Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun

by Iain Overton

  Given the rise of Islamic militants and unruly warlords here in this blighted country, we feared kidnapping or worse, so we had hired guards. They chewed on sticks of khat, a local natural quasi-amphetamine, and fixed us with steady, hepatic eyes. We clambered up beside the machine-gunners and, exposed and burning under the unwavering sun, skidded through the dirt and dust to our fortified hotel. On the way they told us we were the only white people in the capital.

  The streets quickly showed how the rule of law and those things we often take for granted – sewage removal and rubbish collection – had failed here. Foot-soldiers of the militia groups stood on crumbling street corners, young boys who had yet to buy razors but had long ago picked up semi-automatics. Everywhere you saw the violent marks of rivalries; I struggled to see what soul this city had worth fighting over.

  There was no street electricity; abandoned houses stood in skeletal silence; potholes marked the roads. Outside our hotel was an upturned cow, distended in the heat. Someone had shot it a few days before, and the putrefaction touched your mouth.

  The hotel had four guests. Me, Simon and our researcher – a feisty and huge-hearted Uzbek dissident and journalist, fluent in Russian and Arabic, called Shahida Tulaganova – and someone else: a Japanese government agent. I had sidled over to him and asked what he was here for. He told me he was a cartographer. I laughed and said nineteenth-century spies used to call themselves that. He never spoke to me again.

  I was shown to my monk-like cell; cheap painted white walls and mildew marked the room. In it was a bed whose sheets had yet to dry. I lay upon the dampness and tried to ease that growing sense of panic that comes when you parachute into a place where, it feels, every other person wants to shoot you.

  Later, towards dusk, we met in the hotel courtyard. High gates and walls rose on all sides, topped with shards of glass. There was a problem. Before we had set off from London, we had agreed a day rate of $50 for each of the guards, but the group wanted an extra $50 a day for their khat. At first I refused – I couldn’t see a BBC licence fee payer being happy with us paying for the drugs of armed militia – but then I was taken aside. It was made clear that not paying would have consequences: our armed guards would no longer guarantee our safety. The emphasis was on the armed, and the threat was unequivocal.

  Somalia in 2004 was not a safe place to be. If you were white and not a Muslim, it was more dangerous still. Within two years, two journalists I knew had been shot and killed there. Kate Peyton, a BBC reporter, went there just after us. She was shot outside the hotel where we were staying. Martin Adler, a Swedish cameraman, was gunned down a few months later in a crowded rally outside the national stadium. It wasn’t the place to quibble over a few dollars.

  I agreed a ‘consultancy fee’ and told them what they did with the money was their business, not the BBC’s. The matter was settled, and we went inside for a meal of goat and spaghetti and arranged our visit to the smuggler’s market.

  The next day, as the call to prayer infused the city air, we set off, the guards making a small show of the khat in their mouths. Soon we came to a crossroads. Coming up the other road was a group of heavily armed gunmen – thugs from the enemy warlords. Our two convoys passed, and they immediately swung their guns onto us. The air was filled with a sharp cocking of rifles, and the occupants of the two cars began to scream at each other like dogs. Then one of our guards turned the anti-aircraft gun on them and – suddenly – the stand-off ended. We sped on our way. When it came to guns, here it was survival of the biggest.

  Fear slowly eased back into fascination. Brightly painted trucks lined the road, horns blaring, fenders brilliantly painted in whirls of yellows and reds. We followed them, swerving past donkeys pulling wagons of rice and maize, until we came to an area where lines of ripe watermelons lay stretched out in the heat. On each side, pharmacies sold handfuls of coloured pills. Further along was the meat market, thick with flies. Men peeled off strips of crimson flesh with sharp knives, and thick white fat fell to the floor. There was no government here – this was the logic of trade at its most basic.

  We got out of the car and walked over to a mound of green, vicious cacti. If you looked inside the thicket, you could see the outline of a US Black Hawk Helicopter. It was downed in 1993 in the infamous mission where Navy SEALS failed to capture the faction leader Mohamed Farrah Aidid. Instead, the Americans ran up against a barrage of Somali anger and gunfire. Beyond was a line of skinny, gazing boys, their homes the colour of burnt sienna, long ago marked by bullet holes. Beyond them spread Mogadishu’s infamous Bakaara market.

  Whatever you needed, this warren of huts and shadowy deals had it. Drugs? No problem. A passport? Mr Big Beard, a wizened Somali trader with luxuriously crimson-dyed hair, could make one for you for $40. An extra $10 would get you a diplomatic one. AK47s? How many, exactly?

  We carried on into the shifting gloom, passing clackety-clack wooden shacks as we headed towards the gun market. We had been told we were not allowed to film, and by this stage I wasn’t arguing. A few minutes before, the marked cocking of a semi-automatic by a lean and fierce guard had been directed at me as I filmed one of the many loan banks that skirted the market. And here there were plenty more guns to cock.

  We passed one stall. Rows and rows of Chinese rifles lay propped up in the half shadows. Previously there had been Russian AK47s sold here, trickling out from the military arms caches of the old Soviet bloc. Then it was Ukrainians, Albanians and Romanians who had made their millions shipping semi-automatics to Africa. Now it was the turn of Chinese dealers, and good money was here to be made.

  This week the price for an AK47 was about $860, up 40 per cent from five months before. And that was just the lower range of the AK47 variant: the 7.62mm. Those rifles that chambered the 5.45mm cartridge cost much more.

  It was worth noting these things, because the price of weapons in gun markets can tell you a lot about the security situation of a country; rising price tags can be like a canary in the mine, foretelling the drums of war. Before coalition forces invaded Iraq in 2003, basic AK47s sold for as little as $80. Three years on, during the bloody tumult, they were ten times that.17

  Gun prices also inform of recent horrors. Post-conflict areas are often flooded with cheap arms – FN FAL rifles sold for as little as $500 in Libya in February 2012, down from the thousands of dollars they cost at the height of the conflict a year before.18 So exact can the formula between violence and the value of weaponry be, you can almost gauge the levels of violence in Syria by the price of bullets in neighbouring Lebanon.19

  The costs of guns, though, are often subject to greater influences – including rumours, stock availability and simply whatever the trader can get away with. The UN has cited AK47s costing as little as $15, but I’ve never seen them sold that cheaply,20 whereas a fully automatic Chinese Type 56 Kalashnikov can go for as much as $10,000.21

  What was more certain than the price was the fact that the guns sold here would one day work their way far beyond these wooden racks. Guns sold in Somalia have wound up in Sierra Leone, been traded into Liberia and then used in killings in the Ivory Coast. The longevity of the gun means that you can never know where, or to whom, it will be trafficked – something governments don’t think about nearly enough when they arm rebels or overthrow regimes.

  This brief glimpse of an anarchic market also showed the face of a very specific type of trafficking – one that experts call the ‘ant trade’, where plentiful shipments of small numbers of weapons over time can lead to the accumulation of large and potent arsenals. Of course, I wanted to know more in that market: where these guns were bought in from, to whom were they sold. But it was too dangerous to linger, to ask questions. So we pushed on. Besides, we had Somali passports to buy.

  What Somalia had shown me briefly, though, was the shadow outlines of a lawless world where smugglers work without governmental control. But what happened when it was too much governmental control that was the problem – when st
ates smuggled arms? For me, the answer to that question was found far closer to home.

  I had not been back to Northern Ireland since I was eight years old. A third of a century. I had remembered it to be, as childhood memories had marked upon me, a place in black and white: a monochrome-clouded land where the streets were lined with colourless, sullen men in ashen overcoats. But on that day I saw no clouds and no grey. The brilliance of a rare sun shone on this land and, on the drive into Belfast, the fields stretched out in an emerald patchwork, the green so intense you felt it.

  Grainne Teggart, a deeply conscientious woman from the charity Amnesty International, had picked me up from the airport. In the middle of my research for this book and years after I had come back from Somalia, she had invited me over from London to talk about investigating human rights at Belfast’s largest community festival. As we drove through country lanes lined with thick-wrapped hay bales and dirty-white farmhouses, hedgerows and hawthorns stretching on either side, she spoke about the violent history of this troubled land.

  Soon we saw the place-names: the Falls Road, the Shankill. We were in West Belfast; Union Jack bunting and Sinn Féin colours would have given the streets a festive feel, if it wasn’t for the barbed-wire-rimmed walls and the infernal history of the place.

  The sun was the hottest it would be all year, and white men with shaved heads rested, arms crossed over stained tank tops, on the gritty streets. Above them, Grainne pointed out the murals of paramilitaries in black who clutched their equally black rifles. Punishment was often meted out by these men, and it was always hard and bitter. Kneecapping, a malicious punishment of getting shot in the leg, was once so common that a local surgeon was compelled to go to the highest echelons of the terrorist movement and explain how to kneecap without permanently maiming. Aimed more at sending a message than ruining a life, the punishments by the armed gangs got a lot less disabling after that.22

  The talk went painlessly. At the end of it one woman, a campaigner and writer called Anne Cadwallader, put her hand up and asked me about the British government’s arming of Unionist paramilitaries. I said I knew precious little about this, and she offered to share some information with me. As promised, an email soon pinged through.

  What Anne outlined was stark. She had shown how members of the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force had collaborated with officers in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) to form a gang based in the so-called ‘Mid-Ulster Murder Triangle’. She described how they were responsible for the deaths of over 120 people between 1972 and 1976, many with weapons taken from British army armouries.

  In October 1972 one government document that she sent detailed how armed men had carried out a raid on a joint British army base in Lurgan in County Armagh. They escaped with eighty-five high-velocity rifles and twenty-one sub-machine-guns. An army intelligence report later recorded how the weapons went on to be used in a number of murders by the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and that collusion by Northern Irish forces in the raid was ‘highly probable’. In just eighteen months in the early 1970s the British army was to record seventeen incidents of weapon theft by loyalists where institutional collusion was suspected.23

  It was not just the stealing of arms that fuelled the violence. The British government appears to have been actively involved in securing guns for terrorists, too.

  In 2012 the Ministry of Defence and the Police Service of Northern Ireland were sued by the relatives of six men shot and killed by a loyalist gunman in a bar in Loughinisland, County Down, in June 1994.24 The families accused the British authorities of having assisted – or, at best, just having looked the other way – as 300 guns and 30,000 rounds of ammunition, and more besides, were smuggled into Belfast in the late 1980s.

  One of these, a Czechoslovakian SA Vz.58 assault rifle, was used in that County Down pub attack.25 The same weapon had reportedly been used in 1993 in another attack on a van carrying Catholic painters to work in Belfast, in which one man, a father of five, died and five others were wounded.26

  According to lawyers acting for the families of those massacred in The Heights Bar, the weapon cache was sold by Armscor, the gun sales corporation of apartheid-era South Africa.27 A deal had been struck between the company and loyalist paramilitaries after a British agent, who infiltrated the UDA for the British spy agency MI5, went to South Africa in 1985. The agent had gone there specifically to line up contacts to buy guns, a trip funded, the MoD were later to admit, by the British taxpayer.28 The deal was struck in June 1987 after £300,000 was stolen by Unionist terrorists from the Northern Bank in Portadown. That money was reportedly used to buy the weapons, and the guns duly arrived the following November at Belfast’s docks, shipped in from Lebanon.29

  The smuggled guns had consequences. After the shipment landed, killings by loyalists rose sharply. In the six years before the guns arrived, loyalists murdered about seventy people; in the six years that followed, 230 were gunned down, many of them innocent by-standers. Within weeks of the guns arriving, UDA gunman Michael Stone had shot and killed three men at an IRA funeral in Milltown cemetery in West Belfast.30 Stone had been armed with a Browning 9mm semi-automatic pistol ‘of the same type as those brought in from South Africa’,31 along with a .357 Magnum revolver.

  The trouble with all of this, though, is that the evidence surrounding the pub shootings was heard under the terms of a controversial British secret justice bill. This allowed British government lawyers to keep their evidence secret, disclosing it only to a judge behind closed doors, where it cannot be examined or challenged by other lawyers. So we may suspect a great deal but – as with so much in this opaque world of gun smuggling – we may never know the truth.

  Of course, the IRA smuggled guns and murdered people, too, even bringing in their arms in coffins.32 But what interested me more was that the loyalist murders showed evidence of the British state’s involvement in the smuggling of the guns. For me, this was a chink of light into the deeply concerning reality of the supply of government-funded arms to fuel insurgencies and terrorists.

  The history of governments supplying arms is one, understandably, filled with intrigue and interference. In 2012, Saudi Arabia was reported to have financed the purchase, in shipments via Jordan, of ‘thousands of rifles and hundreds of machine-guns’ to the Free Syrian Army from a Croatian-controlled stockpile of ex-Yugoslav weapons.33 Diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks showed claims of a Moscow-led strategy to use organised crime ‘groups to do whatever the [government of Russia] cannot acceptably do as a government’. This included gun running to the Kurds in an attempt ‘to destabilise Turkey’.34 And, of course, the US’s long record of supplying rebel groups stretching from Syrian rebels35 all the way to the Taliban is more than well recorded. At one point over 300,000 Afghan warriors carried weapons provided by the CIA.36

  Then there are those weapons that are not purposefully – at least seemingly so – let loose from state control, rather ones lost and stolen. In July 2014 it was reported that 43 per cent of 747,000 weapons given to the Afghan National Army by the US Department of Defense could not be accounted for. These weapons, including rifles and machine-guns, were valued at some $270 million.37 This massive loss was partly put down to ‘missing serial numbers, inaccurate shipping and receiving dates, and duplicate records’. But it is likely that President Obama was not surprised to get this news. In a briefing from the head of the military force in Afghanistan, Marine Corps General John Allen, the president had been told that the major concern out there was not an ineffectual police force or an incompetent military; rather it was corruption. That, in Allen’s words, was ‘the existential, strategic threat to Afghanistan’.38

  But it was not just corruption that fuelled this monumental cock-up. The US, perhaps so loyal to the concept that the right to bear arms was the only way to govern, had given the Afghans far more weapons than they needed. They handed over 83,184 AK47s, even though, at the same time, they were asking the Afghan m
ilitary to shift to NATO weapons like the M16. In total, over 110,000 weapons were given that were deemed ‘surplus to requirement’.39

  Of course, the US was then to deny any responsibility following this irresponsible largesse. ‘It is the Afghan government’s responsibility . . . to determine if they have weapons in excess of their needs,’ Defense officials said in their report.40 But the report also acknowledged the very real possibility that US guns could end up in the hands of the Taliban. Certainly ammunition magazines ‘identical to those given to Afghan government forces by the US military’ had been found on dead Taliban fighters.41

  It was not just Afghanistan where this happened. In Iraq the Pentagon lost track of about 190,000 rifles and pistols they had given to Iraqi security forces.42 As the Small Arms Survey concluded: ‘Weapons were shipped via private arms brokers into a context where the human rights situation had been steadily deteriorating and where the likelihood of diversion was high due to poor oversight and generally weak stockpile security.’43

  The reality, of course, is that some of these weapons, the sale of which had lined the pockets of US gun manufacturers, now line the arsenals of Islamic terror groups.44 Firearms found being used by Islamic militants include American M16A4 assault rifles made by FN Manufacturing and Colt Defense, and XM15-E2S semi-automatic rifles made by Bushmaster Firearms International.45

  It’s clear the US’s love for the gun has much deeper consequences that take it beyond a merely domestic issue about its citizens’ rights to bear arms. In Iraq and Afghanistan this love moulded an ethos on how to rebuild a nation – as if through a sheer weight of weaponry you could stamp out dissent, quash radical opinion and sow the seeds of democracy.

  I could not help but draw parallels between the US government’s firearm-heavy response to crime, with their SWAT-team police culture, and their firearm-heavy response to nation building. The Second Amendment had shifted from a domestic issue into an international strategy. And, as I found out on a trip to Mexico just after I had attended Las Vegas’s Shot Show, the Second Amendment was also to have even deeper consequences there.