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Subject:
Nuclear material in Moldova
Big Bad Pariah
1/19/2004 4:50:06 AM
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Concern over Soviet weapons in Moldova
The deal involved Europe's biggest Soviet army weapons cache, Russia's prime minister and the leader of a separatist enclave in Moldova known as a gunrunner's haven.
As described in a confidential 1998 agreement obtained by The Associated Press, Russia and Trans-Dniester would share profits from the sale of "unnecessary" arms and ammunition chosen from 40,000 tons of material stored in an arms depot in the breakaway region.
The transaction is only one piece of an arms-dealing puzzle in Trans-Dniester where the decade-old depot also contained hundreds of portable surface to air missiles until last month - when concerns they could end up in terrorists' hands prompted Russia to announce it had withdrawn them.
A former Moldovan official says the tiny region even was the repository of rocket-mounted "dirty bombs," or warheads designed to scatter deadly radioactive material that have gone missing.
That widely publicised claim remains unresolved, with officials not even sure the dirty bombs ever existed.
But an AP investigation involving interviews with a dozen officials and experts reinforced suspicions that Trans-Dniester is a hotbed of legal and illegal weapons transactions that are largely unregulated.
Moldova's western neighbour, Romania, shares that view.
Trans-Dniester is a "black hole of trans-border organised crime, including drug smuggling, human trafficking and arms smuggling," Romanian Foreign Minister Mircea Geoana told AP.
Weapons from Trans-Dniester have turned up in Chechnya, Georgia's breakaway Abkhazia region, and in the hands of insurgents in Africa, a government minister of another country in the region told AP. The official spoke on condition he not be identified further.
Experts say that just about every sort of weapon is available.
"If I were in search of most commodities related to weaponry ... this would be the place to go," said William Potter, director of the Centre for Non-proliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute for International Studies in California. "Even if I did not find the weaponry, I would find the individuals who could get me that weaponry."
Reputed gunrunning sources include arms and ammunition from the huge Soviet army depository near the northern town of Kolbasna - including tens of thousands of assault rifles and other small arms and weaponry attractive to terrorists. The depository is guarded by Russian peacekeepers.
Additionally, at least six factories are believed to be churning out grenade and rocket launchers, Makarov pistols and Kalashnikov assault rifles, mortar tubes and other relatively low-tech weapons under contract to the Russian military - and possibly skimming off surplus production to sell to arms dealers, diplomats in the region told AP.
Some, like Tiraspol's Tochlitmash and Elektromash, are believed to be dual use plants, with civilian and secret military production lines.
Ruslan Slobodeniuk, whose business card identifies him as Trans-Dniester's "deputy foreign minister," said Elektromash - a Soviet-era factory in Tiraspol spouting smoke and steam from all corners into the winter skies - made only transformers.
"We are ready to show our factories to journalists," he told the AP.
Authorities did not respond to a request for a tour of Elektromash.
The 1998 arms deal between Russia and Trans-Dniester involved the Soviet army repository - 40,000 tons of ordnance, arms and ammunition dumped in this remote speck of south-eastern Europe in the early 1990s as the Soviet Union broke up and Moldova became independent.
The negotiators: then-Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and Igor Smirnov, self-named president of the separatist enclave.
Moscow and Tiraspol, Trans-Dniester's capital, would split profits from the sale of "unnecessary weapons, ammunition, military assets and materials," according to the 1998 agreement that bears their signatures.
There seems to be no public record of the deal but Russian and Western officials confirmed its existence to the AP as part of a one-page memorandum on what to do with the huge weapons cache - Europe's largest.
It was superseded a year later by a pact providing for a full withdrawal to Russia of all military equipment.
One Russian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said his understanding was that the deal was never enacted, but Western diplomats were sceptical, saying nobody will ever know how much of what was sold, to whom, or at what price in that one-year window - or the criteria used to determine what was "unnecessary."
The authoritarian Smirnov has answered to no one since breaking Russian-speaking Trans-Dniester away from Moldova in 1992 after a brief war, sparked by fears that Moldova would seek reunification with Romania.
Tiraspol is caught in a Soviet-era time warp, left over from Moldova's former Soviet republic status. Located between Romania and Ukraine, Moldova was part of Romania until 1940 and most people speak Romanian or Ukrainian. Trans-Dniester, however, was never part of Romania.
Some Trans-Dniester soldiers sport fur hats with the Red Star emblem, and creaky Volga sedans vie for parking spots with Western cars on the cracked pavement lining crude "bloks" - ugly prefab apartment blocks of raw concrete badly in need of repair. There are still about 2,000 Russian troops in the breakaway region, officially acting as peacekeepers.
Business dealings by Smirnov associates often include smuggling of all kinds -including weapons by the truckload, say diplomats and experts.
Though less than two hours by air from most European capitals and only 50 miles to the south-east of Chisinau, Trans-Dniester is as inaccessible as some of the continent's most remote regions.
To the east lie 250 miles of border with Ukraine. Unguarded fields are broken by thick stretches of fir and bisected by twisting dirt paths where a truck could surreptitiously slip away en route to the Black Sea port of Odessa and an outlet to hotspots in Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere.
Customs officials at the three major international crossing points are corrupt, as are those at railway crossings, say diplomats in the region, all speaking on condition of anonymity.
Oazu Nantoi, a well-connected former Moldovan government official in Chisinau, cites the example of a senior Ukrainian customs official in conversation with his Moldovan counterparts in 2001.
"After some quantity of vodka, the official said: 'Guys, pay us £1.2 million a week, and we'll close the borders"' to illegal traffic, Nantoi said, citing an official present at the talks. "'All it takes is £1.2 million a week -cash."'
Almost as porous are the unofficial borders to Moldova, bordered to the west by Romania. Both countries are high on the list of Europe's most corrupt nations.
Illustrating the depth of the smuggling problem even at controlled crossing points, a Moldovan examination two years ago of temporary customs stamps used by Trans-Dniester found 350 counterfeit versions.
Smirnov's son, Vladimir, heads the Trans-Dniester customs service. He is also said to be the major silent partner in Sheriff, the enclave's business consortium with fingers in everything from Trans-Dniester's mobile phone network, to gas stations, supermarkets and the still-growing gargantuan sports complex on Tiraspol's outskirts.
Western diplomats estimate the sports complex has already cost £108 million -twice as much as Moldova's annual budget.
Nantoi, who now runs the non-governmental Institute for Policy Studies in Chisinau, asserts Trans-Dniester was the repository of dozens of dirty bombs -warheads designed to scatter deadly radioactive material - which now are missing after years of storage near Tiraspol military airport.
Nantoi showed AP what he said was a Russian military document dated Oct. 18, 1994, urging "prohibition" of work with the warheads - 24 ready to use, 14 dismantled - because of dangerous radiation.
Another document from May of that year recorded the "burning and burying" of uniforms contaminated by high radiation.
Nantoi said reports reached him in 1998 that Alazan rockets - inaccurate, short range missiles typically used by the Soviets for weather experiments - had been fitted with warheads modified to carry radioactive material. The rockets and warheads since appeared to have disappeared from storage.
"I could not discover what had happened to them," he said.
Moldova's government has declined comment. Valery Litzkai, who acts as Trans-Dniester's "foreign minister," described the dirty bomb reports as a "smear campaign."
"There are no weapons here," he told AP.
Potter, of the Monterey Institute, said some former Soviet government officials believed the documents could be authentic but considered it unlikely that Russian units would keep such crude weapons "considering their access to much more sophisticated weaponry."
Dismissing the dirty bomb allegations as just one part of an anti-Trans-Dniester campaign, Litzkai and other Trans-Dniester officials assert there have been no major finds of weapons in terrorist hands that can be proven to have come from their enclave.
Still, even they cannot deny evidence of arms trading.
Moldovan police four years ago halted a truck leaving Trans-Dniester. Inside were Russian-made anti-aircraft missiles, detonators, plastic explosives, members of Trans-Dniester's army, and Lt. Col. Vladimir Nemkov, a deputy commander of Russian peacekeepers in the enclave.
Other officials denied the incident ever happened. Litzkai confirmed the incident but suggested it was a setup.
Asked about Nemkov's whereabouts now, Litzkai shrugged, then paused for effect.
"He disappeared."
- AP |
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