Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (40 page)

In the first half of the nineteenth century that elegant seaport grew in wealth and opulence, buoyed by the profits of a vibrant free trade zone set up by the Russian tsar. They were to call it the Porto Franco, and soon Odessa became a global centre, perhaps
the
global centre, for the trade in illicit gods. Porcelain came from China, flowered perfume from France, heady wine from Greece and, of course, muskets and rifles were there aplenty, because where contraband of illegal pleasures are found, so will there be guns – either as a weapon to defend the profits of the haul or just part of the haul itself.

Riches followed. Odessa’s citizens had travelled there from Austria and France, Italy and Spain to create a better life for themselves. And if smuggling was the way to do that, well then, that’s what they would do. They did it well. When the tsar considered withdrawing his financing of the Black Sea state, they sent 3,000 of Greece’s finest oranges to Moscow to change his mind.
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Each fruit was wrapped in a parchment inscribed with a list of all the benefits of the port to him. This bribe in fruit worked. Odessa kept its privileged status and evolved into a city that blinded the Russian imagination with its light architectural beauty and its dark tales of illicit luxuries. So the virtues of bribery and smuggling were here, visibly reinforced in every new building and in every clandestine delight.

It was a hidden character of this city that was pointed out to me by Valentyna Doycheva, a bob-fringed and elfin twenty-eight-year-old history graduate, who worked as one of the guides at Odessa’s Contraband Museum. Showing me around the museum’s modest exhibition floor, Valentyna described to me the catacombs of Odessa – the longest in the world – spreading like entrails deep beneath our feet. They once were used to store the city’s surge of contraband. The museum itself was confined to five small-chambered rooms in the basement of a townhouse. Lined with glass cabinets filled with smuggled items, like clocks stuffed with cocaine or honey jars filled with melted dope, it was a noble institution seeking liberal truth. When
criminal behaviour is so endemic, it takes courage to stand up and point out what was right and wrong. Even more so to dedicate a museum to it.

This is especially the case when you realise that today the culture of smuggling and organised crime still lies deep in the soul of this city. Since the fall of communism, Ukraine has emerged as the place to go for illicit goods, singled out as the epicentre of post-Soviet arms trafficking.
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It is a quasi-criminal city where the government’s involvement in smuggling is more than just looking the other way.

‘Today,’ she said, ‘we get guns coming in from Russia – illegally, of course. And these guns are brought in by different criminal groups. There are a lot of them in Ukraine nowadays. It’s a pity.’

Certainly the Ukrainian government has been culpable. In 1992 a commission concluded the nation’s military stocks were worth $89 billion.
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By 1998 $32 billion of it had been stolen and resold. As Andrew Feinstein wrote in his book
The Shadow World
, ‘So explosive were the [commission’s] findings that the investigation was suddenly closed down, seventeen volumes of its work vanished and its members were cowed into silence.’
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Behind this massive theft was a new breed of men – the so-called ‘Merchants of Death’.
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When the Cold War thawed, arms smugglers with names like Victor Bout and Leonid Minin swooped. Huge stocks of Ukrainian weaponry were bought up and sold to groups like the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone and FARC forces in Columbia.
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Men like Minin became major brokers of arms to Charles Taylor in Liberia, a country under an arms embargo. Minin did things like send 9 million rounds of ammunition and 13,500 AKM rifles to the capital Monrovia in two air-freight deliveries, listing them as headed for Burkino Faso.
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Today, though, things have changed. Experts have confided in me, in a way where even things that were not secret were phrased as being such, that the age of the Merchants of Death has ended. Instead, they said, new realities have created a different type of smuggler – often even more explicitly sanctioned by governments. One arms dealer said, ‘I don’t know if there could be another Viktor. He rose through the ranks at an opportune time. It was a sort of
serendipity – the right time, right place. Viktor was there when the governments fell – he had connections. There is no Soviet Union today with vast quantities of surplus. The situation isn’t right for that now.’

Today the global illicit trade in guns is just as prolific, but possibly more diverse. It happens at the point of production, where guns are stolen from the manufacturers, or – as in Pakistan – produced in extensive unregistered gun industries. It happens later – when guns are smuggled out of police and military arsenals, or seized when rival factions clash with each other.
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‘Sometimes the goods are lost on the way,’ said a Black Sea gun manufacturer I met. ‘One of the things you have to look for is when small arms are taken by sea vessels. If there is a direct flight, then if it goes via sea it makes no sense. That’s a tip-off something is going on.’

Then he told me a story. There was a time when a consignment of arms he had sold, in the belief the guns were headed to Jordan, ended up being earmarked for Libya. They would have been sent there, too, had the shipping company not inadvertently emailed his company a copy of the bill of lading. It claimed the container was filled with packets of soap powder, not 9mm pistols.

Of course, stemming such illegal flows of firearms is incredibly difficult. Unlike cluster munitions or landmines, guns have legitimate police, military and recreational uses. You can’t just ban their manufacture and sale. This means it’s even harder if a government is working in cahoots with the smugglers.

A few months before, I had met a man called Daniel Prins. He was chief of the UN’s Conventional Arms Branch and headed up a department that oversaw attempts to prevent the trade of illicit weapons, without infringing upon their legal use and trade. In 2006 the UN had reported that a quarter of the $4 billion annual global gun trade was illegal.
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He had his work cut out.

‘I’ll give you a hypothetical example,’ he had said as we sat in a New York diner a stone’s throw from the UN’s grey-glass building on 1st Avenue. ‘If you’re an arms broker with a passport that’s from Ukraine and you work from Cyprus, but your bank account is in the
Virgin Islands, and you broker a deal for arms that are made in the USA but are being shipped from Bosnia to Sudan . . . if you want to deal with this from a law enforcement perspective, where do you start? Whose regulations, whose laws do you need to follow? Is it the laws of Cyprus, where this person happens to be?’

He was a carefully spoken man, but frustration infused the little he did say to me, weighing his words down. ‘The Russians tell us that they don’t have a problem with arms brokers, because only one company is allowed to be an arms broker in Russia. But isn’t it true that there are half a dozen, if not more, brokers around the world who do their work? And the answer that we get is: well, yeah, but that’s not in Russia.’

Looking back, I wondered if he despaired in his New York office of all the traders in Ukraine who did Russia’s dirty business.

‘Globalisation means that with a cell phone and a computer it’s easy to work from anywhere and to do your shipments and organise illegal shipments in a whole different way than it used to be, let’s say, during the Cold War,’ Daniel said. ‘Nowadays, middlemen arms brokers don’t need to be where the arms are.’

That was why places like Odessa were so attractive to so many smugglers. There, they could avoid controls. It was a place where the government would look the other way, at least if you filled their pockets when they were doing so.
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In Odessa’s tree-lined streets, criminals had the best of it. The weather was temperate. Women renowned for their beauty stalked the city’s squares with lithe legs and feline eyes. There were nightclubs and restaurants to blow a bootlegger’s profits. And, across this gilded and decaying city, there was easy access to supply chains, front companies and dubious handling agents prepared to do fraudulent paperwork. You could casually commit evil here without ever seeing the impact you were having.

Odessa had shown me what happens when governments allow their ports and businesses to become a logical extension of vast criminal networks and the corruption of officials permits unofficial trafficking. But, I thought, despite all of this, at least Odessa had the semblance of order. I had seen places where order had totally
failed and where the smuggler had flourished: not because of the state, but because of the absence of one.

The only flight into Somalia from Kenya was an aid flight, and we were the only passengers. As we swung low over the flat spread of bush and shrubs that marked the Somali landscape, the emptiness and endless sand scudded beneath us. Just bush and the occasional dot of a herder with his cattle. Then our plane banked, and we headed sharply down to a line of sand and rocks traced far out on the outskirts of the ruptured capital of Mogadishu. It was the improvised international airport, without border guards or terminals, for the most lawless country on earth.

As we climbed down from the plane, six Somalis in battered pick-up trucks, each armed with machine-guns, met us. One leaned onto the ugly, heavy anti-aircraft weapon that had been bolted onto the top of his car. It was 39°C, but you felt the tension faster than you felt the heat.

I was part of a BBC team, fronted by the reporter Simon Reeve, making a series called
Holidays in the Danger Zone
. Given the number of guns here, the title was apt: weapons were in everyone’s hands. About two-thirds of Somali men had at least one, and some estimates put the total national number as high as 750,000.
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Open-air gun markets were also common here. And we had come to Somalia in part to visit the biggest of them – a place where over 400 arms dealers sold smuggled AK47s to anyone who could afford one. Our film was about how a state survives when its government and entire infrastructure have collapsed. Somalia, wrecked by years of civil war, was the perfect example of ungoverned chaos.

Given the rise of Islamic militants and unruly warlords here in this blighted country, we feared kidnapping or worse, so we had hired guards. They chewed on sticks of khat, a local natural quasi-amphetamine, and fixed us with steady, hepatic eyes. We clambered up beside the machine-gunners and, exposed and burning under the
unwavering sun, skidded through the dirt and dust to our fortified hotel. On the way they told us we were the only white people in the capital.

The streets quickly showed how the rule of law and those things we often take for granted – sewage removal and rubbish collection – had failed here. Foot-soldiers of the militia groups stood on crumbling street corners, young boys who had yet to buy razors but had long ago picked up semi-automatics. Everywhere you saw the violent marks of rivalries; I struggled to see what soul this city had worth fighting over.

There was no street electricity; abandoned houses stood in skeletal silence; potholes marked the roads. Outside our hotel was an upturned cow, distended in the heat. Someone had shot it a few days before, and the putrefaction touched your mouth.

The hotel had four guests. Me, Simon and our researcher – a feisty and huge-hearted Uzbek dissident and journalist, fluent in Russian and Arabic, called Shahida Tulaganova – and someone else: a Japanese government agent. I had sidled over to him and asked what he was here for. He told me he was a cartographer. I laughed and said nineteenth-century spies used to call themselves that. He never spoke to me again.

I was shown to my monk-like cell; cheap painted white walls and mildew marked the room. In it was a bed whose sheets had yet to dry. I lay upon the dampness and tried to ease that growing sense of panic that comes when you parachute into a place where, it feels, every other person wants to shoot you.

Later, towards dusk, we met in the hotel courtyard. High gates and walls rose on all sides, topped with shards of glass. There was a problem. Before we had set off from London, we had agreed a day rate of $50 for each of the guards, but the group wanted an extra $50 a day for their khat. At first I refused – I couldn’t see a BBC licence fee payer being happy with us paying for the drugs of armed militia – but then I was taken aside. It was made clear that not paying would have consequences: our armed guards would no longer guarantee our safety. The emphasis was on the armed, and the threat was unequivocal.

Somalia in 2004 was not a safe place to be. If you were white and not a Muslim, it was more dangerous still. Within two years, two journalists I knew had been shot and killed there. Kate Peyton, a BBC reporter, went there just after us. She was shot outside the hotel where we were staying. Martin Adler, a Swedish cameraman, was gunned down a few months later in a crowded rally outside the national stadium. It wasn’t the place to quibble over a few dollars.