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Russia's Centre TV accuses Kazakhstan of selling arms to rogue states

Russian Centre TV has accused Kazakhstan of illegally selling weapons to "criminal regimes". In interviews with the "Secret Materials" programme, Russian military experts alleged that Kazakhstan was receiving state-of-the-art military technology from Russia at "dumping prices" and then reselling it on the world market, thereby undercutting Russia's own arms sales. The programme accused Kazakhstan of exploiting "Russian open-heartedness" and cheating Russia by buying such advanced systems as the S-300 air-defence complex "not at all for itself but for others". The following are excerpts from the programme, broadcast on 2 February; subheadings have been inserted editorially:

[Presenter] The illegal arms trade in the world is estimated at 4-8bn dollars a year. Russia accounts for about 10 per cent of this sum or 400-600m dollars a year... I do realize that after this programme goes on air, there may be a diplomatic row. Despite that we will tell you about some of our neighbours which are selling arms to criminal regimes. We will tell you about the disappearance of Russian military hardware in the CIS. We will tell you about who is benefiting from this and why.

[Ruslan Pukhov, director of the centre for analysis, strategy and technology] We can say that black or illegal exports, which violate international and domestic legislation, came into existence at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

[Presenter, over video of Soviet arms parade, tanks in action] The military might of the USSR was left without an owner at a stroke - tanks, aircraft, missiles and guns turned into a popular commodity...

[Pukhov] According to our estimates, by 1996 illegal arms traders had by and large been forced out of Russia to the former post-Soviet space. Why should anyone attempt to buy aircraft, helicopters or even small arms from Russia's military depots or from the Russian army, if it was easier and cheaper to buy them from Tajikistan, Kazakhstan Ukraine or Belarus and then re-export them to other countries?

[Presenter] The CIS republics have inherited Soviet hardware. There was so much of it that the precise figure was not known even to officials.

[Maj-Gen Vladimir Romanenko, military expert] Let us take the powerful grouping we had in Ukraine: the armed grouping had more than 9,000 tanks at the initial stage, more than 11,000 APCs, more than 18,000 various artillery systems and a large number of aircraft - there were more than 2,000 aircraft and many other kinds of weapons and hardware and strategic resources.

[Vitaliy Khlyupin, politologist] Kazakhstan has accumulated an unimaginable number of tanks since the Soviet days. The number of them is so high that even the Kazakh authorities cannot give their precise number. The [Kazakh] defence minister has admitted that he doesn't know the number of tanks in the country. There could be from 10,000 to 15,000 unregistered tanks in the country. Some of them were left in the fields to rot after the withdrawal of the Soviet grouping from Germany...

[Presenter] On 14 April last year Talgat Ibrayev, the director-general of the [Kazakh] state company, Kazspetseksport, which like our Rosoboroneksport has a monopoly on the sale of weapons, was shot dead in the yard of his own house. On the same day a military cargo plane An-12 was stolen from the Baykonur space site. The aircraft, which belonged to Russia, later turned up in Africa's Congo. Incidentally the theft was sanctioned by the Kazakh authorities. Two weeks before Ibrayev's murder, Uzbek customs officers seized a mysterious lorry on the Kazakh-Uzbek border. It had lead containers with nuclear materials on board. The CIA was quick to announce that notorious international terrorist Usamah Bin-Ladin was the recipient. However, that row, like many other Kazakh rows, died down even before it had started.

What was the motive for the murder of Kazakhstan 's chief arms dealer? We will talk about this subject slightly later. In the meantime, let us talk about an equally mysterious arms-smuggling incident. I am talking about Russian weapons. [video cuts to shots of missile complex]

Russian sale of S-300 systems to Kazakhstan probed

This story began six years ago in 1994. At the time the Kazakh defence minister asked the Russian government to sell to his country the anti-aircraft missile complex S-300. This complex is quite rightly seen as one of the best air-defence systems in the world. This complex is on combat duty in many countries of the world. And it is only Russia that manufactures them. In December 1994 the Kazakh Defence Ministry and [former Russian arms export company] Rosvooruzheniye signed a contract for the sale of the S-300 anti-aircraft missile complex. The strange thing is that this document [video of papers] confirms the signing of the deal which was arranged via the Menatep bank. It also shows the name and address of the exporter: the Rosvooruzheniye state company, Gogolevskiy Bulvar, Moscow. However, we see no names in the section where a foreign buyer should be shown. Why is this happening? [video cuts to airport, aircraft taking off, close-ups of flight documents]

You will soon see why. A cargo aircraft An-124 took-off from the 929 airfield of the state aviation research centre in the town of Akhtyubinsk in Astrakhan Region in April 1996. It was chartered by the Kazakh Defence Ministry. It was carrying the very S-300 complex that they had asked for. According to the documents the plane was en route to the [southern Kazakh] town of Chimkent. Another strange thing: why did they use the costly An-124 if they could have easily used an Il-76 which was a far better option in terms of the cargo's weight and distance? It would have been much cheaper to charter an Il-76 plane. What is the reason for that? It could be that instead of Kazakhstan, the plane left for a different location which is somewhere very far away and which could only be reached by the An-124 plane without refuelling.

I have customs documentation in my hands for the shipment of the S-300 complex. This document proves that this was a pure instance of smuggling. Just look at this [video of document]: an item, identified as 5v55r, 32 pieces, was shipped in 16 metal containers. What kind of item are we talking about? We are talking about a missile. The snag though is that only one missile could go into one container, which is welded at the plant. While the declaration says: 32 missiles in 16 containers. How come the customs officers knew about all these details? Of course, they simply scribbled their signatures. And the 16 combat missiles were simply written off. Where are they now? Against which targets will they be used? That is, if they haven't been used already.

Now the most important thing: there are currently in Kazakhstan five regiments with S-300 anti-aircraft missile complexes. Kazakhstan inherited two of them from the old Soviet days. Another three were purchased by them in 1997-98. However, the S-300 anti-aircraft missile complex, obtained in 1996, the very system that we talked about, is not in Kazakhstan. This fact can easily be checked by simply looking at a map of the joint air-defence system of the CIS. Our complex is not on the map. [video shows more close-ups of documents] This was a classic example of smuggling. This was a crime in which the leadership of fraternal Kazakhstan was involved. The Kazakhs cheated us. They used Russian open-heartedness and bought the powerful complex at a dumping price not at all for itself, but for others. Where is it now? Some claim it is in Croatia, others say it is in the Middle East. However, I don't want to do someone's else's job. Let those who are supposed to be doing the job, do it - the Russian Defence Ministry...

Kazakh arms sales linked to political infighting

What is happening in the republics of the former Soviet Union is not the private affair of these republics. It concerns our weapons, our interests, our technology. We don't want our soldiers to be killed by our weapons, in Chechnya or in Tajikistan.

[Romanenko] The supply of weapons and ammunition to trouble spots during hostilities is certainly immoral and cannot be justified. I can cite as an example the case when the supply of state-of-the-art Ukrainian-produced tanks T-80U or T-80UD to Pakistan caused quite a row, as you know, which had a serious knock-on effect for Russia as well because we realized full well that these tanks, after they found their way to Pakistan, could reach the borders of Tajikistan within a week, and in the final analysis there were such cases, as far as I am aware.

[Presenter] Arms traders have no sentiments. They are ready to sell their goods to anyone - terrorists, partisans, even to Old Nick himself...

[Khlyupin] Virtually every political scientist, or not even a political scientist, just an ordinary journalist who has been in Kazakhstan or similar countries, if only once, realizes that these are eastern countries, and power there is also organized according to the eastern principle, where virtually nothing happens without the consent of the top man. To a large extent we all owe the discovery of the latest cases in 1999 and 2000 to the rivalry which developed between the current deputy chairman of the Kazakh National Security Committee [NSC] - and by virtue of combining jobs this post is much more important - the president's elder son-in-law, Rakhat Aliyev, who is trying, or aspiring to consolidate himself in the unofficial post of Nazarbayev's successor, and those people who oppose him, who are trying, by uniting and forming a certain alliance, to prevent him from coming to power. And since Aliyev himself is a general, most of his opponents, the people who can realistically oppose him in some way, are also officers. And the rivalry that has developed between them is really to the death. And Ibrayev is a victim of this rivalry, and moreover, a victim who belonged neither to the first camp nor the second, because he - this is my personal opinion - most likely made too many overtures to both sides.

Theories abound over murder of Kazakh chief arms trader

[Presenter] And so we return to the tragic death of the director-general of the Kazspetseksport company, Talgat Ibrayev. I would remind you that the main seller of Kazakh arms was shot dead outside his home in April last year. There are many theories for this crime, but they are all in one way or another linked to the illegal trade in military equipment. This is the view, for example, of the prominent expert in the defence field, Ruslan Pukhov.

[Pukhov] Quite recently in Kazakhstan, for example, the director-general of the company empowered by the government to trade in arms was killed after a deal to sell arms to North Korea - which by the way is under an embargo and which does not look good to trade with - was exposed. The president and the prime minister put the blame on the director-general, the chief of the NSC and the defence minister. The defence minister and the head of the NSC resigned quietly, but the director-general let slip in a private conversation somewhere - I'll tell the whole story about what Papa did to me - and two days later they found him dead.

[Presenter, over video of newspaper cuttings] The scandal over Kazakh supplies of MiG fighters and anti-aircraft guns to North Korea was loud. The aircraft were detained in Baku. Deputy Defence Minister Gen ended up in prison, and the chief of the Kazakh General Staff Gen [Bakhytzhan] Yertayev was put on trial.

[Khlyupin] The trial was simply remarkable. Yertayev was actually charged under articles which provide for virtually the supreme penalty, but he officially continues to discharge the duties of chief of the General Staff, and no-one relieved him of this post even temporarily.

[Presenter] Strange things accompany all the weapons scandals in Kazakhstan without exception. This applies in full measure to the murder of the director-general of Kazspetseksport, Ibrayev. By the way, the trial of one of the main defendants in the affair has literally just started, last week: Col [Anatoliy] Adamov, of the NSC. Adamov was arrested by the republic's interior minister in person. I cannot remember such examples since the times of [architect of Stalinist purges] Yezhov. At the same time one of Adamov's lawyers was arrested, a fact that is no less striking. And moreover, no-one sees any particular guilt on the part of the colonel - everyone understands: Ibrayev fell victim to a multimillion-dollar settling of accounts.

[Khlyupin] The point is that Ibrayev had just returned from talks in Delhi, and most interesting, no documents relating to the outcome of the Delhi visit were found on the dead man, that is, they disappeared, and they disappeared most probably during the attack. Many witnesses say that he had a full file, quite a fat file, and of course, it contained some kind of contracts. But most interesting of all is that the conclusions of the talks in Delhi were not found in the office of Kazspetseksport.

Kazakh illegal arms trade proceeding "at full pace"

[Presenter, over video of troops loading plane, tank in action] This is just one of the theories, but there are so many. We have talked about some of them. The illegal trade in arms has been proceeding at full pace in Kazakhstan for several years. Its attraction is obvious. It's not just huge profits, it's also a splendid chance to launder millions and billions [of dollars]... Quite recently, in December, a new scandal erupted. It emerged that Kazakhstan was selling helicopters to Sierra Leone where a civil war is under way... The most striking thing in all these scandals is the fact that Kazakhstan is trading in arms with which Russia is paying the rent for the Baykonur cosmodrome. Every year we have to pay Kazakhstan 115m dollars, but there's no money, and so we give away our most modern technology, as is the custom, at dumping prices. And as a result Kazakhstan makes our, Russian, prices tumble on the world market. I wonder what Rosoboroneksport is thinking about.

[Khlyupin, over video of arms fair] Rosvooruzheniye, our government simply hands it over. And the latest agreements which the secretary of the [CIS] Collective Security Council, [Valeriy] Nikolayenko, said very joyfully - he passed them off as an achievement of Russian diplomacy - that a number of countries, which include Russia and Kazakhstan, have now concluded agreements that Russia will make weapons available to these countries at producer-prices in Russia itself, without any supplements. That is, in effect these countries, having obtained the most up-to-date weapons at minimal prices, can add their own supplements and put them on the market, and moreover, the very same kinds of weapons which Russia is putting on the market.

[Presenter] Do you know what the spy [Edmond] Pope was convicted of? Yes - of trying to steal the blueprints of the secret torpedo Shkval. Why do I ask? Because the Americans could have quite easily bought the Shkval in Kazakhstan,

[Khlyupin] These Shkval torpedoes were also produced in Kazakhstan, in Almaty, and moreover Kazakhstan has already sold them, true, not to America, but to China. It says 40 form part of a deal already concluded.

[Presenter, over shots of interior of defence plant] This is another problem of no small importance. More than 30 defence enterprises remain in Kazakhstan alone since Soviet times. It is mostly Russians that work there. And these enterprises appear to produce Kazakh output, but the technology is ours, Russian. It's our intellectual property, but no-one counts it for some reason...

IAC "Eurasia", 24 April 2001

http://www.eurasia.org.ru/2001/press_en/04_24_Kazakharmsales_eng.htm