldiers. Their actions provoked reactions. The population suffered from both sides. The Ugandan government forced rural Acholi residents into displaced-person camps, both to protect and to control them. The Acholi economy withered. Eventually, the government invested in heavy weapons to chase the child soldiers down. The use of Mi-24 helicopter gunships was decisive in pushing the brigades across Uganda’s borders. But Kony and his army’s remnants lingered on, moving between Uganda,
Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, a force drawing strength from the resilience of its guns.

During the years of Kony’s rise, the Kalashnikov was more than a requisite tool for regional African war. On the Pashtun frontier, where Kalashnikov saturation was as dense as anywhere, it became a gateway to international jihad. After the Soviet army’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban formed and claimed control of much of the country. Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan provided sanctuary for militant Islamic groups and parties. The international recruits who entered this world were ushered from guesthouses in Peshawar and Kabul to camps in the Afghan provinces, where they were trained for terror and guerrilla war.

Camps operated near Mazar-e-Sharif, Jalalabad, Khost, Kandahar, Kabul, and elsewhere. Different parties—some local, others from Central Asia, Kashmir, Africa, or Arabia—operated their own schools and taught their charges in a variety of languages, including Urdu, Uzbek, Tajik, Russian, Arabic, and Pashto.
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The schools shared more than ideology and common purpose. They began instruction with an inaugural lesson—how to use the
Avtomat Kalashnikova.
Notebooks of students who attended these courses, recovered across Afghanistan in 2001, underlined the preeminent place that Kalashnikov rifles had realized in introducing new jihadists to their holy war. The handwritten notebooks the students left behind showed that the recruits attended classes covering the history and characteristics of the AKM and other Kalashnikov variants and received basic instruction in their use. Later lessons covered tactics, including the fundamentals of patrolling and ambushes, and immediate-action drills—the steps to be taken by small patrols upon making contact with a foe. The instruction was of mediocre quality. Some of it contained errors or unrealistic descriptions of the weapons’ qualities. (A class given to Asadullah, a recruit in the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which became an al Qaeda affiliate in the late 1990s, included charts claiming that an AKM had a one-thousand-meter range.) But the instruction was earnest, consistent, and meticulous, suggesting that whoever had organized it had given it considerable thought. The Kalashnikov was viewed by the jihad’s trainers as a fighter’s first tool.

Its prominence was demonstrated by a simple fact: The extent of Kalashnikov
proliferation by the late 1990s was such that the only question for a fighter seeking to obtain one was price. The price of a Kalashnikov is often misunderstood, and in many conversations subject to distortion. One common view has long held, and falsely, that in many regions of the world an AK-47 can be purchased for the cost of a chicken or a sack of grain. Kofi A. Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations from 1997 through 2006, repeated these lines, and added that an AK-47 “can be bought for as little as $15.”
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Such prices may have existed in one place or another for a very brief time. But loudness and repetition are not truth, and these statements, echoed by journalists and arms-control advocates over the years, are best viewed with skepticism. The more realistic retail price range for a single automatic Kalashnikov in much of the developing world, depending on many factors (the rifle’s exact type, nation of manufacture, and condition, the local laws and security conditions at the time and point of sale, the experience of the purchaser) is on the order of several hundred dollars. In some conflicts, a thousand dollars is not rare.

Prices climb when and where Kalashnikovs are difficult to obtain. In nations capable of enforcing the laws they pass, strict gun control can send prices soaring. In the United States, a well-used fully automatic Chinese Type 56 Kalashnikov, in 2005, could cost $10,000;
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the price is higher as of this writing. But the United States is its own case, and prices there are not indicative of prices in regions where the Kalashnikov line is readily available or widely used. Other examples are more germane. In eastern Uganda in the late 1980s, after more than fifteen years of local Kalashnikov proliferation, an AK-47 could be bought for about $200, or traded for three or four cattle
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—a good bit more than a chicken. In the arms bazaars along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, prices for a Kalashnikov ranged from $1,500 to $3,500 during the early years of the 1980s, when demand for weapons for the war against the Soviet army outstripped supply. By the late 1980s, as other governments shipped hundreds of thousands of rifles to the war, Kalashnikov prices had dropped. They reached roughly $700 by the time the Soviet army withdrew. Prices then sank further, dipping nearly to $300 by 2000, before climbing again with the onset of new war.
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In Iraq, Kalashnikovs could be purchased in early to mid-2003 for $150 or less, the soft retail prices reflecting an abundance of weapons available as the Baathist state security structures disbanded and weapons flooded markets, as well as the brief sense of optimism
immediately after Saddam Hussein was toppled.
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As the insurgency grew and sectarian violence spread, and as new forms of demand pressured supply—including an influx of contractors seeking assault rifles for security duties—Kalashnikov prices moved up. By 2005, an AKM clone with a fixed stock cost roughly $450. By 2006, these same rifles cost $650 to $800, with higher prices being paid for Kalashnikovs with folding stocks, which can be more readily concealed and are easier to fire from within a car. In the end, a Kalashnikov on the retail market, which often means on the gray or black market, is like a handmade carpet in a shop. It is worth what a seller can convince a buyer to pay for it. Many factors determine price, and an astute buyer and informed seller can haggle over the details of a gun—not just condition, but Romanian versus Hungarian, Chinese versus Russian, under-folding versus a side-folding collapsible stock—the way collectors might debate the relative merits of a Turkmen, Azeri, or Persian tribal rug.

Not just cash and barter have been used to acquire rifles; extortion has proven an effective means. In Chechnya, insurgents often gain rifles and ammunition through novel agreements. A local fighting cell will use middlemen to negotiate with Russian or pro-Russian Chechen units for truces. In exchange for not attacking a certain Russian position for a prescribed length of time, the insurgents exact a tax paid in armament—a rifle, a can of ammunition, perhaps a sack of grenades. Sometimes to close deals, they sweeten agreements by delivering vodka regularly to a government checkpoint or position. In this way, Russian units have arranged quiet tours.
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Such arrangements are mercurial, and similar pressures can be applied in the other direction and serve as a mechanism for disarmament. Russian units, when seeking to capture weapons, have set up roadblocks and impounded Chechen civilians’ cars and trucks. For each vehicle to be released, the soldiers tell the evicted drivers, the price is one Kalashnikov rifle, to be obtained as the vehicle’s owners see fit.
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In such situations, a rifle becomes very expensive—worth as much as a family’s automobile.

Prices can be set in yet other ways, including special cases that have little to do with needing a weapon for war, as when a weapon’s novelty or symbolism creates prestige. Prestige within Kalashnikov culture, like prestige surrounding other product lines with large followings, almost invariably drives up price. Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, who headed the Afghan bureau of the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, claimed that
the CIA paid $5,000 for the first AK-74—the new Soviet assault rifle that fired the smaller cartridge—captured in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
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At other times a weapon can assume an aura, and aura similarly affects price. Weapons even resembling the smallest Kalashnikovs of all, the AKSU-74, a short-barreled, collapsible-stock design that American gun enthusiasts call the
Krinkov
and that Osama bin Laden has been photographed with, could cost more than $2,000 during the most violent period of the most recent war in Iraq.
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This weapon had by then picked up a regional nickname that gave it jihadist cachet: “the Osama.” Bin Laden’s selection of this design (it is less than twenty inches long and weighs not quite six pounds) was on technical merits a strange endorsement. An AKSU-74 is inaccurate and fires rounds with less muzzle velocity than an AK-74, making it potentially less useful and lethal than many available choices. But people who regard themselves as warriors inhabit worlds in which symbols matter. And in the particular history of bin Laden’s martial surroundings—western Pakistan and Afghanistan of the last three decades—a short-barreled Kalashnikov emanated a trophy’s distinction. Relatively new, the AKSU-74 had been carried in the Soviet-Afghan War by specialized soldiers, including helicopter and armor crews, for whom a smaller weapon was useful in the tight confines of their transit. For an Afghan fighter, possession of one of these rifles signified bravery and action. It implied that the holder had participated in destroying an armored vehicle or aircraft; the rifle was akin to a scalp. By choosing it, bin Laden silently signaled to his followers:
I am authentic,
even if his actual combat experience was not what his prop suggested.

Symbolic power has been harnessed by owners of assault rifles since assault rifles became available. After Salvador Allende rose to the presidency of Chile in 1970, becoming the Western Hemisphere’s first elected socialist head of state, Fidel Castro presented him with a folding-stock Kalashnikov bearing an inscription on a golden plate: “To my good friend Salvador from Fidel, who by different means tries to achieve the same goals.”
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The rifle served as 1970s leftist bling, though a golden plate was more Saddam Hussein than Karl Marx. Like so many other men with a Kalashnikov, like József Tibor Fejes with his captured AK-47 in Budapest, Allende could not resist a pose. He was photographed at least once playing with his keepsake rifle, looking down the barrel while pointing it into the air. If the most widely circulated accounts are to be believed, Castro’s gift had a role in
the final palace act, in which Allende, besieged in September 1973 during a CIA-backed coup, sat on a couch, placed his Kalashnikov between his knees, aligned the muzzle beneath his chin, and fired.
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(Allende would not be the last head of state to die by Kalashnikov fire; the list would grow.)

The darker symbolism eluded those who maintained the celebration. Mozambique chose in 1983 to allow a Kalashnikov to adorn its national flag. At roughly the same time, Hezbollah formed in Lebanon, and its yellow flag bore the image of an assault rifle with features resembling those of a Kalashnikov.
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Other groups have made the selection explicit. The Kalashnikov decorates the crest of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the South Asian Islamic terrorist group, and appears on flags and murals used by the New People’s Army in the Philippines and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. In Iraq after the American invasion, the rifle became part of the murals and flags of Jaish al-Islami, the 1920 Revolutionary Brigades, the Mujahideen Shura Council, Jaish al-Taifa al-Mansoura, and the Salafist Group for Call and Combat.