Gunrunner

Published in Guardian Unlimited Reports
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/armstrade/story/0,10674,519661,00.html)
(July 09, 2001)

The world is awash with guns – at least 550 million of them. An endless cheap supply of small arms has spawned an epidemic of killing. In a three-part series, Guardian writers hunt down the dealers, talk to the victims and ask what can be done to stop the trade. Today: The gunrunner

Ian Traynor in Odessa
Monday July 9, 2001
The Guardian

Leonid Minin was celebrating in room 341 of the Hotel Europa he owned in Cinisello Balsamo outside Milan. There was plenty to toast that balmy Saturday night last August. There was the fact that there were four prostitutes and 20 grammes of cocaine to get the party off with a bang. And there was the fact that the millionaire gunrunner had just delivered 113 tonnes of small arms to west Africa from his native Ukraine.
At 3am, as the party was in full swing, an Italian vice squad patrol chanced to stumble onto it. “The arrest was absolutely a piece of luck,” a source in the Italian judiciary said. Italian special branch officers were called in, which is when they got even luckier.

Among Minin’s belongings they found, apart from the cocaine, $150,000 in cash and half a million dollars worth of African diamonds. There was also a cache of 1,500 documents detailing Minin’s dealings in oil, timber, gems and – most telling of all – guns.

The trade in East European small arms of which Minin was a central part has become the scourge of sub-Saharan Africa. It entrenches unscrupulous regimes in power, arms the legions of child soldiers now estimated at 120,000 and fuels the insurrections and civil wars that are laying large tracts of the continent waste. Africa-watchers saying it could rank alongside the Aids epidemic or debt as one of the most debilitating factors hampering Africa’s development.

The first concerted attempt to get to grips with this pernicious trade opens today in New York where experts, police officers, analysts and diplomats gather for a two-week conference called by the United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan. The event is aimed at reducing the carnage caused by the worldwide stockpile of 550m small arms. The ambition to tighten regulations on the trade is strongly backed by the European Union. And yet it looks doomed to failure, thwarted by a US-led opposition.

If the UN conference fails to make headway, more Leonid Minins are likely to take advantage. He is one of a new breed of east European racketeers, some of whom are well-connected KGB veterans, who thrive on keeping Africans killing one another.

They buy up the large surplus armouries generated by the post-Soviet meltdown and profit handsomely by ferrying the weaponry into the war zones of some of the most vulnerable societies on earth. Minin and his ilk are the middlemen operating between the corrupt arms industries of the old eastern bloc and the warlords of Sierra Leone, Eritrea, Liberia, Angola – the list goes on.

The Soviet-designed AK-47 machine gun or Kalashnikov is the weapon of choice for the legions of killers of sub-Saharan Africa. The portable rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG, is also popular.

It is these small arms, rather than the hi-tech wizardry of Hollywood action movies, that are the real scourge. Across the former Soviet bloc where the disciplines and the controls of the cold war have given way to a corrupt free-for-all, the small arms market is a buyer’s one.

A couple of weeks before he was arrested, according to Italian magistrates, Minin chartered an Antonov-124 transport aircraft in Moscow, had it flown to Kiev in Ukraine where it was loaded with 113 tons of Kalashnikovs, RPGs, and ammunition, and then directed it to Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast in west Africa.

Middlemen

Minin was the middleman, the Italians say, organising the contract with General Robert Guei, the Ivorian dictator who was overthrown last October. The weapons were supplied and transported by a Moscow-based air cargo firm called Aviatrend, run by a former Soviet test pilot called Valery Cherny, a longtime associate of Minin.

Documents seen by the Guardian show Aviatrend promising to supply 5m rounds of ammunition. A certificate of purchase to Cherny bearing the signature of Gen Guei ordered the 5m rounds, as well as 10,500 AK-47s, 330 grenade launchers, sniper rifles, night vision equipment, and assorted munitions.

Sixteen months earlier, another Antonov aircraft left Ukraine with 68 tons of small arms and ammunition for Burkina Faso, staging post for supplying Charles Taylor’s regime in Liberia and the Revolutionary United Front rebels in Sierra Leone.

The Ukrainian government, which licensed the shipment, protested that the end user certificates for the arms were for Burkina Faso (whose military does not use ex-Warsaw Pact weaponry) and that the arms deal was legal. Yet Minin’s private jet was used to fly the cargo from Ouagadougou to Monrovia in Liberia for on-shipment by lorry to the RUF in Sierra Leone in contravention of a UN arms embargo. A central question for the prosecution is whether Minin knew the plane was being used for this illegal purpose.

Last year Minin was handed down a two-year sentence for drugs possession. Two weeks ago he was charged with illegal gunrunning. He denies the accusation.

The Minin saga begins in his native Odessa. He emigrated to Israel in the 70s as part of a large local exodus but when he went into business in the slipstream of the Soviet Union’s collapse, making his first millions from trading oil out of Russia, he used his Odessa contacts.

Minin was an associate of Alexander Angert, nicknamed The Angel, a notoriously violent Odessa godfather who now lives in London. Angert helped run the port’s lucrative oil business and extortion rackets and served 12 years of a 15-year term for murder. “Angert was in control. The politicians depended on him,” the city police chief, Vladimir Zhurakovsky, says.

By 1993, Minin was based in Italy before establishing a timber business registered in Zug in Switzerland and opening offices in Monrovia and Tel Aviv. By 1998 he was immersed in the guns and gems trade.

Ukraine is not the sole, perhaps not even the main culprit in the provision of guns to areas under UN arms embargoes such as Yugoslavia, Liberia, Sierra Leone or Eritrea. Russia, Belarus and Bulgaria are all quoted by international analysts as at least equally culpable.

In early May an Ilyushin-76 cargo aircraft was intercepted as it sat on the runway at the Black Sea port of Burgas with a load of Kalashnikovs, ammunition, cannon, and uniforms worth $250,000. The machine guns were Czech-made, the air company was Ukrainian, the port was Bulgarian. The weapons were destined for Eritrea, though the bill of lading stipulated Georgia as the buyer.

But if Ukraine is not unique, the saga of its arms industry since independence reveals how the supply side of the small arms trade is generated. In the Soviet era Ukraine was a Red Army bulwark, with the military numbering 800,000, almost triple the size of the current army. Ukraine had a third of the USSR’s defence industries which contributed as much as 45% of the republic’s gross national product. It was producing enough hardware to equip five war fronts, according to Oleg Belosludtsev, a Moscow analyst of the post-Soviet military. As Ukraine plunged into its ongoing economic crisis, defence spending covered only about 17% of costs and the freelance arms merchants took over in cahoots with army officers, plundering the vast surplus stocks and selling wherever clients could be found. The government denies persistent reports of weaponry also going to Colonel Gadafy’s Libya and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

“The arms and military goods sold off as a result of the cuts did not go through official structures only, but through the shadow economy which controlled a significant part of Ukrainian arms supplies abroad,” Mr Belosudtsev noted. He calculates that 80% of arms export deals were in the hands of these “shadow structures”.

By the late 90s chaos reigned in Ukraine’s arms industry, a confusion that critics say was deliberately fomented by the profiteers. The government came under western pressure to clean up the sector and control the arms traders.

In response, the now discredited but still powerful regime of President Leonid Kuchma ordered a parliamentary commission to investigate allegations of illicit arms trading. It reached the sensational conclusion that Ukraine’s military stocks were worth $89bn in 1992 and that in the course of the following six years $32bn worth of arms, equipment, and military property were stolen, much of it resold.

What happened next will provide a cautionary tale for anyone at this week’s UN conference planning to tackle the world’s illicit small arms dealers: the investigation was suddenly closed down, 17 volumes of its work vanished, and its members were cowed into silence.

The inquiry into “possible cases of unsanctioned arms trading” was headed by an MP and former deputy defence minister, Lieutenant-General Oleksandr Ignatenko. He was hauled before a court martial and stripped of his rank. He now fears for the lives of his three children.

Oleksandr Malevsky, a communist MP who was secretary to the commission, is one of the few involved willing to talk publicly: “We prepared the report for parliament. Ignatenko was under great pressure and very frightened.”

Frustrated by the high-level blocking of his work, Gen Ignatenko leaked some of his findings to Serhy Odarych, then the publisher of a small-circulation Kiev newsletter. At midnight one Saturday night in July 1998, Mr Odarych was accosted by two men at the entrance to his block of flats. “Stop getting mixed up in politics,” he was told. “If you don’t stop interfering, we’ll eliminate you.”

To underline the point, one of the men shot him in the leg.

“Of course, no one was ever found,” Mr Odarych said. “The police said I shot myself to grab attention.”

Significantly, the Ignatenko commission in Kiev was the sole attempt through the 1990s to investigate the arms trade out of Ukraine. Its outcome speaks volumes about the challenges facing the UN and other international agencies wanting to confront the arms to Africa flow.

The current consensus is that the Kiev government has tightened controls over the small arms trade in recent months. But there remains ample scope for the middlemen and traders.

Minin apparently enjoys a close relationship with the Liberian leader, Charles Taylor, whose vicious regime is believed to control the trade in “conflict diamonds” and supply the RUF in Sierra Leone. Investigators are trying to establish whether the gems found in Minin’s room were part of his pay-off for the guns.

His chance arrest and the discovered paper trail may be a boon to the agencies and activists working to curb the flow of weapons. But the lack of regulation, porous borders, poor infrastructure and toothlessness of UN arms embargoes all work against attempts to clamp down on the supply of small arms to Africa.

Minin now sits in jail in the Milan suburb of Monza and he is also wanted for questioning in Belgium, Switzerland and Paris. It will be December at the earliest before he goes on trial. Others are no doubt already lining up to take his place as profiteers in this deadly trade.