The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  In despair, I walked to the Russian pavilion. And it was here that I met him. Indeed, I could scarcely believe that a name so notorious in all the world’s wars and atrocities, so redolent of insurgency and revolution, so frequently used in battle dispatches that the very word has become a cliché of war reporting, really bore corporeal form—other than that of the AK-47, the most famous rifle in the world. This was the rifle I had seen in Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Serbia. This was the rifle I had held in my hands on that frozen Soviet army convoy to Kabul when we came under attack from the Afghan mujahedin twenty-one years ago. It was a sign of Russian times that to sell their tanks and MiGs, they had enlisted the help of the eighty-one-year-old inventor of that most iconic of weapons and freighted him all the way here to Abu Dhabi.

  I found him sitting in a small room, Mikhail Kalashnikov himself, a small, squat man with grey, coiffed hair and quite a few gold teeth, hands unsteady but Siberian eyes alert as a wolf, still wearing his two Hero of Socialist Labour medals. “Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that you should change your faith?” a Saudi army major had asked him a few years earlier. “By Christian standards, you are a great sinner. You are responsible for thousands, even tens of thousands, of deaths around the globe. They’ve long prepared a place for you in hell.” But, said the major, Kalashnikov was a true Muslim. “And when the time of your earthly existence is over, Allah will welcome you as a hero . . . Allah’s mercy is limitless.”

  At least, that’s how Mikhail Kalashnikov tells the story. And he is at least one of the very few arms-sellers to have experienced war. Born in November 1919, he was one of eighteen children of whom only six survived, a Soviet T-38 tank commander in 1941, wounded in the shoulder and back when a German shell smashed part of the tank’s armour into his body. “I was in hospital and a soldier in the bed beside me asked: ‘Why do our soldiers have only one rifle for two or three of our men when the Germans have automatics?’ So I designed one. I was a soldier and I created a machine gun for a soldier. It was called an Automat Kalashnikova—the automatic weapon of Kalashnikov—AK—and it carried the date of its first manufacture, 1947.”

  The AK-47, the battle rifle of the Warsaw Pact, became the symbol of revolution—Palestinian, Angolan, Vietnamese, Algerian, Afghan, Hizballah. And I asked old Mikhail Kalashnikov how he could justify all this blood, all those corpses torn to bits by his invention. He had been asked before. “You see, all these feelings come about because one side wants to liberate itself with arms. But in my opinion it is good that prevails. You may live to see the day when good prevails— it will be after I am dead. But the time will come when my weapons will be no more used or necessary.”

  This was incredible, preposterous. The AK-47 has mythic status. Kalashnikov admits this. “When I met the Mozambique minister of defence, he presented me with his country’s national banner which carries the image of a Kalashnikov sub-machine gun. And he told me that when all the liberation soldiers went home to their villages, they named their sons ‘Kalash.’ I think this is an honour, not just a military success. It’s a success in life when people are named after me, after Mikhail Kalashnikov.” Even the Lebanese Hizballah have included the AK-47 on their Islamic banner—the rifle forms the “l” of “Allah” in the Arabic script. There was no point in asking the old man what his children thought of him. His fiftyseven -year-old son Viktor is a small-arms designer and was part of the Russian delegation to Abu Dhabi.

  So we embarked down the Russian version of a familiar moral track. “My aim was to protect the borders of my motherland,” Kalashnikov tells me. “It is not my fault that the Kalashnikov became very well known in the world, that it was used in many troubled places. I think the policies of these countries are to blame, not the weapons designers. Man is born to protect his family, his children, his wife. But I want you to know that apart from armaments, I have written three books in which I try to educate our youth to show respect for their families, for old people, for history . . .”

  He was now in nostalgic mode. “I lived at a time when we all wanted to be of benefit to our [Soviet] state. To some extent, the state took care of its heroes and designers . . . In the village where I was born, according to a special decree, a monument was erected to me, twice my height. In the city of Ishevsk where I live, there is now a Kalashnikov museum with a section dedicated to my life—and this was erected in my lifetime!” No, Mikhail Kalashnikov tells me, he is not rich, he has little money. “I would have made good use of this money if I had it. But there are some qualities which may be more important. President Putin called me on my birthday the other day. No other president would telephone an arms designer. And these things are very important for me.” And God? I asked. What would God say of Mikhail Kalashnikov? “We were educated in such a way that I am probably an atheist,” he replied. “But something exists . . .”

  There was only one other place to seek an answer. I walked over to a small stand hidden away in the corner of one of the farthest pavilions, where brown-painted models of mobile-launched rockets lay on a shelf. This was the Iranian arms bazaar. Their missiles were called “Dawn” or “Morning Sunrise,” although one caught my eye, a big V-2-look-alike 125-kilometre-range monster produced by the S. B. Industrial Group of Tehran, called the Nazeat. It’s a Persian word meaning “Horror of Death.” Yes, Iran—the only nation in all of the world’s arms market to tell the true purpose of a weapon—had actually named a missile after the extinction of life. Did the answer to all my questions, I wondered, lie here?

  These missiles were not for sale, I was solemnly informed by Morteza Khosravi. They were only to show Iran’s “capabilities”—although in the year 2000, Iran had sold $31 million worth of “defence” products to Asia and Africa. Khosravi, a young man from the Iranian Ministry of Defence with a small beard and an intense expression and a family that lost its own “martyrs” in the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War, explained carefully—he took half a minute to reflect on each question before replying—that “the defence equipment in our production lines belongs to all Islamic nations—we are here to establish a joint cooperation with them.” But, he swiftly added, Iran sold only according to strict rules, under the UN’s Export Control Act. Once more, Lady Britomart had come to the rescue. In any case, more than 60 per cent of Iran’s military capacity had been switched to civilian production.

  I knew all this. What I wanted to hear about was the immorality of arms production. Morteza Khosravi seemed puzzled. Was it not perfectly clear? “There are two main purposes for the production of weapons,” he said. “Some provide them for aggression, others for self-defence. The latter is the case for our country; we produce weapons only for self-defence and for the protective policy of our government. We have had a peaceful state but others have invaded us—we had the eight years ‘Imposed War.’ The only policy of our troops at that time was to defend their borders and their country. We always had a policy of defending ourselves.” There was another long pause. Then Khosravi uttered the mantra of every arms-seller. “It is a fact that each human being must defend himself.”

  I had heard this from Derek Turnbull, from Mikhail Kalashnikov, from John Hurst. If only the world was full of nice human beings who did civilised things. The Lord wants us to defend ourselves. Man is born to protect his family. Protection, respect, trust, history, timelessness. It seemed useless to listen to these words any more. They were unstoppable, unarguable, impossible. Now thrive the armourers indeed. The merchants of death sell death in the form of protection, killing as defence, as God’s will, human destiny, patriotic duty. The bills—human and financial—come later. And we poor humans are the “target movers,” frightened folk to fleece with talk of threats and aggression. The threat is inside ourselves, of course, as we travel through the world. It is our task to “cycle up and down as desired until hit.”

  THUS FEEL THE PALESTINIANS. Scarcely a month after my conversation with John Hurst, I was in Bethlehem in the Is
raeli-occupied West Bank, where Lockheed Martin of Florida and the Federal Laboratories of Pennsylvania had made quite a contribution to life in the local municipality. Or—in the case of Lockheed—death. I found that pieces of Hellfire missile were stored in sacks in the civil defence headquarters as evidence of eighteen-year-old Osama Khorabi’s violent death. The Hellfire had exploded in his living room, killing him instantly, less than two months earlier. The missile engine, fuel pipe and shreds of the wiring system had been sorted into plastic bags by ambulance-drivers and paramedics, alongside shrapnel from dozens of U.S.-made fuses for shells fired by Israeli tanks into Beit Jalla, in the attack on the Palestinian Christian village that Jim Hurst said he hadn’t heard about. The Palestinians could read the evidence of the weapons’ American origin but were unable to identify the actual missiles and shells that were used. “We are humanitarian workers,” one of the ambulance-drivers said to me one rainy Saturday morning as I trawled through a bag of iron missile parts and shrapnel in his Bethlehem office. “We are not scientists.”

  The use of American armaments against Arabs by Israel has been one of the most provocative sources of anger in the Middle East, and the narrative of their use is almost as important as the political conflict between Israel and its enemies. For it is one thing to know that Washington claims to be a “neutral partner” in Middle East peace negotiations while supporting one side—Israel—in all its demands; it is quite another when the armaments Israel employs to enforce its will—weapons that kill and tear apart Arabs—carry the engraved evidence of their manufacture in the United States. Even the CS gas cartridges fired by Israelis at Palestinians in Bethlehem are American-made. Palestinians claimed—with good reason—that the gas has caused serious breathing difficulties among children after the rounds were fired at stone-throwing children near Rachel’s tomb. The cartridges and gas canisters are labelled “Federal Laboratories, Saltsburg, Pennsylvania 15681” and are stated on the metal to be “long range projectiles 150 yards.” The rounds, according to the U.S. manufacturers’ instructions I read on the side, contain “tear gas which is highly irritating to eyes, nose, skin and respiratory system . . . If exposed, do not rub eyes, seek medical assistance immediately.”163

  Throughout early 2001, Israeli tank crews routinely aimed shells at Beit Jalla when Palestinian gunmen fired Kalashnikov rifles—yes, the invention of cheerful eighty-one-year-old Hero of Socialist Labour Mikhail Kalashnikov—from the village of Beit Jalla at the neighbouring Jewish settlement of Gilo, and most of these tank rounds carried U.S. fuses. All were coded: “FUZE P18D M549AC0914H014 014” (in some cases the last digit read “5”). One of these shells killed Dr. Harald Fischer, a German citizen living in Beit Jalla, in November 2000.

  The engine of the Lockheed Hellfire missile that struck Osama Khorabi’s home in February 2001 carried the coding “189 761334987 DMW90E003007” and its “Lot” number—the batch of missiles from which it came—was 481. On a small steel tube at the top of the missile engine was written the code “12903 9225158 MFR-5S443.” A small, heavy, cylindrical dome which appears to come from the same projectile was labelled “Battery Thermal” and carried the code “P/N 10217556 E-W62, Lot No. EPH-2111, Date of MFR [manufacture] 08776, MFG Code 81855.” The codes are followed by the initials “U.S.” Other missile parts include damaged fragments of a hinged fin and a mass of wiring. The missile attack, according to the Israelis, was a “pre-emptive strike” against the village, although Mr. Khorabi was no militant and his only ambition was to join the Beit Jalla theatre project. The Israelis used Apache helicopters to fire their missiles into Beit Jalla on at least six occasions—including the one on which Mr. Khorabi was killed—and the Apaches are made by Lockheed at their massive arms plant at Orlando, Florida, home of the Hellfire I and II missiles. U.S. manufacturers routinely refuse to accept any blame for the bloody consequences of their weapons’ use. I found that the Pennsylvania gas cartridges used by the Israelis in Bethlehem actually carried an official disclaimer. “Federal Laboratories,” it said on the cartridge, “will assume no responsibility for the misuse of this device.”

  The world arms market, immoral and deceitful and murderous as it is, is nonetheless a beast that clamours for both publicity and secrecy. It needs to sell just as much as it needs to conceal, to make its billions from the Arabs while at the same time avoiding any mention of the blood and brains that will be splashed upon the sand as a result. The French arms conglomerates Giat and Dassault, along with Lockheed Martin, all have local headquarters in gleaming office blocks in Abu Dhabi. And the middlemen—the Arabs and Israelis and Germans and Americans and Britons who negotiate between manufacturers and buyers—also have a strange inclination to court the press, to reveal their more sinister characteristics, to boast of their ruthlessness, of their necessity in an immoral world. I sometimes think they want to use journalists as confessionals.

  Perhaps for this reason, I have spent years, collectively, investigating the ways in which we—the Americans, the Europeans (including the Russians), the “West” in the most generous definition of the word—have produced the instruments of death for those who live in the Middle East. Never once did we reflect upon how Arab Muslims might respond to this extraordinary, wicked trade in arms, how they might attempt to revenge themselves upon us—not in their own lands but in ours. During the Lebanese civil war, I tried hard to connect the victim with the killer, sometimes travelling across Beirut to seek out the sniper or the gunner who had blown a man or woman to pieces. Once, in East Beirut, I confronted the Christian Phalangist militiaman who, I am sure, fired the mortar shell that killed a young woman in a West Beirut street. He refused to talk to me. So I searched for the arms-dealers who made these killings possible. More than anything, I sought to confront the arms-makers with the total and inescapable proof that their particular weapon had slaughtered the innocent. It was a journey that was to take me tens of thousands of kilometres over ten years—to the Gulf, Iran, Palestine, Israel, to Germany, Austria and to the United States. It was a woeful, depressing assignment, for the more I learned, the more profoundly hopeless did the Middle East’s tragedy appear to be. To have venal Western nations peddling their lethal products to the Muslim world and Israel was one thing; to watch those same Middle East nations pleading and whining and squandering their wealth to purchase those same weapons, quite another.

  One cold late winter’s day in 1987, as Iran’s terrible war with Iraq was entering its final, most apocalyptic stage, I arrived at the railway station at Cologne in Germany to meet a dealer who knew far too much about that most costly of Middle East conflicts. He was a plump, bespectacled arms-merchant who had many times acted as a conduit between the U.S. government and Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. He sat in his office with a broad smile, insisting that he must remain anonymous lest I wished to be responsible for his assassination. So was it true, I asked him, that he had given the CIA’s intelligence on the Iranian army to the Iraqi government? He laughed—so long, so deeply, perhaps for more than thirty seconds—before he admitted all. “Mr. Fisk, I will tell you this. At the very beginning of the war, in September of 1980, I was invited to go to the Pentagon. And there I was handed the very latest U.S. satellite photographs of the Iranian front lines. You could see everything on the pictures. There were the Iranian gun emplacements in Abadan and behind Khorramshahr, the lines of trenches on the eastern side of the Karun River, the tank revetments—thousands of them—all the way up the Iranian side of the border towards Kurdistan. No army could want more than this. And I travelled with these maps from Washington by air to Frankfurt and from Frankfurt on Iraqi Airways straight to Baghdad. The Iraqis were very grateful—very grateful!”

  The Germans seem to have a penchant for playing these treacherous games. For months in the mid- to late Eighties, I investigated the Middle East arms trade and often I found myself back in that place of Europe’s dark past, trailing through snow-covered valleys in Germany’s great trains, my bag stuffed with notebooks a
nd files containing Iran’s entire weapons procurement demands for 1987, 1988 and beyond—into uncounted years of warfare against Iraq that would be foreshortened in just twelve months” time.

  In the frost of 1987, one of these long trains carries me into Königswinter, a chauffeur with a well-heated limousine waiting for me at the station to take me to the Schloss in which the “Spider of Bonn” helps to change the military map of the Middle East. Gerhard Mertins smokes long, fat Cuban cigars and looks like an arms-dealer, a part that is played to perfection because it is real. There are no doubts, no lack of confidence, no moral ambiguities as he walks into the study of his Königswinter office, the snow falling heavily and comfortably outside the window. “I love this kind of weather, don’t you?” he asks, brushing the flakes from his jacket.

  The telephone rings and Herr Mertins speaks intently into the receiver. “We have to know the needs of your generals,” he says impatiently. Then he replaces the receiver with an indulgent chuckle. He makes a great appearance of being candid. “That was the Greek Cypriot army. They are interested in new anti-aircraft guns and mines for their harbours. Mark my words, something is cooking in the island of Cyprus.” He laughs again, a man-in-the-know, unshocked by the iniquities of war. When I ask Herr Mertins to whom he sells guns, he almost coughs at the indignity I have cast upon him. “I think, if you will forgive me, that this is a very naive question.”

  He puffs heavily on his cigar and then moves his arm forward and uses it to describe an elliptical, almost aerobatic circle in front of him. “Let me tell you frankly, I am on the Arab horse. Why not? You know, I have principles. I do not do this for profit. Yes, things are said about me—in Mexico, the paper Excelsior said I was a Nazi, an SS man, a friend of Klaus Barbie, the ‘Butcher of Lyon.’ I have never met this man. But they felt they had to deport me from Mexico.” Herr Mertins maintains offices in Jeddah and Riyadh—he needs no visa to travel to Saudi Arabia—and he shows me a snapshot of himself standing next to long-robed Gulf sheikhs. He mourns the old Beirut, the city destroyed in the civil war that is still scissoring Lebanon to pieces, with the special melancholy of the rich. “I have such fond memories of the Lucullus restaurant. It is destroyed? That is too bad. A beautiful city, so sad.” Beirut was destroyed by weapons—by bombs and mines and artillery fire and fighter-bombers and bullets—but no hint of this damages Herr Mertins’s memories.