Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (37 page)

In many ways he did the boring stuff. Things like facilitating shipments and securing end-user certificates, documents that certify the
buyer is the final owner of the guns, not just someone just planning on giving them to a rebel group or a terrorist cell. It was no surprise to learn that Jason was a once a lawyer. In this world you need someone who has that focused patience in order to tell the difference between a DSP-83 form and a BIS-711. He claimed he has a 97.8 per cent success rate in DSP-5 export permit approvals. I had no idea what that meant.

But the things he sells are far from dull and orderly – and so he has to contend with the perpetual scrutiny that he gets from the State Department, from US Customs and Homeland Security, all of them sniffing around. And he has to deal with the public’s perception of his job.

‘When people hear what I do they get scared. “Have you seen
Lord of War
,” they ask? No, I haven’t. I’m not interested. I only sell to the good guys,’ he said.

He exports to over twenty-five countries. ‘There is a proscribed countries list,’ he said. ‘We can’t export to Syria, North Korea, Iran, the Ivory Coast. So I sell to places like Guatemala, so its citizens can buy guns with the hope it prevents a civil war in the future. This might sound counter-productive, but if only the government has guns, then how are you going to fight it?’

I asked him how he could be so sure the ‘good guys’ get the guns. After all, guns exported by Hurricane Butterfly could get siphoned off, fall into the hands of the wrong people. Surely this is what happens when a butterfly flaps its wings – it causes a hurricane on the other side of the world?

‘Diversion is a naughty word. Does it happen? Yes. If it happens, it is usually US government sanctioned. A lot of things go on that people aren’t aware of. The assumption is that weapons going to Syria are just for the bad guys. But if we’re going to talk about Syria what we’re talking about is Russia’s relationship with the West. And it’s not like the US government’s going to issue an export licence to the rebels in Syria. I know of colleagues that were asked to legally supply arms to the rebels with US government sanction and foreign government investment. The US government is always interested in how the US government can get weapons into foreign zones and they have to come to someone like me.’

‘Someone like me’ – the world of the middlemen summed up. The corporate, articulate, besuited quietude. The neat world that lay between the pounding of a producer’s weapon-making machines and the angry retort of those weapons used in anger. A world peopled by men who worked in clean, carpeted, well-lit offices, men with starched collars and cut fingernails who never raised their voices. As C. S. Lewis said, ‘Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.’

In the end Glock never got back in touch for that interview. It was a pity. I had questions to ask about what processes they went through when deciding what guns to sell and who to sell them to. I wanted to know more about how hellish bureaucratic police states got their weapons, and whether Glock could convince me that it was not a thoroughly nasty business concern.

I had my doubts.

On 1 September 2012 Corporal Dwayne Smart, a police officer in the Jamaican Police Force, killed Kayann Lamont. He was trying to arrest her for using ‘indecent language’ – a crime in Jamaica. She struggled, and eyewitnesses claimed that Smart shot her twice in the head. He then allegedly shot and injured her sister. Some were later to say he was in the middle of reloading his weapon to finish her off, when another officer intervened. It was to emerge that Kayann was eight months pregnant when she died. Corporal Dwayne Smart was charged with her murder.
²²

The thing that drew me to this ugly story was that Kayann was shot with a Glock service pistol, one most likely bought by that Caribbean state in 2010, possibly from a Glock subsidiary or agent.
²³
So what, you may say. Gun companies make guns that kill people – it’s self-evident. But Glock is a little different. The Austria-based company has become the leading sidearm of choice for police forces around the world, and the question that has to be asked is: does this company take into account who it really sells to?

The gun company has had resounding success in the US. Glock itself boasts that up to 65 per cent of America’s police departments put a Glock pistol ‘between them and a problem’.
²⁴
Given that almost 1,500 people were reported killed in police interactions in the US between 2013 and 2014, it’s pretty certain that some of those died at the end of a Glock.
²⁵
And not just in the US.

Glock pistols appear to have found their way, perhaps even without Glock’s knowledge, into a number of countries with major issues surrounding their human rights records – places like Iraq,
²⁶
Belarus,
²⁷
Azerbaijan
²⁸
and Israel.
²⁹
It raised for me a specific concern that I wanted to ask Glock about: how much they, or their subsidiaries, took into consideration a nation’s police human rights abuses before a contract was signed. Did they sell Glocks to the Jamaican police, for example, and – if so – did they know that force had been plagued by accusations of extrajudicial killings?

After all, Kayann Lamont was just one of 219 people killed in incidents involving the Jamaican security forces in 2012.
³⁰
And Jamaican human rights groups have repeatedly been vocal about the need for more accountability over the use of firearms by members of their police and army.
³¹

It is not just Jamaica’s controversial police force that I wanted to talk about either.
³²
In 2013, the Philippines National Police also reportedly bought nearly 60,000 Glock Generation 4 pistols.
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In fact, another 14,000 Glocks were sold a year later, again to the Philippines National Police.
³⁴
As I had seen, the police in the Philippines had a staggeringly poor human rights record.
³⁵
Indeed, the police there are so riven with corruption that when the new guns arrived, the Philippines National Police chief reminded his officers that if any of them went out to pawn their guns, they would be charged with a criminal offence.
³⁶
Were Glock entirely oblivious to these spectres of corruption and violence?

Perhaps. But that new Manila-bound consignment – predictably – was very quickly to make its visible, deadly mark. In August 2014, an off-duty policeman shot three men outside a bar in La Trinidad, Benguet, killing two of them. The gun used was the suspect’s Glock service pistol.
³⁷

Of course, it is not just Glock who are clear that they are in compliance with strict export controls. Other European gun companies have been caught in the spotlight for selling guns to police forces with questionable human rights records.

In 2014 the German arms maker Sig Sauer landed in hot water with the authorities when almost 65,000 of their pistols were sold to the Colombian police via the US. Colombia at the time was on the German government’s prohibited list of export countries.
³⁸
In January 2014 the German police also seized documents from Sig Sauer that exposed the sale of seventy guns to Kazakhstan through questionable routes.
³⁹
It was ‘a total failure of controls’, said the German Newspaper
Süddeutsche Zeitung
. ‘Again and again, German weapons are found in conflict zones. And again and again the weapons manufacturers are totally surprised.’
⁴⁰

Another German gun manufacturer, Heckler & Koch, was also accused of supplying 9,500 G36 rifles to prohibited markets in Mexico between 2006 and 2009.
⁴¹
The German government had said H&K could sell arms to Mexico provided they did not end up in the states of Chihuahua, Jalisco, Chiapas and Guerrero. There was strong evidence that the police in these states had carried out ‘disappearances’ and extra-judicial executions.
⁴²
But the Mexican Defence Ministry said they were unaware of the conditions attached to the rifles and so delivered the guns to the prohibited areas.
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The interesting thing is that Glock, Sig Sauer and Heckler & Koch were all working within legal parameters. In the European Union, weapons exports should, according to the law, take into account the ‘respect for human rights in the country’ they are shipped to. The trouble is that ‘respect for human rights’ is not clearly defined. And the gun companies’ lawyers were adamant their clients adhered to the law.

But, as the Shot Show proved, getting direct answers to direct questions was hard. Harder than meeting an El Salvadoran assassin, harder than getting shot at. The situation is that, in general, detailed arms sales data is kept from the public eye, a lack of transparency that might even be bolstered by gun companies’ often-close relationships
with armies and police forces.
⁴⁴
It means the effective scrutiny of arms transfers is sometimes impossible. We often know an arms sale has happened only after someone is killed by a gun from that trade.

In the European Union, where most of these gun companies are based, this lack of transparency is pervasive. Member states are obliged to submit data to the EU on arms transfers. Yet the quality and quantity of this data is far from perfect. In some years, France, Germany and the UK fail to make full submissions.
⁴⁵
And Austria, home of Glock, has no published data on the UN arms register for six years in the last nine. Outside the EU it’s as bad. US government information involving the export of 59,904 pistols from the American subsidiary of Glock to the Philippines was not released because the publication ‘could cause competitive harm to the United States firm concerned’.
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If I could not get gun companies to respond to me, I figured I would just have to go to them. So the frustrating combination of silence and the opaque transference of arms led me to arrange a press pass to another type of gun show that intrigued me – the military arms fair.

‘Welcome to Hell’ said a flyer on the exhibition magazine. In the early June heat of a French summer, it seemed apt. There is something about the endless grey carpets and high spotlighting of convention centres that saps your time and then your soul. Row upon row of people hunched in their cubicles, staring at their laptops or at you – each partitioned by thin stall walls and each displaying an even thinner animosity for their competition. This was Eurosatory – the largest defence and security event in the world, with over fifty countries and 1,430 exhibitors selling the most advanced weapons systems man has dreamed up.

On the way to the convention, far out by Charles de Gaulle airport, I had taken a regional train. All the other trains were on strike, as
this was France. The carriage was filled, and it struck me: Paris was not white. This car was rammed with Franco-Africans from Burkina Faso, Gabon, Guinea and beyond, many displaced by countless wars and conflicts. Some were self-consciously dressed in the dandy-jackets of the Congolese La Sap. Others were in colourful
pagnes
, eating cornmeal and banana fritters. Shoved in between them all were the white arms-sellers, clutching their briefcases to their chests.

By the time, though, that I reached the convention centre, a cathedral of chrome and glass and steel, the only black faces I could see were wearing the military uniforms of their African countries. None of them were selling arms. The white faces were doing that.

Perhaps I had expected an arms trade conference to have something that distinguished it: some tension, some geo-political animosity. But here the very reason that this exhibition existed – so that governments could rigorously attack or defend their sovereign interests – was hidden. The conference was broken up into national pavilions, and flags and banners stood high over the grey partitions; it felt more like the UN than a prelude to war. The vicious sting of international realities had been excised from this cavernous hall. The Israeli stand did not have angry Palestinians throwing rocks at it. The Russians and the Ukrainians were kept at a sensible distance. The Taiwanese were notable for their absence, the Chinese there in silent force. The Iranians and the North Koreans and the Sudanese were not there at all.