The Arms Fixers

Chapter 3

BROKERING ARMS FOR GENOCIDE

The arms dropped in Purulia were, fortunately, not used. In Rwanda, however, brokers and transport agents arranged the supply of arms that were used to commit international crimes against humanity in 1994. Dealers managed to
circumvent not only the national arms-control regulations of several of the most
powerful states in the world, but also a mandatory UN arms embargo.

Documents from the military archives of the regime that planned and carried out the genocide in Rwanda, as well as interviews with some of those involved and evidence cited by the subsequent UN commission of inquiry, help piece together an incomplete yet shocking picture of what transpired. The main foreign brokers and shippers
involved in arming the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide were based in the UK, France and South Africa. They employed networks of collaborators in other countries, including Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Egypt, Italy, Israel, Seychelles, former Zaire, and various offshore financial centres. The dealers evaded the inadequate national arms control laws in their home countries and disguised the routes of their deliveries, choosing to operate where there were shaky customs, transport and financial regulations so as to make their activities as ‘legal’ as possible.

None of these brokers has been indicted for the crime of complicity to genocide.

Prelude to Genocide

By March 1994, an atmosphere of civil war existed in Rwanda, with violent incidents occurring virtually on a daily basis. Lists of people regarded as enemies of the Hutu-dominated Habyarimana regime – either because of their perceived or imagined opposition or, in most cases, simply because they were ethnically identified as Tutsi – were drawn up. When the Rwandan Presidential aircraft was shot down on 6 April, random massacres of Tutsi and Hutus began in Kigali and several other areas, organized under the Hutu interim government. Evacuations of foreign nationals by Belgium and France were followed on 21 April by the withdrawal of the UN peace operation, UNAMIR, amidst ongoing massacres reported daily in the world’s media. Eventually, on 17 May 1994, one month after the genocide began in Rwanda, the UN Security Council
imposed an international arms embargo. It was generally agreed that this embargo also applied to the ousted Hutu Rwandan regime-in-exile – although the UK government later denied this was the case, in order to avoid prosecuting known arms brokers acting from UK territory for the exiled armed forces and militia.¹ A massive exodus of the killers and hundreds of thousands displaced Hutus had begun in May; by mid-July about one million had crossed into the former Zaire around the town of Goma, and several hundred thousand more into other neighbouring territories. ²

The attempt by the United Nations to stop arms from reaching the country was already too late. The tragedy was compounded when, even after the UN embargo was agreed, major states did not promptly incorporate it into their domestic law and take concerted action to enforce it. As a result, more small arms and ammunition were supplied to the mass killers via routes supposedly monitored by international observers.

Up to the outbreak of the genocide, the Rwandan government had secured its main arms supplies from companies in China, France, Egypt and South Africa, with a smaller role for Israel, Greece and Poland.³ France, the biggest supplier of heavy military equipment, had sent troops to Rwanda in 1990 to help repel a military offensive by the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front against the Habyarimana regime. Both sides committed atrocities. The French authorities were accused of using the supply of arms to control the regime. ⁴ During that time, Kigali was used a hub by French arms dealers for the supply of Iran and other countries. ⁵ Thus it was hardly surprising that the
regime would try to use such dealers to obtain alternative sources of supply, at least for smaller weapons.

Trying to Stop Further Deliveries

During and in the aftermath of the genocide, international speculation and isolated
allegations continued as to where further arms could have come from. In mid-1995, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International drew attention to reports of arms
deliveries via airports in former Zaire, near the border with Rwanda.⁶ After the Rwanda Patriotic Front took control of Kigali on 4 July, the airport at Goma, just next to the border with western Rwanda, became for a while the main delivery point for supplies to the massive numbers of refugees pouring out of Rwanda, as well as for the further supply of small arms and ammunition to the retreating armed forces (the ex-FAR – Forces armées rwandaises) and militia (the Interahamwe) of the exiled Hutu regime. As Goma came under suspicion during 1994, arms for the genocidal killers of Rwanda continued to be flown in to Kinshasa and then ferried to other airports in the Zairian border region, such as Bukavu. The Zairian authorities under President
Mobutu collaborated in this buildup. Human Rights Watch focused in particular on the officially sanctioned Chinese and French arms deliveries and on supplies brokered from South Africa, while Amnesty International reported that UK-based arms brokers had arranged small arms deliveries from Albania, Bulgaria and Israel using secret
international brokering and trafficking networks. Both warned that further deliveries from various sources were being reported locally. The Albanian, Bulgarian, French and South African governments denied any official knowledge of or involvement in violating the UN embargo.⁷

These exposures in mid-1995 convinced the UN Security Council to establish an
International Commission of Inquiry (UNICOI) to find evidence of breaches of the embargo imposed on 17 May 1994.⁸ UNICOI did not, however, focus on complicity in genocide under the 1951 Convention on Genocide. This was assumed to be a responsibility of the separate International Tribunal on Rwanda, based in Arusha, Tanzania, although this has not been the case so far. UNICOI also lacked judicial powers to call
witnesses, and it had limited resources. In addition, commissioners suffered from a lack of cooperation, to varying degrees, from governments and officials in the region, especially the authorities of former Zaire but also from some states in Western and Eastern Europe. However, with support from some officials, NGOs and journalists, UNICOI did manage to find credible evidence of arms flows to the region from Eastern Europe and Southern Africa even after the imposition of the arms embargo. It put awkward questions to European governments through its representations, and, even though these were never fully answered, its reports to the Security Council helped provide some impetus for UN action toward preventing small arms proliferation.⁹

The South African Who Cleared a Million Dollars

In March 1993 a ship called the Malo, laden with Serbian small arms and ammunition on its way to Somalia, was inspected and held by the Seychelles authorities.¹⁰ On 4 June 1994, Wilhelm Tertius Ehlers (known as Ters Ehlers) – a former senior official in the apartheid government – and Colonel Theoneste Bagosora – a senior official of the Rwandan Ministry of Defence of the Hutu government-in-exile – went to the Seychelles to negotiate the purchase of the arms. When interviewed in Goma in February 1995 by a Human Rights Watch researcher, Bagosora said he had met with South African officials at the end of May and early June 1994 to arrange weapons shipments to the former Rwandan military. These officials had refused to consider direct South African arms shipments but had offered to help to arrange shipments by other parties. ¹¹

On the nights of 16–17 and 18–19 June 1994, two planes of Air Zaire flew the weapons from the Seychelles government-controlled stockpile to Goma airport. These weapons were then transferred to the ex-FAR military forces in Gisenyi just across the border inside Rwanda.¹² The weapons included anti-tank and fragmentation grenades and high-calibre ammunition. According to Human Rights Watch, an Air Zaire DC-8 aircraft with the call sign 9Q-CLV had transported the arms from the Seychelles to the Zairian town of Goma in two separate flights. On arrival in Goma, the arms were
reportedly handed over for use by the ex-FAR armed forces that were still holding Gisenyi prefecture in Rwanda.

In the spring of 1996, two UNICOI members visited Seychelles to discuss the allegations with the Minister of Defence, James Michel, and other senior officials of the Seychelles government. In a report presented by UNICOI to the UN Security Council, the Commission wrote that it had been provided with information that amply corroborated the statements made in the 1995 report by Human Rights Watch. Documents, and that information made available to UNICOI by the Seychelles government enabled the Commission to reconstruct the case of the arms purchase. In discussions with members of UNICOI, the Defence Minister of the Seychelles stated that the arms in question had been seized by his government because they were being transported to Somalia in violation of the UN arms embargo. The Seychelles government had tried to dispose of the arms, but Ehlers had approached them, saying that the Zairian government was interested in buying them.¹³

Ehlers described himself in the Seychelles as the director of a company called Delta Aero.¹⁴ He had arrived from Johannesburg on 4 June 1994 accompanied by a person afterwards known as Colonel Bagosora, ‘whom the Seychelles authorities believed to be a Zairian’. ¹⁵ The two visitors inspected the weapons and agreed to purchase the
entire shipment. Bagosora produced an end-user certificate that had apparently been
issued by the Zairian Ministry of Defence. The document, a copy of which was made available by the Seychelles government, purported to be an end-user certificate signed on 13 June 1994 in Kinshasa by General Baoko Yoka, the then Vice-Minister for
National Defence of Zaire. It referred to Ehlers’ company ‘Delta’ and described the weaponry as ‘munitions’ and ‘TNT’.¹⁶

Ehlers and Bagosora had provided the aircraft in which to transport the arms, a civilian DC-8 cargo aeroplane with the registration 9Q-CLV, owned by the state company Air Zaire. To overcome an objection from the Seychelles Civil Aviation Authorities concerning the transport of military matériel in a civilian aircraft, Bagosora produced a document certifying that the aircraft had been chartered for military purposes. The document purported to place it under ‘full military responsibility of the Ministry of Defence of the Government of Zaire’. The document bore the heading of the seal of the Ministry of Defence of Zaire and was dated 16 June 1994 and signed by Bagosora. The authorities of Seychelles were apparently unaware that the Colonel, although signing on behalf of the Zairian Ministry of Defence, was in fact a Rwandan national. However, Bagosora had declared himself as such on the immigration card he filled in when entering the Seychelles on 4 June 1994 to negotiate for the arms. In fact Colonel Bagosora was a high-ranking officer in the former Rwandan government forces,
reputed to be one of the main organizers of the genocide and the ‘chief arms procurerfor the ex-FAR’. ¹⁷

Flight plans given to UNICOI by the transport authorities indicated that the Air Zaire DC8 aircraft had left Kinshasa on 16 June 1994 for Mombasa, Kenya, and had
returned on 20 June from Goma to Kinshasa.¹⁸ This schedule corresponded with the information that the arms had been transported in two shipments, on 17 and 18 June 1994. Flight plans provided in Seychelles corroborated this. The government of the Seychelles provided lists of the rifles, grenades and ammunition contained in each of consignments airlifted to Goma. Bagosora had countersigned both of the documents on behalf of the Zairian armed forces – the Forces armées zaïroises (FAZ). Each shipment weighed approximately 40–42 tons. ¹⁹ Realizing the fraud, the Seychelles authorities said they finally cancelled a third consignment, planned for 23 June 1994. Following the departure of the second consignment on 19 June 1994, reports in the Seychelles media had revealed that the armaments were being transported to Goma and not to Kinshasa, and that Bagosora was not Zairian but in fact a Rwandan officer in the ex-FAR who had ordered acts of mass killing of civilians. Afterwards, Seychelles officials told UNICOI that they had been under the impression the arms were to be airlifted to Kinshasa and that their suspicions had been aroused only after the subsequent press reports. ²⁰

Swiss Banking Arrangements

Attempts to uncover the money trail shed more light on the deal, but still left some big questions. Basically, the arms were purchased with two separate payments into the
account of the Central Bank of Seychelles in the Federal Reserve Bank in New York.²¹ Two amounts of $179,965 and $149,982.50 were sent to the Seychelles account from an account at the Union Bancaire Privée in Geneva. UNICOI’s requests to the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs of Switzerland for information about the account-holder initially bore no results. ‘Investigations are encountering numerous problems of a legal and practical nature’, was the reply from the Swiss Federal Department to UNICOI. ²² However, in August 1997 the Prosecutor General of Switzerland sent UNICOI a letter notifying the Commission that an investigation on the financial transactions regarding the case had been opened. The Swiss government gave some specific details acknowledging that Ehlers was indeed the holder of a numbered account – 82-113 CHEATA – at the Lugano office of Union Bancaire Privée in Switzerland.

The Swiss Prosecutor General confirmed that the two separate payments, $179,965 and $149,982.50 respectively, had been paid on 15 and 17 June 1994, and stated moreover that on 14 June and 16 June 1994 the account of Ehlers had been credited with $592,784 and $734,099 respectively – in other words, about $1 million more had been received in Ehlers account than had been paid to the Seychelles Central Bank in New York. The Prosecutor General told UNICOI that the large funds entering Ehlers’ account had originated from an account at the Banque Nationale de Paris SA in Paris, which had in turn been acting on behalf of the ‘Banque Nationale du Rwanda, Kigali’. So where had the money really come from?

The French newspaper Le Figaro tried to reconstruct these transactions in April 1998, but both the Banque National de Paris and the Union Bancaire Privée in Switzerland declined to comment on the issue. Representatives of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York referred Le Figaro’s journalists back to the Swiss bank.²³

In September 1996, members of UNICOI travelled to South Africa to discuss the role of arms traffickers to the Great Lakes. They interviewed Ehlers, who offered to
provide a detailed account of the deal but claimed ‘he had been assured that the arms were destined for Zaire and had been "shocked" to learn that the recipients were in fact the former Government forces’.²⁴ Ehlers said that he believed Colonel Bagosora had been merely a ‘technical expert’ who was to inspect the weapons on behalf of the Zairian officials who had approached him in Pretoria to buy rifles and ammunition for the Zairian armed forces. ²⁵

That Ehlers was ‘shocked’ and so naïve is highly unlikely, because he was not an
incidental player in the international arms market. He was the personal secretary of the South African President Pik W. Botha until Botha’s retirement in 1989,²⁶ and in this capacity he would have been aware of the role played by the Seychelles-registered company GMR as a front for sanctions-busting to South Africa. ²⁷ (GMR are the initials of one of the Italian founders of the company, Giovanni Mario Ricci). The GMR conglomerate’s network, controlled from executive offices in Switzerland (Lugano) and South Africa, ²⁸ had played a role in the arms transaction between Ehlers, Bagosora and the Seychelles government. ²⁹

One of GMR’s original founders, Mario Benito Chiavelli, was a controversial Italian businessman who had cooperated with the apartheid authorities to circumvent the arms and oil embargoes on South Africa throughout the 1980s.³⁰ Ehlers had become managing director of the South African branch of GMR in 1990, after Botha had
retired as South Africa’s President one year earlier.³¹

Le Figaro contended that the transactions for the weapons bought through the Paris account of the former Rwandan government were not a coincidence.³³ The inventory of the weapons that were bought from the Seychelles government closely resembled a list that the exiled ‘interim Minister of the Interior of the Rwandan government’ had sent to the French government in May 1994. Both Bagosora and Ehlers were well connected in France. Bagosora had been the first Rwandan officer to be admitted to the French war academy in Paris. Ehlers, who had been an officer in the South African Navy before being seconded to President Botha, had received military training at a French submarine base between 1970 and 1972. ³⁴

In 1996, Ehlers was again reported to be involved in a clandestine shipment.³⁵ In February 1996 the Department of Transport of Namibia had grounded a Russian-registered Antonov 12 at Grootfontein airport, pending an investigation by police. ³⁶ The plane was suspected of illegal cargo flights to UNITA in Angola, at a time when the country’s rebel movement was under a UN embargo against receiving arms or fuel. Namibia’s Deputy-Minister of Transport said that Ehlers had approached him to allow the aircraft to fly supplies to Angola, but the plane had started operating from the Namibian airport without permission. ³⁷

Ehlers denied any involvement in illegal cargo flights, but the Namibian authorities insisted that he was implicated in a series of illegal flights to Angola, Zaire and Botswana with thousands of litres of fuel.³⁸ The owner of the Antonov was a South African-based Russian national who faced charges in Namibia. His company, Yurand Air, had also skirted the law in Mozambique and South Africa, according to a South African official at the Directorate of Civil Aviation. ³⁹ Ehlers reportedly stated that he had indeed ‘investigated a business proposition’ where the Russian owner of the aircraft was a potential ‘supplier of services’, but that the illegal operation had subsequently started without his knowledge. ⁴⁰

In December 1997, Human Rights Watch published a report on military assistance and arms trafficking to Burundi.⁴¹ The report described an offer made in September 1996 for a consignment of AKM assault rifles, hand grenades, anti-tank mines, rocket-propelled grenades and ammunition to Burundian buyers by a South African arms merchant. The person facilitating the deal was a South African national, acting on behalf of a supplying company, GMR Group, registered in South Africa. The facilitator used a business address in Kampala, Uganda, to approach the Burundi military authorities, but the negotiations were suspended after Burundi’s neighbours imposed sanctions on Burundi in response to the military coup of July 1996. ⁴²

The Anglo-French Offshore Method

UK brokers and traders used a host of sub-contracting companies based in offshore tax havens to conceal their Rwanda activities. This was revealed by interviews conducted by investigative journalists in late 1994 and 1995 with UK-based aircrew who were directly involved or who knew about arms deliveries to the exiled Rwandan armed forces and Hutu militia.⁴³

Cargo aircraft registered in Africa but based in Europe helped conceal the arms trail. For example, a UK pilot and loadmaster stated that in May 1994 an aircraft managed by a company in the UK flew empty from Oostend in Belgium to Tirana in Albania, where small arms were loaded under the supervision of Israeli officers; the plane then flew to Goma in the former Zaire with no customs checks on documentation and cargo, despite a refuelling stop in Cairo. The crews said they were initially unaware that their flight was to carry arms cargo; they then thought that it was a government-to-government deal, until they saw there was no paperwork carried out in Kigali. Each pilot and loadmaster expressed remorse about what he had done, but claimed that his involvement was unintentional. They recalled other flights from Albania, as well as Bulgaria and Israel, during that period, and gave names of persons and companies they thought were managing the operation.⁴⁴

On 16 November1996, as armed clashes escalated in eastern Zaire, two journalists working for the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera discovered military procurement documents from a lorry belonging to the exiled Rwandan Ministry of Defence near a refugee camp at Mugunga.⁴⁵ These documents corroborated the UK aircrew claims of a secret series of arms flights from Albania and Israel into Goma and Kinshasa airports brokered by agents in Western Europe, particularly in the United Kingdom. Seven large cargoes of small arms worth $6.5 million were flown from Tirana and Tel Aviv between mid-April and mid-July 1994 to the forces as they carried out the genocide, even during the time when the mass killings were being reported daily by the international news media. ⁴⁶

The documents showed that a UK company, Mil-Tec Corporation Ltd, was involved in arms supplies to the Hutu regime at least from June 1993 to mid-July 1994. Mil-Tec had been paid $4.8 million by the regime in return for invoices of $6.5 million for the arms sent. The manager of Mil-Tec, Anoop Vidyarthi, was described as a Kenyan Asian who owned a travel company in North London and was in business with
Rakeesh Kumar Gupta.⁴⁷ They both fled the UK shortly after the revelations. Mil-Tec documents show that the company had arranged the supply of rifle ammunition using an Israeli shipping agent, Trade and Maritime Services of Tel Aviv. ⁴⁸ This deal was reportedly handled through Merstone Investments, a company registered in the Isle of Man. ⁴⁹ Vidyarthi was linked to a UK arms dealer, Paul Restorick, who ran another arms brokering company, Mil-Tec Marketing, situated in Ashford, Kent. Restorick admitted that he had ‘advised’ Vidyarthi in 1993, but he denied any corporate connection with Mil-Tec Corporation and any involvement in arms supplies to Rwanda. ⁵⁰

The diffuse and nebulous structure of Mil-Tec Corporation Ltd was deliberate. The company’s letterhead stated that it had ‘Associates in – Europe – Israel – Korea – USA’. Correspondence between Mil-Tec and the Rwandan Ministry of Defence showed that Mil-Tec had continuously used an address in Hove, East Sussex, but was registered in offshore tax havens. Initially, the Hove address was the only one given on Mil-Tec’s letterhead, for example in April 1993 when it was supplying batteries to the Ministry in Kigali from London. Then, as soon as the company was used to supply the ammunition from Israel in May, Mil-Tec’s letterhead showed an address in
Douglas, Isle of Man. Vidyarthi had registered Mil-Tec as a company in Douglas in February 1993 through a local ‘off the shelf’ company-formation agent, and then in June 1993 had registered it with two local ‘facilitator’ directors on the Island of Sark.⁵¹ In this way, Vidyarthi and his associates tried to ensure minimum public
information about their activities.⁵²

Mil-Tec’s ‘offshore’ move coincided with the increasingly controversial trade. While the address in Douglas was retained on the letterhead throughout Mil-Tec’s mid-1994 arms deliveries, the company continued to describe the Hove office as its ‘correspondence address’, and always displayed the Hove telephone and fax numbers. This office was used by a long-established accountancy firm run by Vinod P. Dhiri, who was in partnership with Varinder Singh and Ravinder Jain. The latter had recently joined the firm; he said that Vidyarthi had contacted the accountancy firm in 1992, and that they had met a few times on social occasions, but that no work was provided to Mil-Tec. A handwritten note of the contact in 1992 was in the files, and the firm denied any knowledge or involvement in Mil-Tec’s arms deals.⁵³

The shipping arrangements used by Mil-Tec were intentionally obscure. According to the air waybill documents attached to the correspondence, Mil-Tec used the Israeli company, Trade and Maritime Services, which in turn contracted Aeroflot aircraft to supply the ammunition to Kigali in June 1993. For the arms deliveries in mid-1994, however, Mil-Tec used a different shipping agent, one which could set up complicated route and over-flight arrangements in Africa. This was Jet Lease International (Bahamas) Ltd, run from a Jet Lease office in Windsor near London. The manager of Jet Lease, Donald Duke, was described as of Nigerian origin. Although Jet Lease used air waybill documents from a well-known Nigerian company, Okada Air Cargo, for the 1994 deliveries, Okada denied any involvement with the arms flights. Aircrew who flew to Goma claim that Duke and others sub-contracted the Mil-Tec deliveries to small air-cargo companies.⁵⁴

One such company was Peak Aviation, with offices in Hove and then Brighton,
Sussex. It operated a Boeing 707 registered in Ghana but based in Kent. A freelance pilot resident in the Channel Islands told UK television researchers that Peak Aviation had flown four arms flights to Goma in mid-1994 – one from Tel Aviv and three from Tirana – and this was broadcast in November 1994.⁵⁵ A second pilot said that the loading agent in Tel Aviv had told him the boxes of weapons were to go across the border into Rwanda for the Hutu government. ⁵⁶ The owner of Peak Aviation, Alan Moffat, used an offshore company in Jersey called D.C. Marketing Ltd. ⁵⁷ Peak Aviation was dissolved in December 1994, and Moffat left the UK when confronted by the television crew about his involvement in the arms flights. ⁵⁸

Financial arrangements make the picture look more complex. Mil-Tec Corporation used a North London branch of the National Westminster Bank to receive payments.⁵⁹ Rwandan officials of the extremist regime had facilitated payments to Mil-Tec initially from Kigali in mid-April, then from the Cairo embassy and from two Belgian banks in May, and finally from the Paris embassy in mid-July. Lieutenant-Colonel Cyprien
Kayumba, director of financial services in the Rwandan Ministry of Defence, wrote that he had left Kigali on 17 June 1994 to supervise the unloading of the first arms delivery in Goma; then, until the last delivery on 18 July, he had toured Nairobi, Cairo, Paris (where he stayed for 27 days), Nairobi, Kinshasa, Cairo, Tunis, Tripoli, Paris, Cairo and Nairobi in order to facilitate the purchases.⁶⁰

However, in a letter to the exiled Rwandan Minister of Defence in December 1994, several months after the genocide, Mil-Tec complained of not having received payment for the ammunition shipment from Israel in June 1993, and of a payment from Cairo for the shipment from Albania in July 1994 being blocked by the Bank of New York:

Your Excellency, as you are well aware, we have been suppliers to your Ministry for over 5 years, and were able to assist you with supplies during your time of need….we were approached for very urgent supplies on the 10^th of April, after the tragic death of His Excellency the President, …as you see our first shipment was delivered 8 days later…Payments were made to us from Kigali, Belgium, France and Cairo, we also received 1 payment of 450,000 dollars from one of your suppliers (DYL INVESTMENTS) who was unable to fulfil his delivery commitments to you, but had been paid by your Ministry…A transfer of US dollars 578,654 was effected from Cairo for our last shipment on 18/7/94, we however never received the payment…We believe the blockade was initiated by the U.S. due to the situation in Rwanda at that time … may we also add that we are able to assist you in the future if you so require.⁶¹

The payment by DYL Investments refers to a French arms brokering company owned by Dominique Lemonnier.⁶² In 1991, he began working with arms suppliers in Poland through his Polish father to supply Burkina Faso, and then on 3 May 1993 managed to secure a $12,166 million contract with the Kigali regime to supply a large array of arms. Lemonnier registered his company in the Turks and Caicos Islands on 19 May after getting the contract. ⁶³ Nevertheless, he continued to operate from Cran-Gevrier, Haute-Savoie, in France, and used a cover address in Geneva, where he opened an
account with the Banque Internationale de Commerce. Between May and September 1993, DYL received four payments into the Geneva account from Kigali, each for $1,064,525. Deliveries of arms to Kigali were reportedly made from Poland and from the Israeli company, Universal, using East Africa Cargo airlines.⁶⁴

However, Lemonnier made the mistake of including DYL’s French address on the contract instead of only the British offshore tax haven.⁶⁵ Unlike the situation faced by Mil-Tec in the UK, DYL was supposed to have obtained prior authorization from the French Ministry of Defence. When his Polish source dried up, Lemonnier tried to
activate the Israeli one, but he was unable to secure an air shipping agent or carrier with the right to overfly countries between Tel Aviv and Kigali. When DYL failed make two-thirds of the arms deliveries, Lemonnier faced legal action in France to recover the $1,647,864.⁶⁶ By early May, DYL had to pay Mil-Tec $450,000. ⁶⁷ According to Mil-Tec records, this payment met costs for the third arms shipment to Goma. It also brought into play the services of an Afghan agent in Rome, Dr Ghazi Tamiz Ud Din Khan, who signed himself ‘Consulate General Rwanda in Rome’. After meeting Colonel Kayumba in Paris, he promised that the $970,000 order of ammunition and grenades was ‘ready…please wait tomorrow for the next fax, tonight we will listen to the phone’. ⁶⁸ UK aircrew collecting arms in Tirana at this time said Israeli supervisors had arrived in Tirana from Rome.

Who Cares About the Missing Million?

Since intentional obfuscation is the order of the day in the arms brokering and shipping business, many lingering but important questions inevitably remain unanswered, not least the origin of the funds used to purchase the arms for the before, during and after the Rwanda genocide. The $1,196,898 claimed by Mil-Tec from the Hutu regime for its arms deliveries appears to match the $1,197,864 owed to the regime by DYL. Why did a senior French official pursue this repayment on behalf of the Hutu regime? And did the $900,000 remaining in Ehlers’ Geneva account reflect a desperate attempt in June by the Hutu extremists to switch to another arms broker? Or was Ehlers more involved at a higher level from the start? And what happened to the money in Ehlers’ account? Whatever the answers, the actions of the collaborators are still unaccounted for under international law, while Ehlers and Vidyarthi remain free to continue arms dealing – unlike Lemonnier, who died of a heart attack in France in April 1997, only 44 years old.⁶⁹

The arms deals continued to be brokered and shipped for the retreating Hutu forces. On 15 April 1994, around the same time as the Mil-Tec deal, Colonel Gratien Kagiligi signed a $4.7 million contract for rifle ammunition, grenades, rockets and mortars with Oriental Machineries Inc. of Hong Kong and China. The contract specified that the arms would be delivered in C130 or Antonov 12 aircraft to destinations decided by the purchasers.⁷⁰ Europe, too, continued to be used as a platform as if nothing had happened. The Russian-Israeli owner of TIG Bulgaria and Phoenix Air Bulgaria later admitted in a UK news programme that a British company based at Gatwick had chartered his aircraft to fly arms to Goma in 1995. He said that he assumed it was a government-to-government delivery: ‘We fly if the documents are right. We don’t check the papers…we just check the export certificates.’ ⁷¹

In 1996, UNICOI received disturbing evidence of forcible fund-raising by the ex-FAR forces and their Interahamwe militia amongst Rwandan refugees, and of the production of counterfeit money in Kenya by exiled officials.⁷² These and other findings were not published for over a year, but leaked out and received significant international media coverage. However, two of the Commission’s most important recommendations – that arms monitors should be stationed at all ports of entry near Rwanda, and that arms traffickers operating from third countries with impunity should be confronted with new laws – were quietly ignored by governments. ⁷³

In November 1998, UNICOI published a final report, warning that the exiled Rwandan armed forces had scattered to many countries in Central and East Africa, and were not only launching attacks in Rwanda but also fighting in neighbouring Congo on the side of the new government’s armed forces and its allies. UNICOI reported a lack of cooperation by many governments in the region in tackling arms flows, and said that further illegal arms transfers had taken place during 1997 and 1998, but it did not publish any details.⁷⁴

In answer to a letter from UNICOI asking what action the UK government was taking on Mil-Tec, the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs replied on 9 October 1998 that there had been ‘delays and omissions in implementing the United Nations arms embargo’ in 1994. He went on to state that it had also concluded that ‘because the legislation imposing the embargo in the United Kingdom did not fully cover the supply of arms to neighbouring countries, the Customs and Excise investigation was unable to take forward criminal proceedings against Mil-Tec..’.⁷⁵ It should be recalled that by the last week of April 1994, humanitarian organizations were estimating that over 300,000 Rwandans had been killed. The UK government made no mention of a possible prosecution under the 1951 Genocide Convention. ⁷⁶

Likewise, the South African government told UNICOI that it had no previous powers to prosecute the offenders, but that it had passed a new law and was still investigating new reports of trafficking to Central Africa. The last UNICOI report did not state whether it had sent any letters to the governments of Albania, China, Israel and Italy regarding the further receipt of evidence of arms deliveries in breach of the embargo. The Bulgarian and French governments simply denied the further involvement of their nationals. Today the recommendations and future existence of UNICOI remain in doubt, but the Commission certainly prompted international awareness of the catastrophic consequences of small arms proliferation in Central Africa.

Meanwhile, in 1996 and 1997 the new government armed forces of Rwanda acquired significant quantities of arms from Romania, using a broker in Israel.⁷⁷ The Tutsi-dominated government also took delivery of arms from Bulgaria, China and South
Africa, as well as US military combat training, while carrying out numerous arbitrary killings of civilians, especially in eastern Zaire, where an estimated 200,000 Rwandan refugees were reported disappeared.⁷⁸ Officials in the supplying countries attempted to justify these arms shipments on the grounds that the armed opposition, including the perpetrators of the genocide, was still killing and abusing defenceless Rwandan civilians. Apparently, no lessons had been learned.

Bartering Arms for the Brazzaville Massacres

During 1997, the ethnic fighting spread from both the Great Lakes region and Angola towards the Congo Basin. The acquisition and circulation of weapons and ammunition was linked to the changing fortunes of opposing armed groups and their suppliers. Ex-FAR and Interahamwe killers retreated and scattered, some fleeing across the Congo River to support the rebellion in the Congo Republic (Brazzaville) in exchange for food and money. On the other side, the Congolese government army and its Israeli-trained militia⁷⁹ welcomed Mobutu’s retreating troops and Angola’s UNITA rebels. Their base in Zaire was under threat from the advancing forces of Kabila and the Rwandan and Ugandan armies. ⁸⁰ The Brazzaville (and new Kinshasa) political leadership resorted to bartering or mortgaging national assets or future production in
exchange for arms – and, unfettered, international arms brokers were ready to help, as the following account shows.

Fighting involving deliberate attacks on civilians erupted in Congo-Brazzaville in June 1997. By early October 1997 it had reached catastrophic proportions. Even the
personnel of the International Committee of the Red Cross had to withdraw from Brazzaville for a time, and it is claimed that as many as 15,000 Congolese civilians were killed and many more injured.⁸¹ The belligerents used small arms and heavier weaponry, including attack helicopters. Some of the equipment was supplied through West European dealers operating within Africa who took advantage of the fact that no arms embargo had been imposed on the Republic.

Documents found in the offices of the ousted government of Congo-Brazzaville showed that, between June and September 1997, a German arms broker and an arms trader allegedly of Belgian nationality supplied millions of dollars worth of military equipment to the forces of the beleaguered President Lissouba.⁸² The German dealer negotiated orders totalling $42.4 million, and received $27.1 million. ⁸³ Both dealers operated from South Africa using several companies registered in various countries, with French, Belgian and UK bank accounts. ⁸⁴ In addition, between January and July 1997, Italian traders supplied Congo-Brazzaville with 15 tons of cartridges apparently worth over $5 million. ⁸⁵ This shipment was delivered at a time when the rivalry
between political militias in the Congo was increasing and observers were warning of an outbreak of fighting and the probable slaughter of many more civilians.

Amongst the documents seized from the presidential palace by the militia of the new head of state, Sassou-Nguesso, is a letter dated 8 December 1997 from the former Congolese Prime Minister to the Director of Ebar Management & Trading Ltd in Pretoria, South Africa. The letter informs him about the visit of a mission on behalf of the Congolese Prime Minister, Bernard Kolelas, to discuss the purchase of planes, helicopters, trucks and an oil contract between the company in Pretoria and the Congolese government. The announced mission included the son of the Prime Minister and two other officials of the Prime Minister’s cabinet.⁸⁶

The director of Ebar, a German national based in South Africa, signed all but one of the proforma invoices sent to the Congo government between 1 June and 19 September 1997. The first was issued by CED Marketing based in Johannesburg, whose
director was the same German national, but was issued ‘on behalf of Support Systems Corporation (Pty) Ltd. and Exotek’.⁸⁷ It mentions an amount of $19.9 million for the supply of four Puma SA 330 L transport helicopters. It specifies that the aerospace corporation Denel Aviation of South Africa would ‘recondition’ these helicopters prior to delivery, after payment of half the price. In September, the director of President Lissouba’s cabinet, Claudine Munari, wrote that $10 million had been transferred to Ebar and a further $9 million to Ingwe Traders, another company linked to the German dealer. ⁸⁸ Other companies for which this dealer signed as a director are CED Marketing SA of Johannesburg and Caprivi Cargo – the latter being a South African freight company based in Namibia that was allegedly used for shipment to Pointe Noire in Congo-Brazzaville. ⁸⁹

The other invoices relate to the registration of Antonov AN-24 and AN-26 aircraft, to the costs of the crews required to pilot them, and to the supply of Unimog and IVECO trucks. One invoice states that: ‘all items are sourced, shipped and delivered via SAPROD Namibia.’ Arms appear also to have been shipped from South Africa and from some Central Asian republics using large Ukrainian-registered llyushin 76 cargo aircraft which flew via airports in Namibia and Egypt.⁹⁰

Another document dated 27 June 1997 and signed by the German broker as chairman of CED Marketing acknowledged an order from the Congo-Brazzaville government for the purchase of two MI-17 IV transport helicopters. This deal was reportedly made through the Belgian manager of a company called Sablon Trading, which had an account at the First National Bank in Johannesburg.⁹¹ According to the letter, the helicopters were ordered from an ‘East European’ supplier. Other documents show that a contract existed between the Kirghiz Republic (Kyrgyzstan) and the Brazzaville government for the purchase of five MI-8 and three MI-24 attack helicopters. ⁹²

A fax sent by the Belgian trader to Lissouba’s secretary mentioned another order of five helicopters. A technical note specifies that the MI-17 IV helicopter can be used as a combat helicopter with rockets, guns and bombs. This bears handwritten notations on the cost of the rockets. Combat helicopters piloted by East European mercenaries reportedly began firing indiscriminately on civilian areas in Brazzaville on 19 August, and were allegedly used to bomb civilians in the Mpila and Poto-Poto districts of Brazzaville on 26 August 1997 and again on 10 September.⁹³ The new Congo-Brazzaville government said that this was a crime against humanity and submitted evidence to the United Nations, as well as to the French, Belgian, German and US governments. ⁹⁴

The documents also indicate that President Lissouba’s government concluded an oil-for-arms deal with the German broker to obtain these helicopters. On 2 October 1997 the German signed a contract for a loan of $100 million with the then ministers of economics and oil of the Congo. In this contract, the Congo government committed
itself to provide Ebar with 160,000 barrels of crude oil per month over five years from 1 November 1997. The first disbursement of $50 million should have been made on 17 October, two days after Lissouba was overthrown. ⁹⁵

All of the above might explain why the documents reveal that on 30 June 1997, President Lissouba asked the director of Fiba, a bank reported to be the ‘in-house bank’ of the French oil giant Elf Aquitaine,⁹⁶ to make three transfers. First, $5.7 million was to be paid into ‘La Belgolaise’ account in Brussels of a Belgian company; secondly, $1.8 million was to be paid into the Commercial Bank of Namibia account of Support Systems Corporation (linked to CED Marketing, Exotek and to the German broker); and thirdly, $5.8 million was to be paid into the Barclays Bank account in Jersey of Ebar Management and Trading. On 23 September, the Congolese cabinet secretary told the German dealer: ‘there are at your disposal in our bank in Paris (Fiba) two cheques of $500, 000 each (no 1601 and no 1602 American Express) payable to BD International and CED.’ ⁹⁷ Two days later, the German dealer acknowledged receipt.

Sassou-Nguesso was sworn in as President of Congo on 25 October. The following day, he met the President-Director of Elf Aquitaine, and it was reported that Fiba stopped the accounts of the former regime.⁹⁸ On 20 November 1997 it was reported that Lissouba had filed a complaint at the High Court in Paris against Elf for its ‘aid to General Sassou for the execution of his coup’ against him. His lawyer told French newspapers that Lissouba had access to documents proving the use of the Fiba (French) and Belgolaise (Belgian) banks for the purchase of arms by Sassou-Nguesso. The French judge reportedly declared that he had ‘no jurisdiction to hear the matter’. ⁹⁹ In mid-1998, President Nguesso’s government published a report detailing what it called genocide and war crimes by forces of former President Lissouba, but failed to address its own widespread abuses. Armed clashed resumed in August 1998 with the killing of hundreds of unarmed civilians. ¹⁰⁰

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Preface / Acknowledgments / Introduction / Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7 / Chapter 8 / Chapter 9 / Chapter 10 / Chapter 11

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25/11/1999 - NISAT