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Saddam's Serb supplier: how our last enemy has been arming our next one
Washington Monthly, March, 2003 by Dave Marash
LAST OCTOBER, SEVERAL DOZEN American troops assembled outside an anonymous new low-rise factory building a half-empty industrial park on the out-skirts of Bijeljina, a small town in north-eastern Bosnia. The owner of the factory, a firm called Orao, was well known among arms dealers and weapons manufacturers. During the 1980s, when a sull-intact Yugoslavia maintained the fourth largest military in Europe, Orao was the Yugoslav Air Force's contractor of choice for jet engine maintenance. After the partition of Bosnia in 1995 and in defiance of U.N. sanctions, they went into business with a new client: Saddam Hussein. Orao became Iraq's prime contractor for servicing its Mig-21 jet engines.
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When NATO soldiers finally raided the plant, seizing everything on site, they found, among other things, a long letter on the stationary of Yugoimport, the Yugoslav government's arms trading company. The letter explained to the firm's Baghdad buyer what to do if U.N. weapons inspectors arrived. First, it instructed, the Iraqis were to remove all evidence of the Orao connection and disassemble the engines. Once the inspectors left, the letter continued, Orao would reassemble the upgraded MiG-21 jet engine--free of charge, as part of the contract agreement.
Few Americans know about the connection between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the former Yugoslav National Army, the front end of a military-industrial complex riddled with mafia connections and ties to Serbian nationalist groups. But the story is a cautionary tale about how, at the dawn of the 21st century, the lawlessness and chaos of one rogue regime or failed state can--if left untended--spill over into the affairs of others, with potentially dreadful consequences.
Three American administrations have now had to grapple with the wreckage of the former Yugoslavia, with little Success. The administration of George H.W. Bush did its best to avoid involvement in the Balkans; as then-Secretary of State James Baker famously said, "We've got no dog in this fight." When the Clinton administration finally intervened in force, first in Bosnia and later in Kosovo, the effect was more to stop warfare than to project real peace and civility: by rooting out endemic corruption, arresting war criminals, and establishing the rule of law. There was neither a serious nor a sustained effort to reshape the region's basic institutions or place the various countries of the former Yugoslavia on a path toward achieving political stability, civic rights, and economic growth, as America did successfully in Germany and Japan after World War II. The result was to end bloodshed but leave the region in a state of endemic lawlessness, free from war but rife with organized violence and corruption. In other words, the Clinton policy freed the region from war but abandoned it to rule by often-government-connected mafias.
But even this low level of involvement was more than the current White House seems willing to bear. Instead of working to root out Bosnia's endemic corruption, arrest war criminals, and establish the rule of law, the Bush administration has been angling for two years to extricate us from the region--and America and Europe are starting to pay the price. The Balkans today are fertile territory for those seeking to smuggle guns, drugs, and persons into Western Europe. And as the Orao raid revealed, chaos in the Balkans, mostly ignored by the Bush administration, could actually threaten American troops during an invasion of Iraq--a task which has been the chief focus of American foreign policy for more than a year.
Rocket in my Pocket
Yugoslavia's role supplying weapons expertise to Iraq has actually been a well-known fact for several years. Indeed, once Slobodan Milosevic was deposed in 2000, the Bush administration set about trying to get Yugoslavia's new government to crack down on transfers of military equipment and knowledge to Iraq. Little progress was made, however, and last September, as President Bush announced his intention to force Saddam Hussein to give up his weapons of mass destruction, State Department officials summoned Goran Svilanovic, Yugoslavia's foreign minister, to Washington for an explanation. Svilanovic was in the United States to attend the U.N. General Assembly session at which President Bush announced his global campaign against Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. There was, recalls Svilanovic, a new note of urgency. End the Belgrade-Baghdad connection and punish the people who run it, he was told, or risk losing America's goodwill--and billions of dollars in aid. The Orao plant had been especially embarrassing for the United States since it lay in a part of Bosnia nominally under the supervision of American peacekeeping forces.
Soon after the Orao raid, more evidence of a Serb-Saddam connection surfaced. Acting on American intelligence, Croatian police in the port of Rijeka raided the cargo carrier Boka Star, which was supposed to be loaded with "activated charcoal" Instead, it was loaded with 208 metric tons of chemical ingredients for exactly the kind of solid rocket fuel used in Iraqi Scud missiles. This connection was critical, American government sources suggest, because the Boka Star was part of a well-watched fleet that regularly sailed between Tivat, a Yugoslav naval base, and Syria, where many cargoes were trucked to Iraq. Evidence discovered on board indicated that the Boka Star and its bogus cargo had been inaccurately papered several times over by Yugoslav naval and customs officials.
