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The Eurasian Politician - October 2003
Anssi Kullberg & Christian Jokinen, 25 Sept. 2003
Translation from the article published in
Kristityn Vastuu, 25th Sept. 2003.
See the original Finnish article Kuoleman kauppiaiden jäljillä, EP
28.9.2003
We travel upstream the route of the weapons and start from where the journey of the armaments ends. When travelling on land route between Kabul and Peshawar, one has to spend a night in the city of Jalalabad, which is in the Pashtun area of Afghanistan, and until the autumn 2001, stronghold and support area of the Taliban. Now Jalalabad is controlled by the paramilitary troops of the local warlord, Hazrat Ali.
The fashion of the city’s youth has changed in the sense that now many have shaven off their beards, cool sunglasses are worn with the shalwar-qamis, music shops play Pashtun pop loud, and in the tearooms, young men are at the evenings staring at "daring" Punjabi movie, where a woman is dancing and singing. Some things haven’t changed, though: the male population of the city is still armed up to their teeth. Some dozens of kilometers away, fighting is going on against the remaining Taliban troops. Co-operating with Hazrat Ali’s troops, the American special troops have made large weapons confiscation raids, finding piles of mostly Russian, Pakistani and Chinese weapons.
On the other side of Afghanistan is situated the old city of Herat, whose Persian-style Blue Mosque is included in the UNESCO world heritage list. Herat is under the heavy-handed rule of the veteran warlord Ismail Khan, with whom the present Afghan government and the Western Coalition reluctantly co-operate, although Ismail Khan has dubiously strong ties with Iran, and prefers the women to wear burkha. Near Herat, we see hectares of brand new city jeeps and tanks, which have been smuggled here through Iran. The cars and electronics come from the tax paradises of the Gulf states to Afghanistan nowadays through Iran and Herat, as Kabul is controlled by Westerners. The wealth of Ismail Khan’s Herat is based on smuggling. From Herat, the goods are taken to Kabul, and finally on land route to Pakistan’s black market in Peshawar. Nowadays, the smuggling increasingly heads from Herat to south, bypassing Kabul, and enters Pakistan in Baluchistan. The capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan, Quetta, has partly replaced Peshawar as a knot of smuggling.
During the Afghanistan War and the Taliban reign, Peshawar, however, was the main crossroads of weapons trade on the Pakistani side. Peshawar is the capital of Pakistan’s Pashtun-majority North-Western Frontier Province, a historical gateway between the Indian Subcontinent and Central Asia on the mouth of the Khyber Pass, full of the exoticism of frontier lands. Still during our visits, weapons trade flourished in Peshawar, but smuggling is more concentrated in the Tribal Agencies, which begin just outside the city. They have large autonomy guaranteed by the Constitution of Pakistan, and therefore even Pakistan’s own law-enforcement bodies cannot efficiently operate there. About half an hour drive west from Peshawar, there is the town of Darra, the core of weapons trade of the frontier. There the gunsmiths boast that fighters are the only arms they haven’t manufactured – yet. Here a Kalashnikov costs about 200 euro.
Farther east, along the legendary Karakorum Highway connecting Punjab with China, there lies Kohistan, one of Pakistan’s most conservative and religious regions. Driving from Rawalpindi to Gilgit takes about 17 hours, but it is easy to bear, because the Highway takes us through most unforgettable landscapes. After the hills of Hazara, we arrive in Kohistan, where the Indus is flowing fast on the bottom of the magnificent ravine, and villages seem to hang over the precipices of the steep gorge. The Karakorum Highway snakes along the western side of the Indus Ravine. Kohistan is strong support base for Islamists, and in the villages one can see lots of bearded men but hardly any women or girls, or if one sees one of the latter, she is wearing full headscarf. In Besham, every second shop is an arms shop, and an AK-47 cost 10’000 rupees.
Here, the mosques preach the most puritan interpretations of Islam, Wahhabism originating in Saudi Arabia, and Deobandism originating in India. On the outskirts of the cities of this region, radical mullahs continue to preach in the madrassahs, agitating hatred against the West, and particularly against the United States, although since the pro-Western General Pervez Musharraf took power, Pakistan has tried to gain control over the situation. During the electoral campaigning of last autumn, death was sworn for Musharraf in the villages of the Pashtun regions. The poor villages of Kohistan and the Tribal Agencies, as well as the slums of the metropoles, give birth and raise the students of the madrassahs, the talibs, who become the row infantry of the "holy war". The guns we are tracking end up in the hands of these often illiterate and hardly adult serious boys, who are prepared to be killed, holding the weapons, in the battlefields of jihad in Afghanistan, Kashmir, and other conflict areas of Eurasia.
The young infantrymen of the holy war hardly understand anything else of world politics except what has been put to their heads in the madrassahs and in Islamist propaganda. They think they are fighting for God and for Islam, but they have never been allowed to independently research Islam and the Koran, in order to find the religion of peace and mercy, which Islam is for most of its believers. The zeal of these boys is more politics than religion, and behind their political indoctrination, there are unscrupulous agitators, who are by no means from poor villages, and who do not share their infantrymen’s suffering in the battlefields. They come from where the money for the weapons come, too: from the most wealthy Arab countries, and from the frustrated emigrant populations who have lived for years in the West.
Many of them used to support another totalitarian ideology, atheist communism, in the 1970s, until in the 1980s, the greatest sponsor of international terrorism, the Soviet Union, observed that radical Islamism seemed more promising than communism, to combat Western interests in the Middle East and South Asia. Subsequently, in the mid-1980s, many former atheists suddenly declared themselves Muslim believers, grew up beard, and rushed to Peshawar, where the Afghan resistance against Soviet occupation had been supported, with US assistance, for about five years already.
The jihadist newcomers, however, were not as interested in fighting the Soviet Union as they were to turn the hatred of the holy warriors against the United States and capitalism. As a conclusion to this dispute, the original leader of the Peshawar Service Bureau for Afghan Jihad, Abdullah Azzam, was assassinated with a car bomb in autumn 1989, and the organization was captured by the radical Usama bin Ladin. This was how Al Qaida was born. Two years later, Al Qaida started to send back terrorists from Afghanistan to run subversive operations against the pro-Western Muslim regimes, especially in conservative Arab countries. Afghanistan remained fighting its own civil war, and bin Ladin and his men returned there from Sudan only in 1996, when in need of a new asylum.
Although the Soviet empire was dispersed in 1989-1992, its heir, Russia, continues to be the superpower of international arms trade. Russia has been arming most of the world’s dictatorships and war zones. For example Iraq, Syria, and Iran were provided massive amounts of Russian weapons continuously for 1992-2003. Even the Colombian drug cartels received from Russia, among other weapons, anti-aircraft missiles and a submarine in the 1990s. Nowadays it is increasingly difficult to distinguish, which part of arms trade and support ending up in terrorist hands is purposeful coordinated activity of secret services, and which part is private business or organized crime. These are indistinguishably intertwined in the area of the former Soviet Union. An example of this is provided by the career of the KGB Major Viktor But (Victor Bout).
But belonged to a family which was close to Yuri Andropov, and thereby in the core of the KGB’s terrorist activity in the 1970s and 1980s. In August-September 1989, But also visited Finland as a young intelligence officer, probably having duties connected with the monitoring of the Jewish emigration through Finland to Israel. When the Soviet Union collapsed, But left for Angola, as a UN peacekeeper. There began his new career as an international merchant of arms. Throughout early 1990s, But was supplying millions of dollars worth of weapons, among other destinations, to Angola and Liberia. In 1995, he appeared in Belgium as the owner of a Russian flight company, and continued his arms trade throughout Africa. He was arming, for example, Zaire, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone, for the forthcoming genocides. He is believed to have supplied arms also to the governments of Serbia and Iraq, and even to Al Qaida, which was smuggling Russian SA-7 missiles through Sudan to Kenya.
In the Kenyan city of Mombasa, there was a center of Al Qaida’s weapons trade, led by Muhammad Sadiq Odeh, also known as "Muhammad the Fisherman", because he was smuggling weapons with fish cargo. Odeh was also something else than a weapons merchant, as in 1998, he organized the terrorist bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam. In the coded messages, the bombers called each other the "Fish People". At the same time, But was smuggling arms to his new profitable customer, the Taliban movement of Afghanistan. In a fax captured by the Pakistani intelligence, sent by But’s employees in Peshawar, the weapons deliveries were referred to with the code "fish from Tanzania". The airplanes of But’s flight companies Air Cess and Flying Dolphin officially carried their cargoes from East Africa and the United Arab Emirates to Central Asia, but the Armenian pilots made landings in Kandahar, where the Taliban unloaded the weapon cargo.
But was the single most important arms supplier of the Taliban from 1995 until 2001. Alone in 1996, he earned more than 50 million dollars from arms trade. In 1997, he moved his headquarters from Belgium to the Arab Emirates, first to Dubai and later to the safer Sharjah, to make easier his profitable arms trade to Afghanistan. Air Cess and Flying Dolphin were operating without obstacles from the state of the UAE, as But had an excellent business partner, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, who was close to the ruling family of Abu Dhabi. Besides, the US Democrat administration under Bill Clinton had ordered Russian planes to be exempted from all the checks, to which all cargo planes of Muslim countries were subjected.
But’s weapons came from Russia, but to blur their tracks, for example Ukrainian and Belarussian weapons traders were used as covers. An especially flourishing knot of international weapons trade was generated in Transnistria, the separatist republic, which belongs to Moldova but is occupied by Russia. Transnistria still swears in the name of Stalinism, and it is led by the Russian politruk Igor Smirnov, and members of the Russian security services and the Yanayev junta, who have been moved from Moscow to Tiraspol. However, the backbone of Transnistrian economy is smuggling of weapons, drugs and humans. Every day, two air cargoes of Russian weapons leave Tiraspol for Larnaca of Southern Cyprus, where the weapons are distributed to the clients in Syria, Lebanon, and to the Hizbollah, which is making its strikes against Israel.
But’s business only suffered a backlash in autumn 2001, when it was revealed, due to the anger caused by the new terrorist attack by Al Qaida. The enraged United States started a war against the Taliban movement of Afghanistan, which was protecting Al Qaida. The Interpol issued an international warranty on Viktor But, and several public reports were written about his activities in various parliaments as well as in the UN. Despite of this, But continues to operate relatively freely in Africa as well as in the United Arab Emirates and Russia, and he seems to reside undisturbed in his Moscow apartment, where he has given several interviews during the recent years. The Russian Interpol claims that they can’t find But.
When a stir broke out in the world in 2002 about But’s activities, the Russian intelligence decided to "burn" a couple of lesser arms merchants, and the Russian press seemed to try to express it all as a "Jewish conspiracy" of some oligarchs. Two Ukrainian Jewish arms traders, But’s junior partner Vadim Rabinovich and Leonid Minin, caught the attention of the media. Rabinovich was reported, for example, to have delivered 200 tanks to the Taliban. Many Western, Polish, Romanian, and even Moldovan press continued to report on But and on the Russian secret services’ relationship with terrorism, but for example in the Finnish press the issue seemed too sensitive and so the Finnish newspapers gratefully seized to the "Ukrainian" arms trade of Minin and Rabinovich.
Everywhere in the world, lengthened conflicts make sure that arms trade remains one of the most profitable business worldwide. On the battlefields, it is not asked, from whom the weapons come from; they are taken from where they are offered. Because of this, the arms merchants also possess a lot of influence on the political movements of the conflict zones. During the Cold War, communism spread in the Third World largely on the wings offered by Kalashnikovs. The Marxist regime of Mozambique even described an AK-47 in their flag. Today, radical Islamism is similarly able to increase its influence in conflict areas, where moderate resistance groups and freedom fighters are not able to get weapons for their struggle as efficiently as the radical internationalists. By the weapons, also the seeds of ideologies spreading more destruction are being sowed.