DAKAR, Senegal — He smuggled weapons to rebels in Angola. He headed a criminal group that smuggled cobalt out of the Congo. He delivered missiles, machine guns and military helicopters to Liberia in the midst of a civil war. But convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, recently released by the United States in an exchange for Brittney Griner, the American women’s basketball star, has never been held accountable for the acts documented over the years by the United Nations. Instead, he was arrested in a sting operation in Bangkok in 2008 by US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) informants posing as Colombian revolutionaries, and later convicted of conspiring to kill Colombians. americans.
Although he was greeted on his return to Russia as a “wonderful person”, many of the African victims of the conflicts he supplied weapons to are still suffering from the trauma and waiting for justice.
“This guy is responsible for the murder, indirectly, of thousands of people,” said Hassan Bility, director of the Global Justice and Research Project, an organization that documents the atrocities of war in his country, Liberia.
Bout had a network of more than 50 aircraft that were constantly involved in “arms shipments from Eastern Europe to African war zones,” according to the UN.
Bout has not responded to an interview request. But speaking to The New York Times in 2003, Bout first said he didn’t know what he was handing over were weapons. He then he changed focus.
“Illegal weapons?” he asked. “What does that mean? If the rebels control an airport and a city, and they give you permission to land, what’s illegal about that?
One war zone where the UN detected arms shipments was Liberia. Bout supplied weapons to Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, said Stephen J. Rapp, who as prosecutor for the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone led Taylor’s prosecution, which ended in his conviction for war crimes for atrocities committed in Sierra Leone.
Rapp said that Taylor waged his wars through acts of violence against civilians.
Joshua Kulah, who was 9 when Liberia’s second civil war ended in 2003, said soldiers and rebels had forced his friends to become child soldiers and cousins and friends had been killed on the front lines. Kulah, now a 28-year-old lawyer, recalled that his parents hid him whenever armed men came to the neighborhood, so they wouldn’t kidnap him and force him to fight.
One day in 2003, he was playing outside when the rebels arrived. “We saw rockets coming down everywhere,” Kulah said. “I saw it fall on the houses and kill everyone in the house. I remember running home from the field and the rockets were coming down. I saw corpses.”
Kulah said he was “indifferent” to Bout’s release because he blamed the people who used the weapons, not those who sold them.
Bility said his organization would start putting together a dossier on the arms dealer’s activities in Liberia that could be used in a case against him, and then wait for him to leave Russia so he could be extradited or tried elsewhere.
Bility added that Bout’s release was “difficult” but that he would not criticize the United States when the United States had repeatedly tried to hold accountable the Liberian rebels who fled there, while hundreds of war criminals in Liberia are free.
Bout’s client list was long, according to Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, who wrote a book about him, “Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible.” He simultaneously supplied weapons to Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, and to Massoud’s enemies, the Taliban.
For years, Liberian war survivors, human rights advocates and some politicians have pushed for the creation of a war crimes tribunal, recommended by the Country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But successive governments have resisted.
Among the commission’s recommendations: Investigate Bout.
Initially, George Weah, the President of Liberia, supported the creation of the court. But he recently he has kept quiet about it.
By: RUTH MACLEAN and DOUNARD BONDO
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6503495, IMPORTING DATE: 2022-12-21 21:00:07
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