Global IssuesBOOKS: In the Shadow World, Only Blood, Gold and Gunpowder
They called themselves the 'cut hands commandos' because they lopped off their victims' hands with machetes; the 'burn house unit', for the thousands of families who were locked into their homes and roasted alive; the 'born naked squad', in reference to the hapless hundreds who were stripped naked and raped before being bludgeoned or burned to death.
The perpetrators were not savages operating alone in Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital, during the two-day horror that marked the climax of that country's 11-year civil war in January 1999.
Rather, Andrew Feinstein writes in his new book 'The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade', the swarms of men — most of them teenagers driven to madness from forcible injections of crack cocaine into their heads — were a machine oiled by the dollars of some of the world's biggest arms traders, who handed the rebels caches of weapons in exchange for unfettered access to the timber fields and diamond mines of West Africa.
Those same weapons — carried into Liberia and passed across the porous border into warring Sierra Leone aboard a British Aircraft Corporation (BAC) 1-11 jet owned by the notorious Ukrainian-born Israeli arms dealer Leonid Minin — were used to murder 6,000 civilians, maim and mutilate tens of thousands more and send 100,000 fleeing for their lives.
While this 'orgy of bewildering cruelty' was being wrought on the world's least developed country, on a population subsisting largely on less than a dollar a day, Minin and his associates pocketed tens of millions of dollars.
Such exchanges — of lives for 'business as usual' — are the subjects of 'Shadow World', the first account of its kind to chronicle the corruption, collateral damage and protagonists involved in the world's most lucrative business.
Feinstein writes, 'Global military expenditure is estimated to have totaled 1.6 trillion dollars in 2010, 235 dollars for every single person on the planet. This is an increase of 53 percent since 2000 and accounts for 2.6 percent of global GDP.
'The trade in conventional arms, both big and small, is worth about 60 billion dollars a year,' he notes.
The U.S.'s national security budget alone reaches a trillion dollars a year, with a defence portfolio topping 703 billion annually, but it is by no means the only, or even the worst actor in the war economy. China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Holland, Italy, Israel and China are also formidable players in the arms game.
Citing statistics from the U.S. department of commerce, Feinstein reckons that the global arms trade accounts for almost half — 40 percent — of total corruption in world trade.
Rarely occurring out in the open, Feinstein posits that arms deals occupy a shadow land, midway between legal but opaque 'grey' transactions and the utterly lawless black market.
Here, 'buyer' and 'seller' are fluid terms, and could refer to anyone from government agents and gunrunners to pariah states and private detectives to guerilla fighters and corporate CEOs.
He writes, 'From world wars to the Cold War to the War on Terror… arms dealers, weapons manufacturers and governments have fuelled and perpetuated tensions in pursuit of profit, on occasion selling to all sides in the same conflict.'
China and Russia provide much of the firepower needed to maintain dictatorships and regimes of terror in Syria, Burma, Sudan, North Korea, Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka, watching impassively as weapons large and small lay waste to whole neighbourhoods, villages and cities from 'Darfur to Mallaitivu'.
When Egypt's Hosni Mubarak finally fell from power, China, Russia, the UK, the U.S. and France slipped slowly into the shadows, offering token denunciations of the regime while stuffing away the bank slips documenting their years-long arms deals with Egypt.
And when NATO flew its sorties over Gaddafi's incendiary Libya last year, the righteous warplanes were on the lookout for weapons bearing the names of Russian, French, German and Italian arms manufacturers: in effect spending millions to eradicate arms provided by its own member states.
From these double-dealings arise the kind of silence and secrecy that are almost impossible to breach.
'Well over 80 percent of the people I approached wouldn't speak to me, or didn't even answer requests,' Feinstein told IPS.
'When I first emailed Joe der Hovsepian (the notorious Armenian- Lebanese weapons titan who had never given an interview prior to his talk with Feinstein), he responded along the lines of, 'In my long life I've never done anything for nothing. Why should I start now?''
Feinstein also hounded the World Trade Organisation about why its 'defence is the one sector in which economic offsets are allowed to be used in public procurement decisions.' He is still waiting for an answer.
Feinstein's dogged pursuit of the trail of bloody footsteps and smoking gun-barrels across the killing fields and into government offices or corporate boardrooms arose not only from an urge to expose the corruption that makes the world more vulnerable to inexorable warfare.
He also sought to expose how the torrent of money expended on bloodletting represents a massive diversion of public funds that could, instead of gushing into the off-shore bank accounts of a handful of profiteers, build solid health, educational and social infrastructure to provide the 'stability and security' that warmongers claim to bankroll.
As a former member of the African National Congress (ANC), the author was first awakened to the opportunity cost of the shadow world when he discovered that the newly-elected government of post-apartheid South Africa spent close to 10 billion dollars on arms and weapons in its early years in power, even while lamenting vociferously its lack of funds to provide antiretroviral drugs to the country's six million HIV-positive citizens.
Half a decade later, while the freshly acquired war machinery grew rusty in warehouses, 355,000 South Africans had died preventable deaths.
© Inter Press Service (2012) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service