Shady dealers aim to arm Iraq

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.