INDEFENSIBLE: SETTING THE SCENE

Just before midday on 15 March 2008, an arms dump in the small Albanian village of Gerdec caught alight. The gargantuan explosions that followed were heard nearly a hundred miles away and continued for almost fourteen hours. The explosions killed twenty-six people, including a three-year-old, a seven-year-old who was cycling nearby and a pregnant woman. Over 300 people were injured, 318 houses completely destroyed and 400 others damaged.

It was a tragedy designed by the international arms business and involving the collusion of the US government, Albanian government and a contract with a shady company, AEY Inc.

The story begins in January 2007, when the US Department of Defense awarded a $298 million contract to an upstart US company, AEY, to supply ammunition to the Afghan military. The US-backed Afghan National Army uses Soviet-designed small arms such as Kalashnikovs, as they are accustomed to them, and they are cheap and serviceable. But (at that time), America didn’t manufacture the ammunition for the ubiquitous AK47 assault rifle. So the DoD looked to buy what it needed from elsewhere—and faced the immediate and obvious problem that its likely sources of supply were Chinese and former Eastern Bloc manufacturers. Circumventing such difficulties is the stock-in-trade of the arms business, and the DoD had a simple solution: to outsource the supply.

The contract was won by a company that few had heard of until that time. That’s not unusual in this business of corporate chameleons. AEY was run by twenty-one-year-old Efraim Diveroli, who not only carried a forged driving license but had previously been arrested for domestic violence. The company’s vice-president was a former masseur. Serial party-goers and regular pot smokers, they also dabbled in cocaine and acid.

Both AEY and its youthful president had been placed on the State Department’s Arms Trafficking Watch List, a list that was not consulted when the contract was awarded. The Pentagon commissioned an ‘independent’ evaluation of the company that returned a glowing endorsement. The evaluation was written by an individual who was a financial backer and vice-president of AEY.

Diveroli operated at the thrift-store bargain-hunting end of the arms business supply chain. Seeking cheap ammunition, he turned to Albania. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall, Albania had been one of the most militarized countries in Europe, its former dictator Enver Hoxha building bunkers and situating arms caches across the territory of his small nation. The country had liberalized its economy, remained poor and didn’t need all those old bullets. So Albania’s defense authorities were in the process of dismantling and repacking its old ammunition stores to be recycled or disposed of. A shady firm (not AEY) led by a small-time US dealer and a politically connected Albanian businessman bought the ammunition and persuaded the defense minister, with the support of the prime minister, to have the army truck it for free to Gerdec, a small village near Albania’s sole international airport. There, the ammunition was to be cleaned, sorted and repacked.

The profits from this deal would feed many mouths. Diveroli did not buy directly from the Albanians or the ‘recycling’ firm, but from yet another shell company, Evdin Limited, associated with the Swiss arms dealer Heinrich Thomet, also on the US State Department’s watch list. Evdin Limited bought the ammunition for $22 per thousand rounds, before selling it to Diveroli for $40. The difference allegedly provided kick-backs to a number of Albanian higher-ups, most likely including the defense minister and the son of the prime minister.

There was one problem: Hoxha, distrusting the Soviets, had bought the ammunition from China, and US law prohibited the Pentagon from using Chinese weaponry. The Albanians solved this challenge by demonstrating how easy it was to remove the ‘Made in China’ markings, and authorizing a state agency to issue false certificates guaranteeing their Albanian origin. The military attaché at the US embassy in Albania claimed that the US ambassador at the time assisted the cover-up of the origins of the ammunition.

In late 2007, the Albanian government gave the factory in Gerdec the go-ahead to begin dismantling and recycling the ammunition. The Kalashnikov and its ammunition are famously sturdy and will withstand extreme conditions and long neglect—reasons, along with cheapness and simplicity, that they are favored by cash-strapped armies with poorly educated soldiers. But any ammunition needs to be handled with extreme care, especially if it is two decades or more old and has been kept in badly maintained rural storehouses. The process of transporting, stacking, inspecting and cleaning the ammunition violated numerous safety laws. The commander of the Albanian armed forces deemed Gerdec an inappropriate site: among other things, the job should have been done well away from any civilian habitation. Nevertheless, by mid-March 2008, 8,900 tons of ammunition had been delivered to the Gerdec site, nearly 10% of the entire Albanian military’s supply.

Most of the work was done by hand by poorly paid workers, who were instructed to dump old gunpowder, damaged cases, thousands of fuses and projectiles onto a huge pile on the property. It was then bulldozed towards a nearby field. Soon two fields of about 2,000 square meters were filled with this deadly debris.

It did not take a munitions specialist to see that this was an accident waiting to happen. All that was needed was a spark. In the explosion of 15 March 2008, Gerdec was almost entirely destroyed.

Arms dealers don’t like to advertise what their business really involves. In this case, AEY had blown its cover, and the scam had literally exploded in the face of its conspirators. Unusually for such a transaction, it couldn’t be concealed any longer. A few knuckles had to be rapped.

Efraim Diveroli was eventually jailed in the US for four years for trading in Chinese munitions. The American ambassador was cleared of any wrongdoing. Albania’s defense minister resigned, but a year later was named the country’s environment minister. No American has faced justice for the deaths at Gerdec.

The father of the seven-year-old boy who was killed because he happened to be cycling past when the dump exploded describes his life in Gerdec as ‘like living every minute of every day in a cemetery’.

You may say: ‘surely this is an anomaly, an outlier, a crazy deal with unforeseen outcomes’. Sadly, it is not. It is emblematic of a global arms trade that is suffused with corruption, imperils the vulnerable and makes us all less safe. Despite the constant messages and distortions we are bombarded with, this is the real truth of the industry. Don’t believe us? Read on.