The trial of the alleged “Merchant of Death”
This article is by Kathi Lynn Austin, a former Arms Trafficking Expert for the United Nations, and the Executive Director of the Conflict Awareness Project. Views expressed are the author’s own.
On the opening day of the Viktor Bout trial, Judge Shira Scheinlin invited the unusually large, eighty person jury pool to be seated in the courtroom gallery. That meant that I and other members of the press and public were directed by a stern U.S. marshal to sit in the jury box. Because I had been first in line waiting for the trial to begin, I found myself seated as juror number one.
I directly faced dark-suited, mustached Viktor Bout, sitting to the left of his two trial lawyers, a study in contrasts—the elder, restrained Kenneth Kaplan beside the dapper lead attorney, Albert Dayan. It was a surreal moment, with both Viktor Bout and myself behind our composed courtroom masks. From my long experience tracking Bout’s activities, I can say we were both out of character. We both are more accustomed to a different kind of front line, under a different kind of glare—the equatorial sun of jungle war zones.
I never saw Viktor Bout look me in the eye while I sat distracted despite the comfortable chairs of the jury box, and he faced a possible life sentence on charges of conspiring to provide surface-to-air missiles for the use in killing Americans. What was going through my mind were the images from my years as an arms trafficking investigator—of particular people, even close friends, who had become victims of the many dirty wars I had witnessed, wars aided and abetted by Bout and other arms smugglers.
I first came across Viktor Bout’s name in the mid-1990’s when I was investigating violations of a U.N. arms embargo on Rwanda for a human rights organization. I interviewed a European pilot in the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire), and he described Bout to me as a less-known but entrepreneurial air cargo operator. At the time, Bout had contracted the plane’s of the pilot’s company to carry out a rebel supply mission in neighboring Angola despite a U.N. embargo on that country too.
It was a time when private arms traffickers started to play a pivotal role in African conflicts by illicitly supplying the demands of weapons of warlords, rebel groups, pariah governments, and criminal networks involved in attacks on civilian populations and the pillaging of natural resources. Most of these traffickers had started out as Cold War government operatives either for the former Soviet bloc or the West, or for Apartheid South Africa. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Apartheid regime’s days were numbered, these agents were given access to the cache of airplanes, cargo companies, airstrips, along with the corrupt officials that formed the lifeblood of their operations.
As privatization and globalization took hold, so did they, unwilling to relinquish their former profits and adventure-fueled, macho lifestyles. Governments did little to rein in the activities of these free-wheeling and dealing arms entrepreneurs, preferring instead to call upon them covertly when needed for national security operations.
Bout’s shrewd business skills helped him rise to the top as he took over as many friendly skies as he could while pioneering the airdrop of arms supplies over unfriendly ones. To outdo his arms supply competitors, Bout amassed one of the biggest aviation fleets and began gobbling up local ‘boutique’ arms delivery shops. Bout’s cornering of the arms trade market in parts of Africa, Afghanistan, and elsewhere is what earned him his arms trafficker poster boy status.
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