Africa’s most notorious gunrunner is rarely seen these days at his gracious mansion, whose walls overlook the mud lanes and banana groves of this obscure equatorial town.
“Mister Victor’s house,” as it is locally known, seems eerily still. A door buzzer goes unanswered. And when a tight-lipped neighbor suggests knocking again the next morning, a return visit reveals shiny new padlocks on the compound’s imposing iron gates.
Mister Victor–or Victor Anatoliyevich Bout, a shadowy ex-Soviet air force officer and KGB agent accused of fueling Africa’s bloodiest wars for profit–clearly is out. Where he has gone, only Interpol can guess.
Shuttling discreetly between Africa, the Persian Gulf and Russia, the mastermind behind one of the largest and most devious arms smuggling networks in the world leaves few trails, and has been photographed only once in recent years.
“He’s incredibly shrewd, and that’s why he hasn’t been caught,” says a South African investigator familiar with Bout’s illicit arms dealings in Africa. “It also helps, of course, that the laws covering this nasty business have got holes in them big enough to fly cargo planes through.”
Lax laws, poor international police coordination and yawning government indifference are all on the agenda Monday as diplomats gather at the United Nations headquarters in New York to try to curb the shady operations of global gun dealers such as Bout.
Shocked by the toll that dozens of low-tech conflicts worldwide are taking on civilian populations and spurred on by human-rights groups that have been arguing for a crackdown on arms merchants for years, the UN delegates hope to begin setting up procedures to stop the destructive trade.
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Unscrupulous arms dealers
Since the end of the Cold War, experts say, some 300,000 to 500,000 people have been dying yearly in battle zones from Chechnya to Colombia, from Sierra Leone to Sri Lanka. The vast majority are killed by light weapons such as rifles, machine guns and grenades–the leftover arsenal of East-West conflict, now often fallen into the hands of unscrupulous arms dealers.
The legal aspects of the trade, guarded jealously by arms exporters such as the United States, Russia and China, will not be affected by any accords coming out of the July 9-20 conference.
“It’s going to be tough enough to get some real concrete action against the smugglers,” said Joost Hiltermann, an arms-control expert with Human Rights Watch in Washington. “Many of the bad guys work for government intelligence agencies, and they’re considered assets.”
At a minimum, conference supporters hope that the UN will start to pry open the door to the murky netherworld of arms trafficking.
For years, shady weapons brokers and dealers have blurred the line between legality and illegality, selling their deadly wares to legitimate governments and warlords alike.
The latest case is that of Vladimiro Montesinos, the former Peruvian intelligence chief who is accused of funneling 10,000 AK-47 rifles to drug-growing, leftist Colombian guerrillas while simultaneously working to stamp out the guerrillas with the CIA.
The dark lure of gun profits has further tarnished the reputation of former Argentine President Carlos Menem, indicted last week for allegedly facilitating illegal arms shipments to Ecuador and Croatia.
Elusive bogeyman
Yet if the UN focuses its wrath on a single bogeyman, it could do no better than choose Victor Bout.
Intelligent, suave, fluent in at least six languages, Bout fascinates arms-control experts due to the extraordinary success of his operations, and the sprawling size of his market–war-bloodied Africa.
According to the UN investigators who first exposed his dealings in a series of landmark diamonds-for-guns reports last year, Bout has a virtual stranglehold on weapons smuggling on the troubled continent.
Western intelligence sources say he has supplied guns to every major African conflict over the last five years–sometimes arming both sides–and specialized in countries and rebel groups under UN embargo for their exceptional brutality. In return, his planes often fly out laden with diamonds, the valuable industrial mineral coltan and other spoils of war.
“Everywhere we looked we saw hints of Bout,” said a UN source who asked not to be named. “He seems like a very energetic man.”
Reportedly only 34, and born in the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan–though even this much is unclear because he uses several aliases and carries at least five passports–Bout was ideally positioned to cash in on the booming small arms trade in the 1990s.
A Russian air force officer at the strategic airbase of Lipetsk at the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse, he used his military and intelligence connections to begin hawking guns from bankrupted and poorly regulated East bloc weapons factories.
First, investigators say, he supplied equipment to the militias opposing the Taliban in Afghanistan.
But he soon discovered the bonanza of violence that was Africa.
In the mid-1990s, say European intelligence sources, he was flying one Ilyushin cargo plane out of Ostend airport in Belgium, allegedly arming the Hutu extremists who had earlier carried out the genocide in Rwanda, where an estimated 800,000 Tutsis were killed over a 13-week period in 1994.
Later, Bout relocated to South Africa, where he had 20 to 40 Soviet-era planes at his disposal.
In a pattern that would mark his shadowy progress across the continent, Bout abandoned South Africa abruptly when local officials began investigating him for air safety irregularities and smuggling. Since then, he has skipped from backwater to backwater, operating under flags of convenience in both the Central African Republic and Equatorial Guinea.
Today, Bout–also known as Victor Butt, Boutov, Budd and Bouta–bases himself mostly in Kigali, Rwanda, where he reputedly enjoys the protection of powerful military officials.
Aside from the empty mansion in Entebbe, he has left behind three palatial houses in Johannesburg and one in Ostend. He still keeps a villa in Sharjah, a city in the United Arab Emirates where his wife and daughter live, and where one of his many airline companies, Air Cess, is based.
Feeling the heat?
“They’ve basically shut him down there, too,” said Brian Wood, an arms expert with Amnesty International in London. “I get the sense that he’s feeling the heat.”
Currently under UN investigation for shipping helicopter gunships from Kyrgyzstan to Africa via Slovakia, Bout did not answer repeated Tribune requests through an intermediary for an interview.
Supremely elusive, he surfaced most recently in May, when a team of Belgian journalists bumped into him in rebel-held eastern Congo. Clad in khakis and a ball cap, the most infamous arms trader in Africa was flying his own cargo plane, ushering around Russian geologists in a search for diamonds.
“He comes across as a quite pleasant person, not dodgy at all,” said Deirdre Ward, who for a year was a partner in Bout’s South African air cargo operation, a company called Air Pass that was cited for almost 150 violations of civil aviation laws.
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“We certainly had no idea he was doing bad things,” Ward claimed. “It was like he led a double life.”
According to South African authorities, Bout’s planes were linked to dozens of illicit arms flights from Bulgaria to UNITA rebels in neighboring Angola in the late 1990s.
UNITA is under a UN arms embargo for prolonging a grinding civil war in Angola, where an estimated 500,000 people have died because of the conflict.
Bout got his foothold in Angola, South African military sources say, when he worked as a translator for the KGB.
Allegations discounted
A far-flung colleague of Bout, however, discounts such allegations. “Here we have this superman who is supposed to be destabilizing a whole continent,” said Richard Chichakli, Bout’s American accountant in Richardson, Texas.
“So why isn’t Victor in jail? Is that stupid or what?” he asked.
That mocking challenge is sure to echo in the ears of the UN delegates, who face the task of wringing action out of a gathering that some human-rights experts concede is largely symbolic.
By employing old tricks such as forging paperwork, using front companies, or simply bribing underpaid customs agents and airport officials, old hands such as Bout are likely to evade justice despite the best reforms, diplomats admit.
“It’s a piecemeal thing that you have to build up over time,” said Herbert Calhoun, an arms trafficking expert at the State Department and a delegate to the UN conference. “No one country can get its hands around this problem.”
In the meantime, plying the hazy skies over Africa, Victor Bout remains untroubled by a single arms trafficking warrant against him.