Peter Landesman has a lengthy and fascinating article in Sunday's New York Times Magazine about the international arms trafficking industry and its current godfather, Russian Victor Bout. This is the stuff of thrillers, but real and scarier. Reads like good journalism.
Most people think that controlling arms shipments is merely a matter of international diplomacy. That may have been true during the cold war, when traffickers were often subcontractors of the superpowers, feeding the proxy conflicts Washington and Moscow wanted fought. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the exclusive club of arms brokers metastasized. Some brokers still work at the behest of governments and intelligence agencies. But most are now entrepreneurial freelancers who sell weapons without regard for ideology, allegiance or consequence. They have only one goal in mind: profit.''Victor Bout is a creature of the Yeltsin era, of disorganized crime, who adapted to live in the era of Putin and more organized crime,'' according to Jonathan M. Winer, deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration.
In the wake of the cold war, to adapt meant to exploit the chaos. The Soviet Army's massive arsenal ended up in the hands of former Soviet republics. Desperate for hard currency, they sold off weapons the same way they sold off other resources and products they inherited from the defunct Soviet empire. ''Who owned what and who ran the fire sale was a free-for-all,'' Winer said.
Of all the republics outside of Russia, Ukraine got the most -- and most lethal -- weapons, enough conventional firepower, by many accounts, to sustain a million troops. The Ukrainian government made a public show of transferring its vast nuclear arsenal back to Russia. But between 1992 and 1998, it has been reported, $32 billion of large- and small-scale Ukrainian weaponry and ammunition, as well as other military property, simply disappeared.
''The Ukrainian military was turned into a tool for revenue by a generation of politicians who took advantage of the factories and used them to manufacture and ship weapons for money to anyone who wanted them,'' Winer said.
Representatives from Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Yemen, the Taliban and Pakistan came calling. So, perhaps, did North Korea, by way of Pakistan, and Al Qaeda, through the Taliban.
via The New York Times Magazine
Posted by Alan at August 16, 2003 12:50 PM