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| Look Whoâs Selling Arms To Saddam |
| 2003-03-31 |
| Edited for length... A steady sale of illegal arms from Yugoslavia to Iraq ought to be something we stopped worrying about with the downfall of Dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Evidence of illegal arms sales came to light last October when NATO-led peacekeeping troops raided the Orao aviation factory in the Serb-controlled area of Bosnia. Among the documents they found was a contract for $8.5 million to repair and upgrade the engines of Saddam's MIG fighter planes. They also found a copy of a letter sent last September to the Ministry of Defense in Baghdad outlining precautions to avoid detection by UN weapons inspectors. That letter was sent to the Iraqis by Yugoimport, the Yugoslav arms export agency, and signed by the director of Yugoimport in Baghdad. Just how much the Iraqis relied on the Yugoslavs for arms is laid out in a report by the International Crisis Group, an independent organization that seeks to pinpoint potential trouble spots around the world. We spoke to the author of the report, Dr. James Lyon. âWhat we later found out was that it was not just jet engines,â Dr. Lyon said. âThere were a whole series of other weapons that appeared to have gone, including artillery shells, including technology that could enable Saddam to enhance his Scud missiles, including anti-aircraft technology, including a whole series of other military technologies and equipment. So it wasn't simply jet engines in question. It could have been a whole laundry list of equipment... Some estimates have put it as high as perhaps $3 billion, others $1.5 billion, no one knows for certain.â Yugoimport, which is a state-owned company, saw hardly any of that money. Zoran Kusovacs, the Balkan defense analyst for âJane's Defense Weekly,â says most of it went into the pockets of private individuals. âThey have been operating like private arms dealers, at the same time when and where convenient, using allegedly the umbrella of the state,â Zusovacs explains. âThis does not say that the officials did not know about these deals. Arms deals at this scale lasting this long cannot go unnoticed.â Lord Paddy Ashdown, who is a UN representative in the Balkans, âI think [the Yugoslav arms trade is] more widespread than we have yet currently uncovered. When you look at this, you need to think of the old, as it were, ghostly network leftover of the JNA, the Yugoslav National Army's generals who controlled the military industrial complex, who existed in the days of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and who went on controlling it afterwards.â Those Yugoslav army generals long had close ties with Iraq. In the 1980s, they developed a joint weapons program that produced a multiple rocket launcher that can fire chemical warheads. âThe information we have come across indicates that the arms sales may have actually increased after Milosevic left power,â says Dr. Lyon, of the International Crisis Group. As President Bush began to beat the war drums, the Iraqis began to rely extensively on the Yugoslavs because of their decades-long cooperation, and because the Yugoslavs were the only other country that they dealt with that had been bombed by the Americans. Zoran Kusovacs says that during those air strikes the Yugoslavs, using sophisticated computer systems, acquired an in-depth knowledge of American aerial tactics. The Yugoslavs managed to upgrade their anti-aircraft missiles with a television guidance system that allowed them to shoot down an American stealth bomber and to keep NATO aircraft above 15,000 feet. That system has allegedly been passed on to Iraq. It wasn't just firepower but brainpower that the Yugoslavs exported to Iraq. Professors from the Technical University in Belgrade made frequent trips to Baghdad to help the Iraqis make a harmless looking aircraft, a Czech-made jet trainer, [that] can be armed with tanks of chemical or biological weapons and equipped with remote control technology. Military experts say that it can be turned into what they call a âpoor man's cruise missile,â able to launch attacks on Iraq's neighbors. But when news of the illegal arms deals broke, the democratic government which relies on American aid was quick to deny all knowledge. We asked Miroljub Labus, the Deputy Prime Minister in charge of foreign trade, who he thinks was behind the illegal arms sales to Iraq. âSome private vested interest,â Labus replies. âSome people in the last ten years, mostly from the military, retired gentlemen or generals, and they had very good relationships with Ministry of Defense, so they've been very active in selling those weapons.â Deputy Prime Minister Labus says that the government immediately dismissed a Ministry of Defense official and a retired general who was head of Yugoimport. But what about the government ministers, including the Minister of Defense and the Minister of Interior, who sat on the board of Yugoimport? How is it that they wouldn't know what's going on? âWell, they claim that they didn't know everything what happened, you have to talk to them,â the Deputy Prime Minister says. The fact is, those ministers did know. In January 2002, the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry presented a document at a cabinet meeting detailing those illegal sales, and warning that such a breach of UN sanctions would damage the government's attempts to win Western approval. Labus attended that meeting, and he says âmy impression was that we passed a decision to cancel any trade. But it turned out that some ministers didn't share that view.â So whatever they decided to do at this cabinet meeting, in fact nothing was done. Why? Dr. James Lyon thinks âthere were people in that new democratic government who were directly profiting from those arms sales. One of those people, it is alleged, was Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, who, ten days ago was gunned down in Belgrade by unknown assailants. After his death, Djindjic was praised in the West as a liberal reformer. But he was also thought to be involved in illegal arms deals as well as other criminal activities. |
| Posted by:ISHMAIL |
| #5 Did you see the quote at the bottom of the original article: -------- The U.S. must take some of the blame for the way that the state and organized crime continue to march hand in hand in this country, as they did under Milosevic, says Zoran Kusovacs. âThe United States bears a lot of the responsibility because, along with others in the West, it has let the changes go skin deep,â he explains. âMilosevic has been changed. The system has not been changed. And certain things that were done under Milosevic are still being done under the democratic government, and they're as unacceptable now as they were then.â ------ Good Lord. They crap on us when we do something about things like this in others' countries, then they crap on us when we don't do enough. |
| Posted by: eb 2003-03-31 18:10:11 |
| #4 Path, Just before GW1 kicked off, Jordan provided a lot of material to Saddam. It is likely that this is the origin of the captured materials. Considering their dependence on the Iraqi oil and Bush Sr.'s unwillingness to Saddam to his just resting place, it looks like the former King was unwilling to cut his country's economy for no compensation in return. As the last 12 years have played out, I can't fault him. Now if that stuff is younger than 3 or 4 years, it could become very interesting for some in Jordan. However, they are permitting us to do things through Jordan in a manner similar to Kuwait but without the high profile. |
| Posted by: Don 2003-03-31 12:15:56 |
| #3 Just saw on FoxNews clips of a humongous cache of artillery and tank shells, some still in boxes with stencilling directing them to the Jordanian Army. Ouch... |
| Posted by: Ptah 2003-03-31 10:58:54 |
| #2 "... Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, who, ten days ago was gunned down in Belgrade by unknown assailants...he was also thought to be involved in illegal arms deals as well as other criminal activities." And of course, it was mostly our fault... Chirac was accused of taking bribes when he was just a mayor (but not proseuted, seems that in France you can't prosecute while someone is still in office), should we go take him out? Well, OK, yes, but for more than that... |
| Posted by: John Anderson 2003-03-31 02:11:43 |
| #1 THE ABOVE NEWS ITEM APPEARS ON CBS, THE LINK IS AS FOLLOWING: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/30/60minutes/main546826.shtml |
| Posted by: ISHMAIL 2003-03-31 00:12:52 |