How improved UN monitoring led to the capture of arms traffickers such as Viktor Bout.
This week the notorious suspected arms dealer Viktor Bout was extradited to the United States from Thailand, where he has been in prison since he was caught by Thai police after running into a trap of the American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 2008. Russia has denounced the extradition, saying that the move is politically motivated and that Bout is a legitimate transporter and businessman. In anyway, the Bout case sends a signal that the improved effectiveness of UN sanctions monitoring over the past ten years led to tangible results.
Bout, also known as the ´Merchant of Death´, is probably the most notorious and (until 2008 most successful) arms dealer in the world, having delivered all types of arms, but also several legal commercial goods to almost any place in the world. In the 1990´s he shipped anything from frozen chicken to Belgian peacekeeping forces or aid supplies. Later in the decade, however, UN sanctions committees suspected him of delivering arms in some of the bloodiest conflicts in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.
The Glory Years
Viktor Anatolyevic Bout, born in Tajikistan in 1967 served as a military translator in the Soviet army until the end of the Cold War, after which he decided to start his own aviation business. He purchased 4 Antonov-8 cargo aircraft and ventured into Africa. Bout was known as an ambitious international entrepreneur, speaking several languages and with connections worldwide. According to some accounts, Bout speaks Fluent English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, and several African languages. In the mid-1990s his fleet consisted of about 50 planes and his empire existed of several aviation and logistics companies.
Having served in Angola as part of a Soviet peacekeeping operation in 1987, Bout started doing business in Africa right after the fall of the Soviet Union, at the age of 24. In the 1990´s, Bout was seen as a legitimate contractor, providing services to the US in Iraq and to the United Nations in Sudan. In 1993 he flew Belgian peacekeepers to Somalia as part of a UN mission. In 1994 he did a similar thing by flying French troops into Rwanda to try to stop the genocide. Furthermore, as Douglas Farah mentions in his book about the ´Merchant of Death´, Bout also supplied disaster relief to the victims of the 2004 tsunami that hit large parts of South-East Asia and India.
Sanctions Busting
In 1999, with United Nations arms embargos being monitored more strictly for the first time by expert panels, Bout started getting mentioned in reports from UN sanctions committees as a sanctions buster. His name was first mentioned in the Fowler Report, that investigated sanctions imposed on the UNITA rebel movement in Angola. His Air-Cess aviation company was found to have managed various shipments of arms from Bulgaria to Togo on forged Togolese end-user certificates. Several weapons were later found in Angola´s occupied UNITA regions. Similarly, various arms shipments were delivered to Zaire on falsified end-user certificates.
During the civil war in Liberia between 1997 and 2003, Bout was also suspected to have supplied weapons to Charles Taylor´s LRA forces on various occasions. Shipments did not include only AK-47 rifles, but also attack-capable helicopters, armored vehicles, and missiles. According to UN reports from 2001, Bout´s airline and transport companies were registered in countries such as Uganda, Pakistan, Ivory Coast, Moldova and the United States.
Other clients of Viktor Bout are reported to have been Zaire´s Mobutu Sese Seko, the Taliban regime of Afghanistan, and the FARC rebel movement in Colombia. Weapons would mostly come from former Soviet countries and would be delivered to government forces as well as to their opponents, as is illustrated in a Hollywood movie based on his character named ´Lord of War´, starred by Nicholas Cage.
Although individual sanctions and asset freezes were imposed on Bout in 2001 and a red notice was issued by Interpol in 2002, he was only arrested in 2008 in Bangkok. Negotiating with undercover DEA agents, which Bout thought to be Colombian FARC rebels, Bout offered to supply weapons and was arrested by the Thai Police.
Political Interests
Since his capture, the US and Russia have quarreled about the possible extradition to New York. At first, on 11 August 2009, the Bangkok Criminal Court decided that Bout would not be extradited to the United States. The United States appealed and forced a higher Thai court to consider the case again. Allegedly under pressure from the US, the court ruled on 20 August 2010 that Bout could be extradited, which finally happened on the 16th of November of this year. In New York, Bout will be trailed for weapons trafficking, terrorism and the killing of US civilians. Until this moment, Bout has not been proven guilty for any of these allegations. Bout has always denied the accusations of him being an arms dealer, and presents himself as a successful air-cargo transporter who has been the victim of false accusations from a corrupt United Nations contractor who turned against him when Bout refused to continue to pay him. If he is proven guilty by the New York court, he could spend the rest of his live in jail.
Russia, who had already warned that an extradition to the United States would have consequences on the diplomatic relationship between the countries, has reacted angrily on the matter. Russia had already tried to press the Thai court into extraditing Bout to Moscow to trail him there. This would have taken away Russian fears that Bout trail might uncover links between Bout´s network and Russia´s intelligence operations. According to the Russians, Bout´s extradition to the US is illegal as Bout is a Russian national and has not committed any crimes on US soil.
Whether Viktor Bout will be convicted or not, the case is an important one that sends a strong message to other arms dealers and sanctions busters. In 2006, Dutch National Gus van Kouwenhoven, another important arms dealer that delivered arms to Charles Taylor in Liberia and the RUF rebel movement of Sierra Leone was sentenced to 8 years in jail. Other arms traffickers, arms producing countries, and banks holding accounts of sanctions busters will certainly have become more careful as a result of the public naming and shaming of those who don´t assume their responsibility in undermining their movements. The lists of sanctions busters that are kept by the United Nations expert panels are thus more than just a little black book. The active monitoring of arms embargos and international cooperation between governments, banks, and institutions such as Interpol do eventually get bad guys behind bars.
For some more details on the extradition of Bout and the stance of Russia, check out this article posted today by the New York Times.
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