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Iraq Buying Arms in East Europe's Black Markets


(Christian Science Monitor) Arie Farnam - Saddam Hussein appears to be rearming and preparing for aerial assault in earnest. Several illegal weapons transfers to Iraq have been uncovered in postcommunist Europe during the past few months. Previous deals have included sales of Russian-made Mi-8 and Mi-17 combat helicopters, Kalashnikov rifles, antitank grenades, and mobile anti-aircraft missile systems. Prague is now the favored base of operations for middlemen selling weapons to the Arab world. According to a former Russian officer involved in the weapons trade, "The Czechs have a good cover by being in NATO and they have all the right contacts from the old days." The end of the cold war left East Bloc countries with massive stockpiles of unused Soviet-era weapons and a hunger for quick cash. In recent years, billions of dollars' worth of weapons have passed out of Eastern Europe into Third World conflict zones. Western experts suspect that the weapons pass through Jordan and Syria to reach Iraq. Iraq appears to be paying for the weapons with unauthorized oil exports, which are reexported as Syrian oil. Syrian oil exports have unaccountably increased by 100,000-200,000 barrels per day in the past year. Earlier this year Ukrainian bodyguard Nikolai Melnichenko revealed recordings of the private conversations of Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma to a court in San Francisco. In the tapes, Kuchma approved the sale of three Kalchuga radar systems to Iraq through a Jordanian middleman for $100 million. The Kalchuga is a mobile, passive radar system which can overcome U.S. stealth technology and detect air and land targets up to 500 miles away. During the cold war, Czech arms companies supplied Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and North Korea with high-tech military equipment and explosives. Several recent arrests suggest that the black-market trade in Czech-made Semtex, a virtually undetectable plastic explosive popular with terrorist groups, is booming.
2002-09-12 00:00:00
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