The Arms Fixers

Today, an important aspect of Europe’s key role in international arms brokering routes is to be found in Eastern Europe. Here we find companies that are
significant international suppliers of cheap small arms, ammunition, grenades, military vehicles, armoured personnel carriers, and attack and transport helicopters for clients in conflict zones. Surplus stocks from former Soviet military bases all over Eastern Europe have turned into warehouses for weapons brokers based in Western Europe. Shopping lists circulate between traders and suppliers; when a recipient is found who cannot buy in the mainstream government markets, the weaponry is shipped by civilian cargo companies to a transit point, from where it is transported to a final destination in a war zone. Once the war is over, large quantities of weapons are stockpiled or exported abroad, often through the same brokering channels that were used as supply channels during the war.

Before his arrest in March 1998, Geza Mezosy was such a broker. He has a Belgian passport but his parents were immigrants from Hungary and Yugoslavia. Using his Central European background, he started to broker arms deals from Belgium, Luxembourg and Hungary for suppliers in Eastern Europe.¹ His company Eastronicom SA was registered in Belgium in 1989, and he obtained a licence to import, sell, store and export weapons in the same year. He also had a company called Laser in Hungary, as well as several companies based in Luxemburg. He opened up business contacts in Central and Eastern Europe to serve a transcontinental list of clients. On the local level Mezosy was also supplying black-market circuits in Belgium.² The sales register of his company shows that his main supplier of the weaponry in the early years of his business career was the now liquidated Hungarian company Technika.³

Mezosy lost his dealer’s licence in Belgium in 1993 after the police had searched the premises of another weapons dealer where Mezosy kept a small stock of samples to demonstrate to his clients.⁴ A number of weapons had not been declared and Mezosy was arrested shortly after the raid. One month later he was released, but the Governor of the Province of Brabant (Belgium) nevertheless refused to grant him a new licence in February 1994, because Mezosy remained under suspicion while a police investigation was in progress.⁵ A few weeks before Mezosy’s stock was confiscated, an article in the American magazine Forbes about the illegal trade in ex-Soviet arms had named Mezosy and his company Eastronicom. Forbes reported that Mezosy was acting as a middleman for the sale of illicit sale of weapons, supplied by the Bulgarian company Kintex, to the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia.⁶ The magazine had found his company’s name on a $15 million order with Mali as the official destination, but the embargoed government forces in Bosnia were the real recipients.⁷ ‘After first denying any involvement, Mezosy now says he sells Soviet-standard weapons to Bosnia for "humanitarian reasons"’, Forbes reported.

The loss of his Belgian dealer’s licence did not stop Mezosy from going on with his trade. Through a company registered in Luxemburg but with offices in Belgium, he remained active on both the national and the international levels.⁸ Invoices to the company in Luxembourg, to the attention of Mezosy and a French partner, dated May 1995, confirm orders by the company of several hundred pistols and a number of submachine guns, with an import licence for Luxembourg.⁹ Mezosy and his partner, although acting through the Luxemburg company, were running their business from an office in Brussels and using the Luxemburg company letterhead, as other correspondence from the same period shows.¹⁰ A fax transmission from the Luxemburg
company’s Brussels representative office to Eastronicom, dated 7 December 1995, again confirms that the lack of a Belgian dealer’s licence did not seriously hamper Mezosy’s activities, and that he even still used his old Belgian-registered company for these purposes.

In May 1996, three years after Mezosy had lost his Belgian licence, a suspect was
arrested near Brussels international airport. In his car the police found 25,000 ecstasy tablets, 10 CZ-pistols and a Yugoslavian-produced Uzi-submachine gun with
silencer.¹¹ Further investigations in Belgium led to nine other arrests and the seizure of hundreds of illegally imported military firearms, grenades, ammunition and explosives.¹² During questioning the suspects mentioned Geza Mezosy. In the course of the surveillance operation by the police at Brussels airport that led to the arrest of the suspect, another man had showed up in a car with a Luxemburg licence plate. The
description of the man and the licence plate again pointed in the direction of Mezosy.¹³ Consequently, Mezosy’s premises in Belgium were searched and several documents were confiscated, but no arms were found. When questioned, he denied having anything to do with the drugs or weapons found in the car at Brussels airport or at the premises of the other suspects. The police did not arrest him.¹⁴ In December 1996, ten individuals connected to this case, most of whom already had previous convictions for arms-trafficking charges, were convicted and given severe prison sentences.¹⁵

Some of the accused had confessed that they were functioning as couriers and straw men for Mezosy. They explained that Mezosy had introduced them to his arms suppliers in Croatia.¹⁶ They were supposed to drive to Croatia by car to pick up small quantities of weaponry and to deliver these to Mezosy in Belgium, who paid them a
commission. During interrogation, two of the suspects also mentioned large quantities of M-16s, US-produced rifles that were leftovers from the Vietnam War. A contact of Mezosy in Croatia, a Frenchman, had access to the US-produced assault rifles; the suspects were expected to find clients for the weaponry.¹⁷ The suspects claimed the weaponry that the police had found were only samples, given to them by Mezosy.¹⁸ One suspect also mentioned a British supply line of Ingram submachine guns.
Although no business connection could be established between the British company and Mezosy, an invoice for the British company was found when the police searched the premises of a relative of Mezosy.¹⁹ In December 1996, Mezosy was convicted
together with the other suspects to three years’ imprisonment, but he had already fled Belgium soon after having been questioned.²⁰

Mezosy had found refuge in South Africa, where he arrived in May 1996 on a temporary residence permit. Upon arrival in South Africa, he wasted no time. The domestic market for pistols was expanding very rapidly, in parallel with gun-related crime, and gun licences were easy to obtain. He immediately started prospecting the South African market and established a new trading company, BEZA Import & Export.²¹ He applied for an arms dealer’s licence. The ‘date of commencement of business’ mentioned on the application was 1 June 1996. The South African Police granted the licence in November 1996.²²

On 8 July 1996, six weeks after his arrival in South Africa, Mezosy mailed a letter to several gun dealers in various parts of South Africa, presenting himself as a major importer of Spanish-produced firearms from the company Llama Gabilondo Y CIA, S.A.²³ A letter from the Spanish company to Mezosy’s company BEZA shows that the Spanish company was not pleased with Mezosy’s mailing in South Africa, noting that ‘Mezosy had absolutely no right to make the claim’ that he was Llama’s exclusive agent.²⁴ Other correspondence with the company shows that Mezosy was persistently trying to
convince the directors of the company in Spain to recognize his marketing talents and that he was placing large orders for hundreds of firearms to the company.

Although several letters point to business transactions going on between the two companies,²⁵ Mezosy was advised not to overestimate his marketing potential in South Africa: ‘Are you really sure that Mr. Mezosy, who is new in the market, will really be able to maintain 6 shipments for a total quantity of 1,500 pieces throughout this year?’, the Managing Director of the company in Spain is quoted as saying in one of the letters to Mezosy.²⁶ Apart from the 1,500 guns, mostly 9 mm and .45 calibre handguns, Mezosy also wanted to import significant amounts of spare parts and ammunition. An invoice from Llama, dated 10 December 1996, totalled 1,200,000 pesetas in arrears payments. In January 1997, Mezosy wrote to the commercial director in Spain saying that he intended ‘to push the product to a maximum on the market’. In order to do that, Mezosy claimed he had worked out a profit-sharing system with a company in South Africa called Centurion, with branches in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban and Port Elizabeth, to distribute the 1,500 pistols from Llama. In a remarkable request by Mezosy, he wrote: ‘Of course we would like to receive the goods in kit but maybe you will have to put in the guns "assembled in RSA" and allocate other serial numbers than yours.’²⁷

When the Public Prosecutor in Brussels issued an international warrant for his arrest in January 1997, Mezosy’s permit to stay in South Africa had already expired, but Belgian authorities did not initially know he was living there. By the time they found out, Mezosy had applied for asylum in South Africa. In March 1998, he was eventually
arrested in South Africa on an Interpol warrant issued by Belgian authorities.²⁸
According to press reports in South Africa, Mezosy was arrested on an Interpol warrant but was also ‘suspected of trafficking arms from the Czech Republic to several African states, including Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, the Central African Republic and Ethiopia’.²⁹ According to a report in The East African, Mezosy was suspected of supplying modern weapons, such as AK-74’s and old US leftovers from the Vietnam War to conflicting countries in Africa.³⁰ The weekly
reported that this could be deduced from a personal computer database of Mezosy, which referred to a great number of African countries.

Interviews with the police officer who arrested and questioned Mezosy in South
Africa and with a Belgian police officer investigating the case confirm that Mezosy’s digital diary contained a list of over 20 African and Latin American countries under a heading ‘M-16 A’. On the basis of the confessions of several of Mezosy’s accomplices in Belgium who had referred to ‘large quantities of M-16s’,³¹ the police in Belgium and South Africa were led to believe that Mezosy was indeed a major illegal weapons supplier of African conflicting parties, but apart from the evidence in the digital diary, no proof could be found to charge him with these offences. It seems more likely,
according to the investigating officers, that Mezosy was prospecting to find clients for the M-16s from his Croatian-based supplier, and that the list of African countries in his digital diary referred to the national arms inventories of those countries where the M-16 is already in use.³²

In May 1998, Mezosy was extradited to Belgium, where his original conviction was confirmed. He was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. The charges were fraud and illegal arms trafficking to and from the former Yugoslav Republics of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina – at a time when both these republics were under UN embargo – and the illegal importation, delivery and sale of arms in Belgium. Mezosy also confessed, in October 1998, that he had supplied the Norinco-gun that was used in a brutal murder case in Belgium. Mezosy had met the suspected killer in 1991 and they had become friends because they had ‘a common interest: the arms trade’, he told the
police after being confronted with the invoices for the sale of the Norinco-gun to the suspected killer.³³

On the day of Mezosy’s arrest at his luxurious home in Midrand, South Africa, a business partner of his was also present – a man who signed himself ‘captain’ on fax transmissions from South Africa. ‘Captain’ was a partner in Mezosy’s South African company Beza.³⁴ He was identified as a former Belgian convict³⁵ who had fled to Latin America in the 1980s, later moving to South Africa, and is suspected of being a key player in a series of brutal armed robberies and killings in Belgium.³⁶ Soon after Mezosy’s arrest, ‘Captain’ left South Africa for an unknown destination in Southern Africa. Mezosy is still in prison.

Exploiting Western Government Surpluses

It is not only in Eastern Europe that states fail to keep proper records of arms stockpiles, and that uncontrolled surpluses left over from the Cold War get siphoned off into the international marketplace. For example, in 1996 the Austrian Ministry of Defence sold 40,000 obsolete StG-58 assault rifles to a Swiss trading company called Brügger + Thomet Feinmechanik.³⁷ The Austrian Interior Ministry authorized the
export of the weapons to Switzerland; but, while these remained stored in Austrian military warehouses between March 1997 and September 1998, the Swiss company sold 17,000 of them to foreign customers.³⁸

Under Austrian law, military assault rifles have to be deactivated or demilitarized
before being exported, unless the Cabinet explicitly authorizes the sale of military equipment to a foreign client. Cabinet authorization should result in the issuance of an export certificate. However, Brügger + Thomet was able to re-export the rifles from Austria to its clients without such approval. Part of the weaponry sold to foreign
clients was demilitarized, but much of it was not.

A large proportion of the rifles were actually exported from Austria with Swiss transit documents, but without any specific export authorization from the Austrian government.³⁹ Recipients were the military and the prison service in Botswana, as well as various arms dealers in the Netherlands, Romania, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and the USA. In September 1996, the Austrian authorities had issued an export licence for the 40,000 assault rifles to Switzerland with a written remark containing a list of the
‘possible destinations’ of the StG-58s. But no export licences had been issued in
Austria when the actual sale of the weaponry to private companies in these countries took place.⁴⁰

Remarkably, a letter dated 23 November 1998 from the Swiss company to the
Austrian Ministry of the Interior requested certificates for the export of 1,575 StG-58 assault rifles and later one hundred StG-58s to Botswana, but the Swiss transit documents for these weapons were issued in November 1996 and February 1998 respectively. Attached to the request, the Swiss company provided copies of three end-user certificates from a commander of the Botswana Defence Force and a commissioner of the Botswana Prison Service, dated 10 June 1997, 17 July 1997 and 6 January 1998. The documents mention 1500, 100 and 75 items respectively. According to the end-user certificate for the two shipments to the Botswana Defence Force, another private company, ‘Beaverpride Holdings’, is stated as the supplier. The Botswana Defence Force is stated as the end-user. On the sales register of Brügger + Thomet, the transactions with clients in Botswana are dated October 1997 and April 1998.

According this register, another deal by the Swiss company was the sale on 9 July 1997 of 1,000 rifles to the AcvilaGroup, a company in Bucharest, Romania.⁴¹ At the time of the sale, the original company Brügger + Thomet Feinmechanik had been deregistered in Switzerland. A new company Brügger + Thomet AG was not registered until six weeks after the indicated sale. Switzerland only issued a transit certificate in March 1997 for the transport of the weapons from Austria to Romania. The transit document mentions 5,200 FN FALs, including accessories. No export licence was
issued in Austria or in Switzerland. It is not clear whether a Romanian import certificate or an end-user certificate was issued.⁴²

There was also the sale of 400 assault rifles shown on an import certificate issued by the Dutch Department for Import and Export of the Ministry for Economic Affairs, dated 22 October 1998.⁴³ The importer in this case is mentioned as ‘J.F.Y. PO BOX 145, 3632 ZT Loenen Aan De Vecht’. The exporter is said to be the Austrian Ministry of Defence with a PO Box in Vienna, but no export licence was issued by Austria for the transaction.⁴⁴ The deal was brokered by Brügger + Thomet in Switzerland. No end-user certificate was issued in the Netherlands either. The sales register of the Swiss company listing the sales of the assault rifles includes three similar exports to the same PO Box in the Netherlands.⁴⁵

None of the entries in the sales list mentions the demilitarization or deactivation of the weapons, nor is there a copy of the ‘deactivation protocol’ required under Austrian export regulations.⁴⁶

On 4 November 1998, the successor company Brügger + Thomet AG received a letter from the Austrian Ministry of the Interior in Vienna containing a reminder of the original contract agreement and referring to Austrian export regulations and restrictions. It was generally understood that the 40,000 assault rifles had been sold after being deactivated (demilitarized), and possibly sold to the collectors’ markets in
Japan, Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada, the USA, France, the UK and Northern Ireland. The weapons could be sold without Austrian government approval, provided they were exported – after deactivation – to Switzerland. ⁴⁷

Brügger + Thomet acknowledged these contract restrictions in a written reply of 23 November 1998, but the company was under the impression that no further authorization by the Austrian government for transactions was required for re-export.⁴⁸ ‘It goes without saying’, the letter states, ‘the prison guard/service of Botswana only procures fully operational StG 58’s.’ The company further provides the annexed list of the 24 transactions of the assault rifles that took place up to September 1998. Deactivation of the exported rifles is mentioned with regard to only three out of the 24 listed cases.

The letter also includes a wish list of Austrian export licences for the past transactions, in order to regularize the past illegal sales as well as to proceed with several new sales to Italy, France and Switzerland.⁴⁹ Anticipating further deliveries to Italy, Spain, France and the Netherlands, the Swiss company requested ‘a generalized export authorization for the entire European Union, Switzerland and the US.’ The company stressed the need for speed, ‘preferably before 10 December 1998, in view of the
entering into force of new Swiss arms legislation on 1 January 1999.’

These cases illustrate why United Nations experts concluded in 1999 that states generally do not keep precise, centralized and accessible records and accounts of existing stocks of small arms and light weapons, including ammunition, deemed surplus to
national requirements, obsolete or unserviceable.⁵⁰ The lack of careful management of surpluses is yet another attraction to brokers eager to find cheap sources of supply to maximize their profit margins.

¹    We collected information through several contacts with officials, private investigators, law-enforcement officers, researchers and journalists in Belgium and South Africa; we were also able to inspect documents, including correspondence between Mezosy’s companies and some of his clients and suppliers.
²    In 1996 Mezosy was charged in absentia in Belgium on charges of fraud, illegal arms trafficking to embargoed Bosnia-Herzegovina and the illegal importation, delivery and sale of arms in Belgium.
³    Copy of Trade Register listing suppliers and clients for the period 1989–91.
⁴    This dealer was later reported to be a major supplier of weaponry and mercenaries for the ousted president of Congo Brazzaville, Pascal Lissouba. See Gary Jones, ‘Blood On Our Hands’, The Mirror, 8 March 1999.
⁵    Interviews with the investigating police officers in Belgium, February 1999.
⁶    The European Community decided to ban all arms deliveries to Yugoslavia on 5 July 1991. The UN Security Council imposed an international arms embargo against Yugoslavia on 25 September 1991 (UN Security Council Resolution 713). This embargo was subsequently reaffirmed in UNSCR 724, 727, 740, 743 and 787. All the warring parties on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, whether recognized states or non-state parties, were subject to the arms embargo.
⁷    Peter Fuhrman, ‘Trading in Death’, Forbes, May 10 1993.
⁸    Copy of the Warrant for his Arrest, April 1997. Additional information: ‘Onrust over wapenhandel vanuit ex-Joegoslavië’, De Morgen, 23 May 1996.
⁹    Copies of invoices are in our possession.
¹⁰    Copies of invoices.
¹¹    ‘Onrust ….’, De Morgen.
¹²    Ibid.
¹³    Copy of ‘Warrant by Default. From the Public Prosecutor of the District of Brussels, April 1997’. Additional interview with police officers in Belgium and South Africa.
¹⁴    Copy of Police document No. 101758, dated 21 June 1996, Rijkswacht BOB Asse (Special Branch of the Belgian National Guard), Asse.
¹⁵    Conviction by the 51st Chamber of the Correctional Court of Brussels, 10 December 1996.
¹⁶    Warrant by Default. Additional interview with police officer in Belgium, February 1999.
¹⁷    Ibid.
¹⁸    Ibid.
¹⁹    Interview with Belgian police officer, February 1999.
²⁰    Ibid.
²¹    The company was registered in South Africa under registration number CK 96/24313/23.
²²    Application for a Licence to Deal in Arms and Ammunition, South African Police, and Licence to Deal in Arms and Ammunition, Date 7 November 1996. We were able to inspect both these documents.
²³    Copy of the letter. We are in possession of the correspondence between Mezosy and the Spanish company’s representatives in Spain. We wish to point out that nothing in this correspondence suggests that the Spanish company was aware that Mezosy had a criminal record. In his capacity as a South African-registered arms dealer he was considered a legitimate client or agent for the Spanish company.
²⁴    Letter from Llama Gabilondo to Mezosy, dated 13 July 1996.
²⁵    A letter from the Spanish company addressed to Mezosy, dated 29 July 1996, reads ‘Our Bank has not yet received any transfer from you’. Several other letters over the period from July 1996 to early 1997 contain similar complaints from the Spanish company.
²⁶    Letter from Llama to Mezosy, dated 21 January 1997.
²⁷    Letter from BEZA Import & Export to the Commercial Director of Llama Gabilondo, dated 21 January 1997.
²⁸    ‘South Africans hold Belgian on Gun-Running Charges’, Sapa-AFP, 6 April 1998.
²⁹    Ibid. Also ‘SA Police to Launch Investigation into Belgian National’, Sapa, 7 April 1998; Sonja Deysel, ‘SA lewer man uit aan België’, Beeld, 7 May 1998.
³⁰    Chris Erasmus, ‘Uganda Link in Belgian Arms Exporter’s Web’, The East African, 9 April 1998.
³¹    Interviews, also Warrant by Default, From the Public Prosecutor of the District of Brussels, April 1997.
³²    Interviews. The list corresponds with the ‘National Inventories’-pages of the 18th Edition (1992–93) of the specialized Infantry Weapons Yearbook of the London-based Jane’s Information Group. A Belgian police officer confirmed that a copy of this Yearbook was found during searches of Mezosy’s premises.
³³    Interview with the Belgian police officer who questioned Mezosy in October 1998. Also: Roger Huisman, ‘Gerecht kent leverancier moordwapen Van Noppen’, Gazet van Antwerpen, 19–20 June 1999.
³⁴    The application for BEZA’s Licence to Deal in Arms and Ammunition mentions him as one of the applicants.
³⁵    Walter de Bock, Maarten Rabaey, ‘Belgen betrokken bij wapensmokkel naar Centraal-Afrika’, De Morgen, 11 May 1998. We were able to inspect a copy of a document from Interpol South Africa, confirming these facts.
³⁶    The ‘warehouse murders’ carried out between 1982 and 1985 involved the deaths of 28 people and wounding of several others. The series of robberies was apparently connected to a right-wing destabilization campaign, and remains one of Belgium’s unsolved judicial mysteries. Mezosy’s partner also has a criminal record in Belgium for aggravated theft and murder.
³⁷    The Stg-58 or Sturmgewehr-58 is an Austrian-produced assault rifle, based on the original Belgian FN-FAL. Originally Austria imported such rifles from the Belgian Fabrique Nationale , but in 1958 the Austrian producer Steyr-Daimler-Puch started manufacturing the StG-58 as a standard rifle for the Austrian Army. Three decades later, a modified version, the StG-77, became the new standard military rifle and the older weapons were mothballed and stockpiled.
³⁸    ‘FN Fal StG-58 Verkaufsnachweis’, a document listing 24 transactions, was attached to a letter from Brügger + Thomet AG to the Austrian Ministry of the Interior, dated 23 November 1998.
³⁹    For some of the transactions explicit export licences were eventually granted, but only a year or even 18 months after the weapons had been sold abroad, ‘Verkauf van 40.000 gebrauchten StG-58 auf dem Weltwaffenmarkt durch das Bundesministerium für Landesverteidigung’, Pressekonferenz, Der Grüne Klub im Parlament, 9 December 1998. (Most documents and a detailed chronology of the facts were distributed during this Press Conference, organized by the Green Party in the Austrian Parliament.)
⁴⁰    ‘Sicherheit/Bundesheer: Verteidigungsminister hat Kriegsmaterialgesetz eingehalten’, OTS-Presseaussendung, OTS219 5 II 0185 NLA002, 9 November 1998 (Communiqué of the Austrian Defence Ministry on the case).
⁴¹    The list was attached to a letter that Brügger + Thomet AG sent to the Austrian Interior Ministry on 23 November 1998.
⁴²    ‘Verkauf van 40.000 gebrauchten StG-58…’ (See note 39 above.)
⁴³    Internationaal Importcertiticaat, Koninkrijk der Nederlanden, Belastingdienst/Douane, Centrale Dienst voor In- en Uitvoer, 22 October 1998.
⁴⁴    ‘Verkauf van 40.000 gebrauchten StG-58’… Acknowledgments to Dr. Peter Steyrer, Parliamentary Advisor on Peace and Security, Green Party in the Austrian Parliament for information obtained.
⁴⁵    Fifteen went to JFY Arms in July 1997, 75 in August 1979, and another 75 in October 1997. When we discussed the issue with an official of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Export Controls Department, it seemed that the Dutch authorities were not aware that no export licence had been granted. The Dutch authorities did, however, check the P.O. Box company, and found that it did belong to a registered arms dealer (telephone conversations 18–19 June 1999).
⁴⁶    Some of the documents list the producing company of the obsolete weapons as the exporting party, implying some of the weapons may have been upgraded from semi-automatic to automatic rifles.
⁴⁷    Answer of the Austrian Defence Ministry before the Austrian Parliament, 100057 AB, 23 June 1995.
⁴⁸    Letter from Brügger + Thomet AG to the Austrian Ministry of the Interior, Spiez, Switzerland, 23 November 1998.
⁴⁹    Ibid.
⁵⁰    Report of the Group of Experts on the Problem of Ammunition and Explosives, UN General
Assembly, A/54/115, par. 59–61.