Yugoslavia is the hub for East European arms smugglers and military experts who have been supplying Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with crucial equipment and know-how to help him frustrate a United States air campaign against Iraq.
Senior Western officials and regional analysts say that Serbia is the centre of the illicit trade that involves at least seven countries in the Balkans and former Soviet Eastern Europe. The trade has been going on for some time, and has even increased since the toppling of Slobodan Milosevic, a Saddam ally, in 2000.
An investigation by the International Crisis Group (ICG) think-tank into the arms-for-Iraq scam concludes that Jugoimport, the Belgrade-based Yugoslav state arms export agency accused by the US last month, also brokered arms to Iraq from Bosnia, Ukraine, Russia and ”possibly Macedonia and Belarus”.
Despite claims by senior Yugoslav officials, including President Vojislav Kostunica, that they knew nothing of the trade, documents seen by The Guardian show that the Kostunica administration was warned in January by its Foreign Ministry of the damage being done by its trading with Iraq. The Kostunica Cabinet voted to continue with the clandestine deals.
”According to diplomatic sources, the pace of arms sales to Iraq may have increased during 2002,” concludes the ICG report.
A senior Western official told The Guardian: ”Just about every defence company in [Yugoslavia] sold to Iraq via Syria or via a third country.” The Ukrainian President, Leonid Kuchma, faces becoming an international pariah for allegedly approving the sale two years ago of a sophisticated $100-million air defence system, a claim he vigorously denies.
Bulgaria admitted last week that the Terem plant in Turgovishte had been sending armoured vehicles and spare parts to Iraq via Syria, while Belarus, under anti-Western authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko, has been supplying Baghdad with missile expertise and machinery which can be adapted for military use.
Last month, acting on a tip-off from US intelligence, the Croatian authorities seized 14 steel containers from the freighter Boka Star. Inside the barrels and crates labelled ”active carbon” and ”filter inserts for water purification” were some 208 tonnes of nitrocellulose propellant and nitroglycerine, compounds that could be used for Iraq’s dwindling arsenal of Scud missiles.
”This material has a wide range of uses in military industry, primarily as fuel for artillery and rockets,” says Dean Sakic, a Croatian investigator with the Boka Star case.
The rocket fuel cargo originated from the Prva Iskra munitions plant outside Belgrade, claim investigators, and was bound for Iraq via Syria from the Montenegrin port of Bar.
While several East European countries are or have been engaged in arms trading with Iraq, it is Yugoslavia that has become the focus of Western anger for two reasons: Belgrade’s experience of and expertise in dealing with a US air campaign during the 1999 Kosovo War is of particular interest to Iraq, while its development of sophisticated smuggling networks to beat United Nations sanctions during the 1990s provides the infrastructure for getting the goods to Baghdad.
A team of US investigators arrived in Yugoslavia last week to inspect suspect defence plants. At the weekend, they scoured the Sloboda munitions plant in Cacak, southern Serbia, a town which, according to the ICG, has been offering a ”cash-and-carry” service for Iraqi arms buyers.
Under Western pressure, Belgrade has shut the Baghdad office of Jugoimport, the pivot of the Balkan arms trade and dubbed a ”state-within-a-state” in Yugoslavia. But key figures remain in place, including Borisa Vukovic, a former Yugoslav foreign trade minister who fled to Baghdad in October 2000 when Milosevic was ousted. He is seen as the middleman and is said to be a close friend of Saddam’s son Uday.
The ICG investigation also claims that allies of Kostunica visited Baghdad last year for a conference devoted to attacking US policy in the Balkans and the Middle East.
”The conference resolution unanimously condemned ‘American imperialism and hegemony’, and everything the US was doing in Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, and had done in Yugoslavia,” the ICG report says.
Two months after the conference, the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry wrote to the Kostunica Cabinet demanding that the illicit trade be halted.
The document, obtained by the ICG, said Yugoslavia had $600-million worth of military contracts with states embargoed by the UN, including around $120-million worth of business with Iraq and $100-million with Libya.
US diplomats in the Balkans say a string of defence plants in Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro have supplied Baghdad with, among other weapons, armour-piercing missiles, rockets, anti-tank ammunition, tank engines, various explosives, chemical stabilisers and grenade launchers, as well as missile fuel, MiG aircraft engines, spare parts and expert advice.
”This shows the urgency of Yugoslavia taking steps to stop exports of any kind of arms or technology that could be used in any way for terrorist activities, or that could be used by these countries to manufacture weapons of mass destruction,” the letter warned.
The Yugoslav Cabinet discussed the matter in January but voted to continue trading, the ICG reports.
The Yugoslav Interior Minister, Zoran Zivkovic, said the arms trade was not the government’s responsibility. In the past year, Yugoslavia had sold about $40-million worth of arms to countries under international embargoes, he said, adding: ”Anyone familiar with weapons can see that this is no great amount.”
If the arms conduits to Baghdad are operating frequently with the blessing of Balkan and East European governments, Western officials say that the problem is much greater than Zivkovic suggests. — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002