streetwise businessman and able slob. In his possession at the time of his arrest, aside from the drugs, were five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of unrefined diamonds and hundreds of pages of documents related to his business dealings, including the business of running guns. The documents showed that in a productive run of years seeking profits in the husk of the Soviet Union, Leonid Minin had assembled the social connections and basket of shell companies to obscure the movements of illicit cargo with paper shuffles that no one had managed to unwind. Some of these papers, once translated from multiple languages, offered a view of two weapons shipments to Africa from Ukraine.
For the first transfer, in March 1999, Minin organized the air shipment to Burkina Faso of three thousand AKM rifles, a million rounds of M1943 ammunition, twenty-five rocket-propelled grenades, and one type each of antiaircraft and antitank missiles, with eighty missiles in all. The shipment, sixty-eight tons of freight on an Antonov-124 cargo jet, was enough to arm a midsized rebel force. Though these weapons were officially listed as bound for Burkina Faso, they were not for that country’s use. Once the plane landed in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, the weapons were offloaded and transferred to another aircraft. This second aircraft, owned by Minin, shuttled the weapons by back-and-forth flights to Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, which was under United Nations arms embargo at the time. The second transfer, organized the following year, was larger. It included 10,500 Kalashnikovs, 120 sniper rifles, and 8 million rounds of ammunition. The cargo was flown out of the same Ukrainian airfield, at Gostomel, northwest of Kiev, and carried on the first leg by the same Antonov-124. The flight landed on July 15, 2000, in Abidjan, the capital of Cote d’Ivoire, and the arms aboard were reshipped to Liberia via a smaller cargo plane, which operated with a faked registration. Once in Liberia, the weapons and munitions were transferred overland to the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF, a rebel group in Sierra Leone backed by Charles Taylor, the former guerrilla who at the time was the warlord president of Liberia.
Under international rules, legal arms shipments are required to be accompanied by documents known as end-user certificates. These certifications, provided by the nation receiving the shipments, officially declare who the final recipient of the weapons will be. They serve as a government’s seal of consent on arms deals on its territory. Minin’s operation revealed how easily the rules could be sidestepped. He had provided the Ukrainian state arms export agency with end-user certificates signed by officials from Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire; the documents claimed that these countries were the end users. They weren’t. (Such records, arms dealers say, are easy to obtain, as simple as paying a bribe to a defense attache on duty in Asian and African embassies in Europe. The paperwork can be arranged over dinner, even lunch. Brussels has been a favorite stop for procuring them, the dealers say, because many impoverished nations that have no representation in Eastern European capitals where arms deals are made have diplomatic representation there.)37 The fraudulent certificates gave the Ukrainian arms export agency, which was riddled with corruption, plausible deniability, though many Ukrainian state officials were said to profit from the deals. By the time Minin was arrested in Italy, the weapons were already in the field, in the hands of the RUF. Minin’s operation had other elements that easily skirted international controls, including shell companies registered in Gibraltar and the British Virgin Islands and banks that accepted wired deposits in Hungary, Cyprus, and the United States.38 With air traffic control over Africa spotty, he had entered a business that was surprisingly secure.
If all of this looked complicated, it was complicated only in its unraveling. In practice, it was rather simple: Minin was a broker, a man who had access to both ends of an illegal arms deal—the people who wanted weapons in one country, and the people who controlled weapons stockpiles in another. With a bevy of bank accounts and shell companies created for the cost of registering them offshore, he assembled the mechanics of black-market transfers. The deals, to a casual observer, were masked by the patina of legitimacy. And once customers were assured of this, Minin passed along the prices for purchases and shipment, arranged transit, and ensured that each party at each leg had the necessary paperwork to present to the authorities, such as they were, to stamp, sign, or seal. All that was required was money, and contacts, and a willingness to break the law.
Once the payments from Africa were posted in his offshore bank accounts, Minin dispatched planeloads of Ukraine’s weapons—made for the Cold War, cached in European bunkers, marooned by the Soviet collapse, and tended by government officials both incompetent and criminal—on their journey to Africa, thereby moving guns from a northern Cold War front to the postcolonial power struggles to the south. In this way, the Kalashnikovs and their ammunition, paired fuels for modern-day African war, were handed out to the thugs. These were not ordinary thugs. The RUF, among its many crimes, specialized in mutilation. In raids on villages along the Liberian border, it captured civilians and amputated limbs by hacking them off. It then released survivors and burned down villages as warnings to others. Its leaders with time were indicted on war-crime charges, as was Charles Taylor, who helped ferry them their guns. Sierra Leone and Liberia were not the only African countries to suffer from war criminals emboldened by excess Soviet guns, nor were they the only African countries that suffered atrocities and mutilations at such men’s hands. The list is long: Angola, Rwanda, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and others. And thus the
Almost no one was moving on the red dirt track leading to the village of Ajulu. The dozen or so young soldiers from the Sinia Brigade, hiding in the vegetation a few yards off the road, had little to do as minutes stretched into hours. They lounged and paced with their assault rifles, chatting, passing time between crimes. All the while they listened, waiting for a car or truck.
The group had been in place since 5:00 A.M., on orders from their commander, Joseph Kony. Their mission was not a hard one, at least not physically. They had been instructed to waylay travelers and lead them into the bush. Another team, responsible for administering warnings and collective punishment, waited in a gully a short walk away, ready with their razor blades. Only occasionally would a victim appear. It was 1998. The people of Acholiland, the area of northwestern Uganda where these fighters roamed the forests, had been living in fear for more than a decade. The survivors had adapted their habits to avoid the horrors of the roads. Yet even the most cautious could not stay off the roads entirely. People needed to go to market or for medical treatment in Gulu or Kitgum, or to visit relatives in the displaced-person camps near the Nile. From the rebels’ perspective, the day had not been lost. They had captured several people, cut them, and released them to stagger home. One of the hidden fighters, Patrick Okwera, saw the next victim: a man about thirty years of age. He was pedaling toward them on a bicycle. The fighters prepared themselves. When the man came close, they would rush from hiding and seize him, too.
Patrick was fourteen years old and in his fifth year as a soldier of the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, the Sinia Brigade’s parent command. His life, and that of his family, ran through Joseph Kony’s nihilistic and inexplicable war. Patrick’s parents had been abducted by the LRA when he was a small boy. The rebels released his mother. They chopped his father to pieces. Patrick’s own encounter with the LRA came in 1993, when rebels kidnapped him from a stream in which he was bathing. Later, his younger brother, Jimmy, was abducted, too. The boys were reunited in LRA camps in southern Sudan, where they were taught to kill. They became child soldiers, molded for violence by commanders who led them back into the bush. Several years on, by the grisly standards by which the LRA judged him, Patrick Okwera was a success. He had been pressed into service as a nine-year-old and quickly sensed that survival required compliance. He had complied, becoming a killer within days of his capture. Now just past puberty, he was a veteran. He knew the tactics of the ambush, was experienced with the details of the kidnapping raid. He had fought in several battles and shown himself to be an effective supervisor of other children under arms. He had stormed enemy barracks, and helped cache weapons and ammunition throughout the countryside, so that if the Lord’s Resistance Army lost Sudanese support its war might go on. By Patrick’s own estimate he had shot at least thirty people with his automatic rifle. He had not hesitated yet.
Outside his depleted family, Patrick’s kidnapping and conversion were barely noticeable. The Lord’s Resistance Army relied on child abduction to maintain its ranks. Tens of thousands of children had been stolen from their lives, often under circumstances more spectacular than his, including raids in which children were roped together and led into the bush with wrists lashed behind their backs. Sometimes the miserable columns became death marches. Those who straggled risked execution at the hands of the other captives, who were forced to beat fellow villagers to death. The first ordeal ended only upon arrival at the rebel bases, where the survivors were reshaped. The boys became fighters. The girls were forced into lives as servants, cooks, and sex slaves. Awarded as wives to LRA commanders, they were repeatedly raped. Many bore children in forest encampments. Abducted
