Bulgaria

Bulgaria
Dirty politics
Apr 17th 2008
From The Economist print edition
One resignation is not enough to clean up Bulgaria

RUMEN PETKOV admits that as the then Bulgarian interior minister he met the country's top gangsters in 2006. He claims it was in a good cause: to ask them to stop shooting each other in the crucial weeks ahead of the country's accession to the European Union.

Bulgaria's woes with crime and corruption needed more than a temporary ceasefire. Gangland shootings, never resolved, have resumed: last week gunmen killed Bulgaria's best-known author of books on the mafia, Georgy Stoyev, and the manager of an energy firm with a controversial history.

Under pressure from the European Union, Mr Petkov resigned this week after a leaked intelligence report said a drug gang had received top-secret internal documents from officials in his ministry, while illegal booze producers gave money to a senior crime-fighter in return for information and the destruction of incriminating evidence. EU officials have long worried that anything they shared with Bulgarian counterparts would be leaked to gangsters. Eurocrats say they objected to Mr Petkov's bullying attitude; an EU source says he enjoyed “rubbing our nose into the fact that Bulgaria is now a member state”. That is not a unanimous view. The European Commission's vice-president, Franco Frattini, went skiing with Mr Petkov last year and has praised him. But the EU has already suspended some programmes because of corruption. In July, it will assess Bulgaria's overall progress and may suspend the validity of its court decisions elsewhere in the EU.

It was a parliamentary investigation that made Mr Petkov's position impossible. But the real story is Bulgaria's political weakness. The ruling ex-communists are split between a supposedly modernising faction lead by the prime minister, Sergey Stanishev, and the old guard around Mr Petkov. A coalition party that represents the Turkish ethnic minority controls the agriculture and environment ministries, the main conduits for EU money. It has been heavily criticised for land deals, arbitrary treatment of mining licences and vote-buying.

Mr Stanishev was recently forced to bring back into government a deputy environment minister from this party, fired last year for alleged corruption (and then cleared). While out of office he caused surprise by acquiring two newspapers (from his savings, he said). The economy minister, Rumen Ovcharov, another old guard ex-communist, resigned last year under a cloud, but protested his innocence. Criticism from Brussels and elsewhere about Bulgaria's murk has continued. One more resignation is unlikely to make a difference.

Bout at bay

The illegal weapons trade

Suited and booted

Mar 13th 2008
From The Economist print edition

A notorious arms dealer is arrested in Thailand. Why?

Reuters

Bout: on the other foot now

A FORMER Soviet military-intelligence officer, stranded in Africa by the collapse of his country, turns to gun-running and builds a lucrative international business. It is the sort of outfit that thrives on pointless wars in failed, dirt-poor places. But it also plays a part in some bigger conflicts. Its list of past customers includes the world's best-known terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda and Colombia's FARC—and Western governments too. Efforts to round up the man at the centre of this web are frustrated, sometimes by bad luck, and sometimes apparently by squabbles in the rich world between those who want to prosecute and those who protect him.

That, broadly, is the critics' account of the career of Viktor Bout, once a Soviet “military translator” in Africa, fluent in six languages, the founder of numerous controversial freight businesses, and now the inmate of a police cell in Thailand, where he was detained on March 6th in a sting operation. Mr Bout says he was on holiday. An extradition affidavit filed by an agent of America's Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Robert Zachariasiewicz, says Mr Bout was lured from his home in Moscow to Thailand by people posing as FARC representatives, wanting to buy weapons for a $5m commission. America says it will seek his extradition. On March 10th Mr Bout's British associate, Andrew Smulian, was charged in New York with conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organisation.

Quite why Mr Bout has now fallen into the clutches of the international justice system is still unclear. Previous attempts to nab him have fallen foul of Western disunity. Clinton-era efforts fizzled out during the Bush administration. Belgian and British attempts to arrest him seem to have been leaked (some blame America for that). Mr Bout appears to have been a useful contractor for American forces in Iraq, and to have trafficked arms to American-backed causes elsewhere. That may have endeared him to the Pentagon, even as the DEA and other agencies were hunting him on other grounds.

Some, such as Louise Shelley, an American academic who researches international organised crime, link Mr Bout's arrest to a broader change in Russia. Semyon Mogilevich, a Moscow-based businessman long wanted by Interpol, was arrested there on January 24th on tax-evasion charges. On March 12th Russia also agreed to extradite to Colombia an Israeli mercenary, Yair Gal Klein, who was arrested late last year in Moscow. He is accused of training FARC guerrillas. But sceptics think any change in Russian co-operation with global law enforcement is cosmetic: “Handing over a couple of ageing arms dealers is a small price,” says one, noting strong Russian involvement in Colombia in the past, such as building a submarine for cocaine smuggling.

It is unclear if Mr Bout will ever reach the dock in America. Some who have followed his career closely think he will use “greymail”: threatening to expose American secrets. The authorities may prefer to have him spill the beans on something else—perhaps his shadowy backers in the Russian arms-export business—than to risk putting him on trial.

Even more puzzling is why Mr Bout ventured to Thailand at all. Mr Zachariasiewicz's affidavit paints a picture of a man both greedy and careless in pursuit of a smallish deal—implausible for those who believe Mr Bout to have been a meticulous planner with a vast fortune.

But the biggest question of all is what Mr Bout represents. In one sense he was a dinosaur: the product of the Soviet collapse and the opportunities it provided in the form of plentiful cheap weapons and aircraft, highly trained men at a loose end, and weak law enforcement. Those conditions are unlikely to be repeated (though a close reading of the DEA affidavit suggests, alarmingly, that Mr Bout thought Bulgaria was the ideal place in which to trans-ship advanced surface-to-air missiles).

If true, his alleged activities could also portend a future in which global criminal entrepreneurs disguise illegal businesses (such as drug- and gun-running) within legal ones (air freight), playing off Western governments and their agencies against each other, and using offshore companies and weak legal systems to keep their activities impenetrable. It is easy to imagine such villainy staying ahead of the stumbling efforts of national criminal-justice systems. At least for a time.