A complex web of private firms, arms brokers and freight firms, was
behind the transfer of the guns, as well as millions of rounds of
ammunition, to Iraq at "bargain basement prices", according to Hugh
Griffiths, Amnesty's investigator.
The Moldovan air firm which flew the cargo out of a US air base at
Tuzla, north-east Bosnia, was flying without a licence.
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.
Some of the firms used in the Pentagon sponsored deals were also
engaged in illegal arms shipments from Serbia and Bosnia to Liberia
and to Saddam Hussein four years ago.
"The sale, purchase, transportation and storage of the [Bosnian]
weapons has been handled entirely by a complex network of private arms
brokers, freight forwarders and air cargo companies operating at times
illegally and subject to little or no governmental regulation," says
the report.
The 120-page Amnesty report, focusing on the risks from the
privatisation of state-sponsored arms sales worldwide, says arms
traffickers have adapted swiftly to globalisation, their prowess aided
by governments and defence establishments farming out contracts.
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 tonnes 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 EU,
the firm had just been stripped of its operating licence by the
Moldovan government because of "safety and security concerns".
Amnesty said there was no available record of the guns reaching their
destination.
Mr Griffiths contacted the coalition authorities in Baghdad, who
denied all knowledge of any weapons purchases from Bosnia.
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 Amnesty report says the command force in Iraq, the coalition group
training Iraqi security forces, and the overseeing US general, had
claimed "not to have ... received any weapons from Bosnia," the report
says.
Mr Wilkinson said:
"What are the control mechanisms? How is it all verified?"
The fate of the arms cargo appears to have been buried in the miasma
of contracting and subcontracting that have characterised the deals.
The Pentagon commissioned the US security firms Taos and CACI - which
is known for its 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 [Pentagon] and its principal US contractor, Taos, appear to have
no effective systems to ensure that their contractors and
subcontractors do not use firms that violate UN embargos and also do
not use air cargo firms for arms deliveries that have no valid air
operating certificates," Amnesty said.
From The Guardian, 5/12/06:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1773002,00.html
US in secret gun deal
Small arms shipped from Bosnia to Iraq 'go missing' as Pentagon uses
dealers
Ian Traynor in Zagreb
Friday May 12, 2006
The Guardian
The Pentagon has secretly shipped tens of thousands of small arms from
Bosnia to Iraq in the past two years, using a web of private
companies, at least one of which is a noted arms smuggler blacklisted
by Washington and the UN.
According to a report by Amnesty International, which investigated the
sales, the US government arranged for the delivery of at least 200,000
Kalashnikov machine guns from Bosnia to Iraq in 2004-05.
But though the weaponry was said to be for arming the fledgling Iraqi
military, there is no evidence of the guns reaching their recipient.
Senior western officials in the Balkans fear that some of the guns may
have fallen into the wrong hands.
A Nato official described the trade as the largest arms shipments from
Bosnia since the second world war.
The official told Amnesty:
"Nato has no way of monitoring the shipments once they leave Bosnia.
There is no tracking mechanism to ensure they do not fall into the
wrong hands. There are concerns that some of the weapons may have been
siphoned off."
European administrators in Bosnia, as well as NGOs working 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 programme
has undermined the disarmament project.
"It's difficult to persuade people to destroy weapons when they're all
holding back and waiting for Uncle Sam to arrive with a fistful of
dollars," said Adrian Wilkinson, a former British officer overseeing a
UN disarmament programme in former Yugoslavia.
The international administration running Bosnia 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.
The British government is funding a programme to destroy 250,000 small
arms, a legacy of the Bosnian war, but the project is faltering
because people are reluctant to surrender weapons that might mean
money.
Nato and European officials confirm 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.
"There are Swiss, US and UK companies involved. The deal was organised
through the embassies [in Bosnia] and the military attaché offices
were involved. The idea was to get the weapons out of Bosnia where
they pose a threat and to Iraq where they are needed," the Nato
official said.
Mr Wilkinson said: "The problem is we haven't seen the end user."
____________________________________________________________
The "end user" may be using these weapons against our troops at this
very moment. These guys don't care who they sell weapons to. Lots o'
blood money is the name of the game.
Harry
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