The Justice Game

by Geoffrey Robertson

  This judge went on in this vein, overlooking the simple legal fact that the Commission of Inquiry, pursuant to the Statute under which it was established by the Governor General, had a duty to take relevant evidence wherever in the world it was available.

  Vere Jnr turned up for the last stage of the inquiry looking smug: thanks to Mitchell’s ruling, witnesses had to be found within the island of Antigua, or not at all. He took the stand to explain away the telephone records which implicated him in the conspiracy. Under cross-examination he denied everything and relied on an exceptionally bad memory. He could not recall receiving cash from Eva, or requesting the cheques which had been paid by Sarfati into his wife’s bank account in New York. What about helping Gacha to obtain lethal weapons? The telephone and fax traffic looked suspicious: the lines from Vere’s office hummed Sarfati’s telephone and fax numbers at each moment that the conspiracy advanced or retreated. Asked about suspicious call after suspicious call, Vere Bird Jnr would pull himself up to his full height (six foot, eight inches), scowl, and repeat his denials of having made them. I asked him who had, and that is when he made what the Commissioner found was his fatal mistake.

  He blamed his secretary. He said it was she who must have given permission to Eva and Klein and Schahar to use his Ministry’s official telephone and fax machine to do business with Sarfati. His allegation was transmitted live on radio and later on television, throughout the island, and it struck me that Mrs Ethlyn Thomas, who had been Bird’s private secretary at the time, might have something to say about it. Truehart-Smith went to her home that night to ask her whether she could assist the Commission. Courageously, and more in sorrow than anger, she attended the hearing the next day. She was a witness from within Antigua, and Vere’s ingenious lawyers could think of no way to bar her testimony. Besides, they did not know what she was going to say.

  Nor did I. There had been no time to examine her privately, to extract her story and rehearse it before she was called. This turned out to be an advantage, in that nobody could accuse us of collusion: she had come of her own accord, because it had suddenly seemed right that she should speak out. Ethlyn Thomas had been under heavy pressure to stay silent. As a public servant, she was expected to remain loyal to her minister. As an Antiguan, she was all too well aware of the prominence of the Bird family. As a woman in male-dominated West Indian society, she was expected to follow orders and find whatever consolation she required in church. She was not expected to do what the Commissioner found she in fact did that morning: testify, with utter clarity and credibility, to her minister’s deep involvement with Sarfati, and in the conspiracy to supply arms to Gacha.

  Ethlyn Thomas was the inquiry’s last witness, and after I had taken her though her testimony I waited to see what mud Vere Jnr’s purse of silks would throw at her. They asked, and were given, time to consult their client, after which they announced that they would not cross-examine her. This, the Commissioner concluded, was a coded acknowledgement that her evidence was true. It was also a sign that Vere Jnr had some decency, or at least a sensible appreciation that an attack on Mrs Thomas would be counter-productive. Vere Jnr was broken: his leading counsel depicted him, in a final speech, as the ignorant and foolish dupe of the evil Maurice Sarfati. This was true, to the extent that Sarfati had forged his signature on the End User certificate, but the Commissioner ultimately found Vere Jnr to be a willing and witting accomplice.

  I had spent many months prevailing on reluctant people to tell me what they knew or to show me what they possessed, not because I had legal powers of subpoena but because I had a power of persuasion based on the enormity of the crimes against humanity that Gacha had committed with the guns from Antigua. Mitchell’s judgment rankled because I thought it was wrong in law and because its consequence of hindering the discovery of the truth was upsetting to those who, at some risk to themselves, had told what they knew of it. Its consequence seemed an insult to the memory of those judges and magistrates in Colombia – Maria Perez, Dr Carlos Garcia, Dr Jose Rodriguez, Mariela Arango and others – who had been shot by criminals for doing their duty. Mitchell’s ruling stopped the Commission from formally sitting to take evidence abroad about the arming of their assassins, but it could not stop me from travelling abroad with a tape-recorder.

  The Israeli Foreign Ministry had been reluctant to co-operate with the Antiguan inquiry, because, it believed it would be biased toward that government. Mitchell’s ruling against the Commission, ironically, convinced the Israelis that we were independent. So the Foreign Ministry required Brigadier-General ‘Pini’ Schahar to face my questioning, and its officials listened with some interest to his answers. Schahar was a small, slightly shabby man, his narrow face given some character by a pencil moustache. He was voluble, and aware that he had been the original agent for a deal which had brought his country much criticism. He explained that he was merely a businessman earning an honest living in Miami in the all-embracing work of ‘import-export’; Klein had approached him with a project to sell to credulous Miami Catholics some quantities of ‘holy water’ from the River Jordan, in crucifix-shaped bottles. (So far, so credible: Klein would do anything to make a buck, and his business did extend from guns and mercenary services to traffic in religious reliquaries.) Schahar said that he was one of many Israeli ex-servicemen who were used as ‘agents’ by IMI in relation to weapons’ sales, and that his neighbour Maurice Sarfati had arranged for Colonel Walker to visit him and place an order on behalf of the Antiguan defence force for sub-machine-guns and assault rifles, which he had duly communicated to IMI. (Walker denied this, claiming that his trip to Miami on the date of the meeting had been for shopping, although on this issue, the Commissioner believed Schahar.)

  But Schahar’s claim that he had acted only as an introductory agent was difficult to square with evidence that he had stayed at the Trade Winds Hotel with Klein, as a member of the delegation which came to promote the ‘training school’. He said that he did not know that Klein was staying in the same hotel at the same time, so I showed him his own American Express card stub, found at the hotel, confirming that it was he who had paid Klein’s bill. More importantly, the US$368,000 paid to IMI for the weapons had been transferred through his account with Bank Hapoalim. How had he come to do this, if he was so uninvolved in the deal? He was merely helping out the Antiguan government, he replied, who had sent the money to him rather than to Israel. (Alas for Schahar, when an American Senate investigation later opened his bank account, they found that the money had come from Yair Klein’s account at a bank in Panama, where it had doubtless been deposited on behalf of Gacha.) When the interview had concluded and the tape was turned off, Schahar took me aside. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘we all make mistakes in our lives. I have a family, please do not publish my name . . .’

  They all have families and their mistake is not to think of other families, bereaved by the killers who were trained and armed through the actions from which they profited. Israel eventually prosecuted Yair Klein, but merely for exporting military techniques without a licence: his punishment was a suspended sentence and a fine of about £20,000. In Antigua, Vere Bird Jnr showed no remorse. He remained in Parliament and won his seat in the 1994 elections which brought his brother Lester to power, Papa having retired at last. He may one day achieve his ambition of becoming Prime Minister, if a local judge quashes Blom-Cooper’s recommendation that he be barred forever from ministerial office. Colonel Walker was relieved from his post, as a result of a Blom-Cooper recommendation, although four years later a local judge was prepared to quash this without even hearing argument in its support. (The Lester Bird government, disgracefully, did not bother to defend the Commission or even to notify the Commissioner.) But at least there was one result of the Commission’s work which can never be undone: it was able to clear the name of Sean Leitch, the nineteen-year-old customs clerk whom the authorities had attempted to make the scapegoat for the entire affair.

  Antigua is a place where it is di
fficult to stay angry. We were quartered in beach-front rooms at Galley Bay Surf Club, a secluded resort on palm-fringed sands. I would wake to the lap of waves on the deserted beach outside, before entering the armed convoy which processed us to the hearing. We were guarded round the clock by four armed Special Branch officers who feared for our safety, not only from cartel hit-men but from goons in the Antiguan Labour Party who had publicly urged that we should be run off the island by force. They were detailed to look after my wife, the Australian author Kathy Lette, who was heavy with our first child. I would return in the afternoon to find their guns abandoned in a hammock, while they were flat out on the sand doing pregnancy exercises with her. Our entertainment was to slip out to calypso competitions, an art form which at its best provides a lethal fusion of catchy music and political satire. The calypso tent is a libel-free environment, in which the most defamatory allegations are made, enjoyed by the audience, and then vanish on the soft breeze. Clues to corruption on the island were contained in the songs. They were enjoyed by the public precisely because they told truths which everybody suspected but none could publish. I sat stiffly, trying not to smile at the attacks on politicians, while police and public alike roared with laughter. This was the Caribbean equivalent of jazz in Prague, the funny, bitter journalism of shanty-town, the real calypsos which Harry Belafonte dared not sing.

  The anger which does remain is the memory of the wrenching poverty in the slums on the outskirts of St John’s. This is an island of fewer than seventy thousand people, and its tourist income, if well-managed, is sufficient to provide a reasonable standard of living for all. It was managed by a political elite running government as a private business, leaving schools and hospitals and social services starved of State funds and people dependent upon (and grateful for) hand-outs from the Birds. The Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid explains, in her book. A Small Place, how powerful family networks have operated since independence to monopolise government, business, and public service on the island: little of the tourism wealth or the foreign investment ever percolates down to the people. At a time when ‘sustainable development’ has become a buzzword for aid programmes, the melon farm of Maurice Sarfati stands as an abject object lesson in how not to sustain development. He went to well-intentioned Washington lenders with a plausible project, and inveigled massive loans, most of which he creamed off or used for political pay-offs. Sarfati’s bankruptcy lost the government millions through its partnership in his project, and foreign aid institutions, having burned their fingers so badly, were reluctant to lend to other Antiguan ventures. Their place is increasingly being taken by disreputable foreign companies, buying slices of national heritage sold for short-term gain.

  The Royal Commission published its report in November 1990. A further report, detailing political corruption, was later completed by Larry Barcella: it was never published by the government, nor were the prosecutions Barcella recommended ever pursued. What is really required, to crack international conspiracies of this scale, is nothing less than an international commission, empowered by agreement between all the countries whose nationals are suspected of involvement. This point was made in 1991 by the US Senate sub-committee on Investigations, which conducted a parallel inquiry into the Antiguan arms transhipment. Under its formidable protective powers, Dr Diego Salinas Viafara described the training camps run by Klein and the British mercenaries on Fantasy Island. I had no muscle to follow the money trail through American banks which insisted on client confidentiality. The Senate investigators, with their statutory subpoenas, were able to open the relevant accounts and trace the money paid to IMI for the guns back through Schahar’s account to Yair Klein’s account in Banco Aleman-Panameno. But their subpoena powers did not extend to Panama, so there the money trail which would have wound back to Gacha went dead. Unlawful arms trafficking will never be capable of proper investigation and exposure unless nations are prepared to subscribe to a treaty under which they permit an international authority to take evidence from their nationals, or at least from all their banks, under legal compulsion.

  There has been some movement in this direction in respect of nuclear proliferation, but the lesson of the Antiguan arms transhipment was drawn by Senator Sam Nunn: ‘The international community as a whole needs to do more to control conventional weapons, which so easily find their way into the hands of the world’s narco-traffickers and terrorists’. Much larger arms shipments have been delivered – by nondescript, Panamanian registered black freighters – to guerrilla armies along the coasts of South America and Africa. The UN’s concern with nuclear weaponry overlooks the way most innocent victims of organised crime die: from clinically accurate assault rifles fired at a distance or from mini-machine-guns hidden beneath coats. The glossy IMI brochure advertises ‘the legendary Uzi’ in a version which whets the appetite of all would-be assassins: ‘permitting easy concealment under ordinary clothing and carriage in minimal space in vehicles, its perfect balance makes it easy to control during automatic fire, permitting sustained accuracy . . . the Mini Uzi is today’s weapon’.

  How are today’s weapons to be kept from tomorrow’s criminals when their manufacturers will do business with whoever is at the other end of a fax machine? IMI was more than happy to accept a forged End User Certificate by fax from Maurice Sarfati, promising on filched government notepaper that the weapons would not leave Antigua. IMI did not bother to ask the obvious questions: Why was the order for fifteen times as many guns as there were soldiers in Antigua’s army? Why purchase Israeli weapons when it was equipped free of charge by the US? Why would a friendly government pay commission to intermediaries like Sarfati and Schahar, when it could order direct? Once the money was paid, the weapons container was shipped with as much care as a consignment of fluffy toys. It was just dumped on the dock. While it is too much to expect of arms dealers that they will make scrupulous enquiry into the use to which their product is put, the deadly nature of that product imposes a duty on governments which deal in arms to take some care to ensure that they do not fall into the hands of criminals and terrorists. The Israeli government defence department, which runs IMI, took no care at all. Blom-Cooper recommended that there should be established, through the United Nations, an international register of End User Certificates, which would provide some check on their authenticity and some sanction in the event that the arms are later found to have been diverted. The idea was at first taken up enthusiastically at the UN but has yet to be implemented, because governments which sell arms claim that End User Certificates are confidential and the government officials who sign them – often for large bribes – are not disposed to disagree.

  International law also failed the people of Colombia through the absence of any effective rules against the recruitment and use of mercenaries. The training camps at Fantasy Island turned untrained killers into trained killers, by teaching them techniques of anti-terrorism which are, when reversed, the techniques of terrorism. This permitted organised crime to organise itself as a military force. The British ‘soldiers of fortune’ hired by Gacha were a disreputable lot who had made their plans and preparations in London, yet Scotland Yard declined to prosecute. This was following the lead of John Major, who when Foreign Minister made a hypocritical speech at the United Nations exuding compassion for Colombia, but pretending that nothing could be done to stop British ex-soldiers from helping its terrorists. In fact, the conduct of the mercenaries breached at least three English criminal statutes but the authorities simply were not interested: there is a long and inglorious tradition of allowing men trained by the British army to sell their services to murderous regimes (e.g. Amin’s Uganda) and to terrorist armies (as in Angola). In 1989 the United Nations passed a resolution condemning the use of mercenaries, but the opposition of the US, UK, France, Belgium and Germany has prevented any further developments by the international community to restrain the whores of war. The sooner nations agree to withdraw mercenaries’ passports, and to prosecute their recruiters, the fe
wer lives will be lost around the globe.

  That, at least, we owe to Colombia, for the reason given by Gabriel García Márquez in ‘The Future of Colombia’:

  The drug-traffickers’ reprisals were violent and scientifically planned, with paramilitary squads from training schools run by mercenaries bought for gold in London and Tel Aviv. The schools recruited adolescent criminals from the poorest shanty towns of our cities, who would then grow up to spread terror and death throughout Colombia . . . Judges and magistrates, whose miserable salaries were barely enough to provide for the education of their children, were faced with an impossible choice: either to sell out to the traffickers or be killed by them. The most admirable and heart-rending thing is that over 40 of them, and many journalists and officials as well, chose to die.

  Practising law in Britain is among the safest jobs in the world. No real courage is called for: ‘fearless advocacy’ is little more than polite disagreement with a grumpy judge. The experience of being protected from cartel vengeance for a few months made me appreciate just how ‘admirable and heart-rending’ was the behaviour of those magistrates who did their duty, when signing a warrant for the arrest of a suspected drug-trafficker was tantamount to signing their own death warrant. This level of courage is astounding, and calls for the continuing pursuit of all those who make it necessary.

  Chapter 12

  Come Up and See My Boggs