TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040290/0402007.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.7 KB | 127 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 29

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

The Arms Merchants' Dilemma


Havel tightens controls on the lethal explosive Semtex, but what
about the rest of Prague's thriving weapons market?

By KENNETH W. BANTA/PRAGUE


    In a secluded wood 55 miles east of Prague, smoking chimneys
rise above the East Bohemian Chemical Enterprise. A large
complex of ramshackle sheds and concrete buildings, the factory
looks unprepossessing enough. But a "special production unit"
is mixing batches of one of Czechoslovakia's most lethal
exports: Semtex, the odorless, colorless plastic explosive of
choice for terrorists the world over.

    Semtex's most famous target was Pan Am Flight 103, which
exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, killing
all 259 on board and eleven people on the ground. Scottish
officials have concluded that a terrorist group called the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command
blew up the plane by concealing Semtex in a radio-cassette
player and smuggling it aboard in a suitcase. Semtex is also
thought to have been used to destroy a French DC-10 over the
Sahara last September, killing 170 people. While visiting
London last week, President Vaclav Havel acknowledged that his
Communist predecessors sold Libya alone 1,000 tons of the
stuff. Said Havel: "If you consider that it takes 200 g [6 oz.]
to blow up an aircraft, this means world terrorism has enough
Semtex to last for 150 years."

    Other plants in Czechoslovakia are engaged in similar
businesses, producing all manner of weaponry and components --
hand grenades, automatic rifles, tanks, armored personnel
carriers -- almost all for export. In a high-security compound
outside the industrial city of Brno, trainees from such
countries as Angola, South Yemen and the People's Republic of
the Congo are being drilled in what officials describe as
"police methodology and criminology," a euphemism for
paramilitary training.

    In the four months since they came to power, Havel and his
democratically inclined colleagues have practically erased
communism from political life. They are finding it far harder,
however, to do away with another legacy: Czechoslovakia's
extensive role as arms supplier to Communist regimes,
liberation movements and outright terrorists. Says an Interior
Ministry official: "The Communists may be gone, but they have
locked us into a web of arms deals and even terrorism that may
be impossible to escape."

    Over the past 15 years, arms exports outside the Warsaw Pact
have earned Czechoslovakia an average of $850 million annually
in cash or such essential raw materials as oil and mineral
ores; additional revenues flow in from the sale of ammunition.
All told, the arms trade accounts for a quarter to a half of
Czechoslovakia's foreign exchange earnings. Havel said last
week his country would continue to sell arms to democracies but
not to totalitarian regimes. However, cautions Foreign Ministry
spokesman Lubos Dobrovsky, "we have existing obligations that
we must honor."

    Current clients include India, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Syria,
Iran and, biggest of all, Muammar Gaddafi's Libya. A
large-scale purchaser on its own, Libya has long been known to
be a conduit for Czechoslovak-made arms to such terrorist
groups as Abu Nidal's Fatah Revolutionary Council, Italy's Red
Brigades and the Irish Republican Army.

    Czechoslovakia's niche in the arms trade has been dependent
on customers who are too poor to afford Western weapons, which
are generally of higher quality, and those who for political
reasons are denied access to them. Thus Prague has done a
thriving business in exporting the L-39 jet trainer ($1.9
million apiece) to Ethiopia and other countries; the plane can
easily be converted into a fighter or fighter-bomber for
customers unable to pay for Western or Soviet aircraft. The
lightweight Skorpion machine pistol sells for less than $220,
the Israeli-made Uzi at least twice that. Czechoslovakia
annually sells about 500 T-72 tanks, at $250,000 apiece;
three-fourths have gone to Libya and other Arab clients, the
balance to China. America's M-1 Abrams tank, by comparison,
sells for $2.5 million and, under U.S. law, cannot be sold to
such countries as Libya, Syria or Iran.

    To their credit, earlier this year Czechoslovakia's new
leaders halted exports of Semtex until chemical markers,
detectable by airport and other security devices, could be
added to the explosive. The government also claims to have shut
down its tank plant in the Slovak town of Martin.

    While officials pledge to convert most of the country's
military production capacity to civilian use, industry experts
in Prague doubt that it can be done. "You can't just turn a
tank factory into a car factory," says one specialist.
"Besides, as we try to revive this economy, we'll need all the
hard currency we can get."

    It has evidently been easier for the government to reduce
other forms of military assistance. According to members of the
country's Red Berets antiterrorist unit, there were often so
many clandestine arms buyers in Prague under the old regime
that the unit spent much of its time guarding hostile factions
against one another. Today the Communist Party hotel just
outside the city center, once reputed to be a safe haven for
terrorists of the I.R.A., the Red Brigades and other European
groups, is closed. At the Police Academy Foreign Branch, as the
training camp outside Brno is called, 60 Afghans were sent home
before Christmas, and there is speculation that the entire
operation, which once trained up to 600 men at a time, will
soon be shut down.