Crime-Conflict Nexus at Oxford

As an update on the CCN project’s recent activities:  Jeni and I were invited to give a seminar at Oxford University last week as part of their Changing Character of War (CCW) Programme’s lunchtime seminar series (please note there is an error in the events page: neither Jeni nor I are Doctors yet). The title of the paper was ‘The Crime-Conflict Nexus: Implications for Stabilisation and Counter-Insurgency’, and we’re very grateful to Professor Hew Strachan for chairing the session and to all that came along, particularly those that contributed to the lively discussion that followed.

We presented our approach for analysing the problem space in this sprawling area, namely through recognising the three forms of crime-conflict nexus that we identify: the logistical, the conceptual, and the governance subversion nexus. In particular, we emphasised that using this tripartite framework is helpful as a basis for challenging the dominant mindset among practitioners and policy-makers that tends to consider this problem primarily in logistical terms (i.e. the flow of resources from criminal activity to insurgents), which in turn has encouraged a largely targeting mindset (i.e. whoever supplies the insurgents should be included in the security force ‘hit list’).

But, as we argued, if you critique that view with considerations for the conceptual and governance subversion forms of nexus then you can immediately expose why this could be a counter-productive response that omits this issue’s crucial nuances (in this post I’m going to leave the details for the formal paper we’ll be working up). Ultimately, the crime-conflict nexus as a subject of interest to practitioners is one that has primarily governance strategy implications which are potentially foundational to the effectiveness of COIN and stabilisation operations; and which are far and above more important than the military targeting implications. To add some richness to the paper, we ended with a discussion of the devilishly complicated applications to contemporary Afghanistan.

There was a great discussion that followed for several hours, both in the room and after; with a great deal of debate on the problem of balancing local governance considerations with central state-building agendas.

Some of the most engaged were the military officers in the audience. Their personal experiences on operations also further drew out the point that always needs to be repeated in this area: there really aren’t ever any wonderful or neat solutions. There are instead only ever moral and practical compromises with consistently messy and flawed results. That of course leaves a crucial, but unanswered question: do we have the stomach to fully face that fact and everything that comes with it on operations? We’re just going to have to wait and see for the answer.

You needn’t make your vote count- We’ll do that for you!

Local elections have just been held across Russia. Millions of Russians have had the opportunity to go and vote for their local representatives. This is modern Russian democracy in action.

“Of course United Russia will win. I won’t bother voting because it will make no difference, but that’s not so bad is it?”

Such is the view of my landlord’s representative, in her twenties, who came to collect the rent a few days ago. It’s typical of so many Muscovites and Russians I’ve talked to. Let’s examine each of the three things she said.

1. Of course United Russia will win.
This was (barring a popular uprising) a certainty. They won with a large majority in most seats. The fact that this can be said is a ringing indictment of the state of Russian ‘democracy’. The United Russia government removed all independent candidates from ballot sheets using the tried and tested method of ‘invalid application forms’. Apparently ALL the independent candidates wanting to stand made mistakes on their forms or had faked the signatures needed to support them. Only opposition parties were allowed to stand, and only because United Russia doesn’t consider them a threat. They briefly walked out of the Duma when they heard about the farcical vote. The Communists, meanwhile, are one of the main complainants about the lack of democracy. Nikolai Gubenko, a communist sitting on the Moscow Assembly, has complained that the ordinary fare of political campaigning – holding gatherings, meeting voters, and putting up posters – has been made very difficult. If this evidence is anything to go by then opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was right to call the election ‘fraud, farce, 100%’. Even former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was outraged by the vote.

2. I won’t bother voting because it will make no difference.
Voter apathy is widespread in Russia. The population’s democratic muscle had never really been flexed before and was only starting to be used by the time Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999. He stopped it again quickly. Many think Russians have had a voice so rarely in the country’s authoritarian past they don’t feel it’s their business who runs the country or how they do it. It’s a different viewpoint which some in the West may find anathema. On the other hand these are only local and municipal elections, which are less prominent than parliamentary or presidential elections in most countries. We must also respect a population’s viewpoint. There are other points of view: who is to say that Western bickering and media frenzies (3rd paragraph) over elections are a useful waste of a population’s time?

3. But neither of the above is so bad is it.
Here we see a greater reason for the (shall we call it a) pact between many Russians and United Russia (or Vladimir Putin). When you ask Russians about the 1990s, especially the late 90s, you receive a pretty much universal answer. The scene depicted is heartbreaking. A once proud nation falling apart at the seams. Rampant crime, drug abuse, alcoholism, a miserable slaughter of hapless conscripts in Chechnya, and the greatest catastrophe of all, the collapse of the rouble. Many people’s life savings were wiped out overnight. Oligarchs bought up people’s money ‘coupons’ for a fraction of their value and were handed empires on a silver platter out of old Soviet industries. The Russian people were shell-shocked by a tragedy many found difficult to comprehend. This was their first experience of democracy and capitalism and it was an awful experience.

In response they coined the term ‘shitocracy’. If this was what democracy brought, then the West could keep it!

Capitalism is making slow and unsteady progress in Russia, but at least it’s crawling in the right direction. Democracy is now ‘managed’ by United Russia, and some observers hold that the Russian people are just fine with that.

So it’s not as simple as democratic crusaders in the West would like to see it. For Russia (as, in fact, for the establishment of all the Western democracies), order comes first. Not servitude to Tsar or the party, but order with capitalism. Russia is not China but it’s found some inspiration from there. Russia taught China how to get into Communism, now it seems China has helped show Russia how to get out. Order allows people to make money, and with that comes higher expectations for living standards and democratic rights. Russia has long had a way of defying prediction, so no doubt the country and people will find a different way of progressing. For the moment though, Russians seem happy to let massive electoral fraud go unchecked, and waive their democratic rights in exchange for some stability.

The West, with the kindest of post Cold War intentions, messed Russia up enough in the 1990s. It might be difficult for us to stand by and watch this happen to a potential democracy, and when it leads to people getting hurt the democratic world is as entitled as ever to show its alarm. But I’m sure if we take a look at the histories of most democratic countries we can find periods where they resembled modern Russia. History is never a straight spectrum of ‘progress’.

That said, let’s hope Russians realise why each vote does matter. The link between free and fair elections and more moderate and benevolent forms of government is not perfect, but it’s more identifiable than in systems of authoritarian or dictatorial power where the people have no say in government. On that basis, let’s hope this century won’t be as tragic for Russia as the previous one.

‘Afghans Oppose US Hit List of Drug traffickers’

Interesting article linked here in the Washington Post from last week with deep relevance to the debates at CCN. We have talked about the need to move away from a simple ‘logistical nexus’ mindset, as well call it, regarding considerations for the overlap between crime and conflict, as this leads to a primarily ‘disrupt’ and ‘destroy’ focus in activity. Our contrasting position, which we are increasingly arguing, is that one must also consider the ‘conceptual nexus’ and ‘governance subversion nexus’ forms of the crime-conflict issue also (see the link above ‘What is the Crime-Conflict Nexus?’). The WP article reveals some of the current problems with that mindset in action. Though, I still think there are more problems with this than the article recognises…

Building Peace After War: New Adelphi Book

Mats Berdal’s Building Peace After War is the latest edition of the International Institute for Strategic Studies‘ Adelphi Book Series. I must declare that Mats Berdal is my PhD supervisor; but even withstanding that (and given that it has already been well received by certain key individuals in the academic/policy world), it is by any standard an excellent read that had me revetted over the weekend. Personally, I judge it to be a remarkable synthesis of the literature on the vast and sprawling topic of ‘peacebuilding’ which is itself both comprehensive and succinct, and cuts to the heart of the key debates in this troubled area.

Quite unusually for the civil war literature that emphasises political dynamics, a significant proportion of the book is devoted to issues associated with crime. I’ll let you read the book to get into the detail of his full argument, but here are some interesting extracts to give you an idea:

The relationship between organised crime and violence in post-conflict settings – especially in the immediate and early post-war phase that is the focus of this book – is more complicated than the public pronouncements of policymakers on the subject typically suggest. Such statements, unsurprisingly and not without good reason, emphasise the costs of organised crime, presenting the need to combat and eradicate it as a moral imperative. And yet, as an issue confronting peacebuilders on the ground it has repeatedly presented morally complex dilemmas and policy trade-offs … an exclusive focus on combatting or eradicating organised crime, drawing upon traditional law-enforcement models and categories, has not only met with mixed success but has sometimes threatened to undermine the fragile stability that characterises post-conflict societies in the early phase of external involvement. [p.69]

… At the very least, this discussion suggests that efforts to meet the challenge posed by organised crime in post-conflict societies must proceed from a nuanced understanding of the roots and functions of this kind of crime in the local community, including the degree of local legitimacy that it may enjoy. All-important in this regard is the need to unravel the relationship of organised crime with ‘existing authority structures’ within a peacebuilding environment, establishing whether that relationship is ‘predatory’, ‘parastic’ or ’symbiotic’. Such understanding must then feed into the strategy adopted for meeting the challenges posed by crime and criminal enterprises in post-conflict settings. Policy initiatives must also take account of and reflect the actual resources available for addressing the challenges identified, while seeking to minimise the unintended consequences of tackling only a limited aspect of what is necessarily a larger and more multifaceted challenge. [p.71]

Reading List: Organised Crime and Trafficking in the Caucasus

Organised Crime and Illegal Trafficking in the Caucasus

Caucasus Analytical Digest (September 2009)

This issue discusses the security threats emanating from networks of crime and corruption in the South Caucasus. It analyzes the Georgian Mafia, their activities and evolution in the 1990s, and evaluates the success of Georgia’s fight against organized crime. The publication also provides an opinion poll on the reliability of and trust towards the police in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia and a chronicle of the events in the Caucasus between 17 July and 15 September 2009.

Governance: Formal vs Informal Systems. Really?

I’ve been catching up with one of my favourite journals, Conflict, Security and Development. I’ve been meaning to post some summaries of a few of the most interesting articles of recent months. Before that, however, here is an aspect of one article that I want to pounce on.

Robert Egnell and Peter Haldén have an excellent article on Security Sector Reform (SSR) and the implications of state theory, entitled “Laudable, ahistorical and overambitious: security sector reform meets state formation theory”, CSD, Vol. 9, No. 1. It’s a first-class analysis that I’ve found highly thought provoking. I thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in SSR or post-conflict reconstruction/governance issues in general.

However, on p.44/45 they go into some of the failings of SSR in Sierra Leone and the stagnation in governance and economic development there. They explain how part of the problem is that the state is bypassed by a “complex web of informal networks”. As a result, the state cannot occupy any kind of central position in the running of society and governance in general:

“In such networks ‘big men’ distribute resources, organise their followers in collective endeavours and co-ordinate communication … Clearly, these networks offer ways for individuals and groups to gain their livelihoods and, although to strikingly different degrees, security, power and wealth. These structures are not clans or tribes – which would be tantamount to ‘organisations’ – they are unofficial networks that encompass organisations and actors such as secret societies, businessmen, chiefs, the military, warlords etc. They are tied together by key persons, called ‘big men’ which means that the channels and vehicles of power are not bounded, permanent nor grounded in territory or other kinds of fixed membership. Indeed it has been pointed out how ‘fluctuating’, ‘changing’, ‘intangible’ and ‘fluid’ these highly important networks are. Hence this fluid situation is one in which ‘exit’ from one network to another is normal, in a similar way that a consumer may shift between purveyors of goods or providers of services, depending on which network is best at satisfying one’s political needs.”

In my past life I was a civil servant in the UK’s MoD. Anyone who’s spent time as a civil servant will find that even in such a centuries-old, formal state structure, the real business, the major leaps, the initiatives almost all really get done through (or as a result of) informal networks. These networks are unnamed, often fleeting, sometimes momentary and always “fluctuating, changing, intangible and fluid”. Informal coalitions, strong “big men” personalities always emerge to shape how things get done within the formal, official structure of the civil service. In my view, the official structure is really a veneer of officialdom in which we take comfort, but beneath that it really comes down to the individuals and their relationships with each other, which are by necessity informally based.

I understand that informal networks that are illicit and clandestine, and hence often serve highly unpleasant purposes, are of course different to the informal networks within formal state structures that I am describing. But the point I am ambling towards is that getting things done through informal networks is not itself a bad thing per se. In fact, it’s very rare for any of us to use systems that aren’t based on informal relations in some way (the exceptions perhaps are things like police arrest and court procedures, but those are pretty stark procedures compared to most of the activities that day-to-day governance relies upon).

I would say that in even the most developed states, most government and non-government business gets done through the same “complex web of informal networks” that Egnell and Haldén descibe. It’s just how humans work. An organisation (whether a business, university faculty or government department) may have a formal diagram indicating the structure and mechanisms it professes to run upon, but at the end of the day it’s the personalities and the relationships between individuals that decides how things get done. The formal structure doesn’t really do anything itself other than acting as a diagrammatic approximation of the informal network, which will itself be of variable accuracy.

Informal networks aren’t bad, they’re fundamental, and can actually form the basis of some of the best of social initiatives (for a conflict resolution example think of the Anbar Awakening, but I’m also talking of even the most banal internal UK government initiatives). Instead of formal vs informal, the real difference between good and bad governance is the accountability, oversight and intervention mechanisms for protecting people and public interests. It’s these latter factors, not formality or informality, that is key to the result I feel.

Economics, Conflict Resolution, COIN and Development: Corruption Still Very Thorny

Last week I was lucky enough to attend an excellent day-long roundtable event at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. It was part of the launch of a new programme at IISS on ‘Economics and Conflict Resolution’.  Some great people spoke, and for myself it amounted in part as a refresher on all things to do with conflict, security and development, but also an update on the leading academic and practitioner thinking in this area.

Given current endeavours in Afghanistan and the troubled dependence of NATO strategy on a legitimate and effective host government ally (see previous post on this), corruption came up quite a bit. At the end of the session Lord Malloch-Brown commented that while a huge amount of ground had been covered and great insights raised, there was so much in the day’s discussion that held deep and unresolved tensions.

They listed several of these, but one tension I perceive, and which I feel wasn’t emphasised enough, is the issue of how to deal with corruption in host nation partners. One of the DFID practitioners emphasised that even though there is an attrition rate on aid supplied to a developing state through corruption, you still have to keep pouring the aid into it as it will strengthen the state’s institutions. In this view, by-passing the state institutions, as many NGOs and donors do in development projects, will just serve to undermine them, which is a bad idea because strengthening the host state is the whole point.  The money has to go to the central government, not because it is the most efficient, but because you have to build the legitimacy of the state.

I have a huge problem with this as it relies on the assumption that the host government ally deserves the donors’ belief in its potential for legitimacy. In some parts of the world (such as Somalia) the state is the most predatory and unpleasant entity that people have to face in their lives, and the forming of coalitions to revive the power of the central state can be the most dangerous of events regardless of efforts to improve central state legitimacy. In such parts of the world that have suffered protracted conflict and state collapse, power is all too often simply structured against the possibility of the sudden re-establishment of a legitimate state and a single set of governing institutions. Interests groups emerge which, when empowered within the state, will only endeavour to serve themselves.

However, I expect that the central state-building approach works (or at least, is not disastrous) where the state is not deeply and violently contested by a powerful and growing insurgency(/ies). In such a more benign scenario then you can have continuing runs of setbacks and dodgy dealings going right to the top as long as you feel you are slowly working towards that much longer term aim of a legitimate and effective state. Peace gives you time and room for continuous governance errors. But when you’re facing the Taliban who are building highly effective conflict institutions to maintain and expand their military and governing influence, I sense this model just won’t do. Counter-insurgency is all about governance, and it is essential to get the governance strategy right if all the other activities (including the application of force) are going to have utility. As certain previous studies have shown (including David Kilcullen’s original PhD thesis) in civil wars power usually leaks further and further down the state-society structure to the local level. The village community is the frontline in the governance strategy for all sides in civil wars, and it’s at that level that the Taliban concentrates and derives its potency.

Efforts to connect all these local governates up into a cohesive and singular state structure can come later (which, btw, I expect is the central Taliban leadership’s plan). Until then, one needs to concentrate on empowering what Ken Menkhaus calls a ‘mediated state’ where the central power has almost no influence at the community level, and instead one encourages and empowers the ‘mosaic’ of governates that communities almost inevitably self-form in the absence of central state power. And as DFID and other development agencies have repeatedly found, it tends to be village-level community governance that is the most trustworthy recipient of aid, because those communities understand better than anyone what the aid is meant for.

I feel it’s time to be brave with the implications of this and forget the central state building agenda in Afghanistan, and I don’t mean replacing that approach with the ‘empowering regional governors’ cop-out that has also emerged, because it amounts to the same thing. The central (or regional) state is not an inevitable good. Give development power to those who deserve and need it most and let the central state form around that, not above it, before it, or even with primacy over it. Deep corruption in Afghan state institutions isn’t going to go anywhere soon, but if we change the governance strategy then we can change the entire strategic meaning of corruption in Afghanistan.

Of course, we may just be too far behind events now for such a shift to have any impact. And anyway, based on my conversations with those working in British defence and foreign affairs, the likelihood of such a shift in thinking being taken on board is almost nil.

Follow-up: Sex and Security

A few weeks back I mentioned a new MICROCON report on peacekeeping and local sex industries. Today’s Asia Times carries a related story on the use of brothels by private security contractors in Kabul.

A report by the Washington, DC, Project on Government Oversight recently released publicly tells of the wild naked antics of members of ArmorGroup (AG), which has a United States State Department contract to provide security for the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Hardly mentioned is the use of local bordellos by some contractors. It took a lawsuit filed on September 9 by James Gordon, a former ArmorGroup director of operations, and subsequent whistleblower, against ArmorGroup North America and associated defendants – ArmorGroup International (AGI), Wackenhut Services Inc (WSI), and various management individuals – to bring details to light. Among other things he charges that AG:

* Allowed AGNA managers and employees to frequent brothels notorious for housing trafficked women in violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, and shutting down the plaintiff’s efforts to investigate and put a stop to these violations.

* Deliberately withholding documents relating to violations of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act allegedly committed by AGNA’s program manager and other AGNA employees when responding to a document demand from US Congressman Henry Waxman on behalf of the Congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The article also recounts failed investigations into allegations that DynCorp employees participated in trafficking-related activities in Bosnia, starting ten years ago with reports that “five male DynCorp employees had purchased female prostitutes from a Serbian organized crime outfit.”

The details in the article should prove interesting to anyone looking at the in-theatre behaviour of private security contractors and the lengths to which corporate entities will go to protect their reputations and revenue streams. The author, David Isenberg from PRIO, also has a forthcoming study on these issues.

We’ve been talking a lot lately about corruption as a strategic problem in Afghanistan. I don’t think most people think of brothels and sex trafficking when they think about corruption in this context, but to the extent that such behaviour by foreign forces (private or not) contributes to local perceptions of foreigners as corrupt or illegitimate, perhaps it should be part of the conversation.

Extra-Judicial Killings in Mumbai: Vigilante Heroes and Self-Interested Villains

A while back I posted about certain Pakistani Taliban using trained suicide bombers as a business opportunity for settling family scores, and how this echoes similar dynamics in many other cases. Another interesting case has come to light in India, reported in the New York Times. There has been a longstanding practice of police killing suspects in serious crime, but at the NYT explains:

Known euphemistically as “encounter killings,” such extrajudicial executions have been a tolerated and even celebrated method of dealing swiftly with crime in a country with a notoriously slow and sometimes corrupt judiciary. An officer in such cases invariably “encounters” a suspect and kills him, supposedly in self-defense.

In cities like Mumbai, which was for decades gripped by violent organized crime syndicates, officers who killed notorious gangland figures were often seen as dark folk heroes, selflessly carrying out the messy business of meting out justice. These officers, known as encounter specialists, became celebrities, even boasting about the number of gangsters they had killed.

But Indians have become increasingly wary of police officers crusading as judge, jury and executioner. Since 2006, 346 people have been killed in what seem to have been extrajudicial police killings, according to the National Human Rights Commission.

In many of these killings, investigations have found, the motive was not vigilante justice. The police often staged such killings for personal gain: bumping off a rival of a powerful politician in the hopes of a big promotion; killing a crime boss at the behest of one of his rivals; settling scores between businessmen.

Just as the Chilean government and certain other Latin American regimes used the threat of terrorism as a cover for the covert mass murder of dissidents, so too (as in this case) can police and politicians use the threat of organised crime to cover their own malicious activities for shoring up power and personal aggrandisement.

It is quite remarkable how whenever there is some form of regularity in the application of violence, where violence comes to serve an institutional function (whether in a civil war situation where collaborators are denounced and dealt with, or in a crime environment where violence plays a role in criminal or police enforcement), there consistently emerges cases of individuals abusing that institutional regularity to cover the pursuit of very different covert interests. It is the sheer frequency in the recurrence of this phenomenon that I find remarkable, but most of all makes me highly pessimistic about human political nature.

Latest Issue of Global Crime

There’s a good new issue from the journal Global Crime. Lots of good articles. One that particularly caught my eye is by professor of criminology Frederico Varese discussing the Neapolitan Camorra. This is an extract from the opening of the article:

In the raw and unadorned language of Saviano, the Camorra is not just a collection of purely parasitic, extortionary thugs, but rather an organisation that provides genuine services, such as access to cheap loans, a degree of competition among firms, and enforcement of economic agreements. The caveat is that these services are provided with utter disregard for fairness, freedom to choose, property rights, and a rule-based system of social relations. What is mutual advantage for vast sectors of the local economy produces a collective nightmare for the overall society. It is a quintessential n-person Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which everybody starts off by maximising his own utility and ends up in the worst of all possible worlds, a universe of defection, mis-trust and fear that ultimately strengthens a criminal organisation that has claimed so many lives. My view is that until this system of mutual advantage is broken, it will be next to impossible to dislodge the Camorra.

What is pleasing about this is that not only does Varese immediately illuminate the nuances of this subject (emphasising the delivery of services and promotion of an economy, but also stressing that for most it is ghastly), he also suggests a positive strategy (of sorts) in how to tackle it, which has some plausibility according to the economic environment it is supposed to be directed against:

No matter how much individual valour anti-mafia campaigners display, the nexus of self-interest that links sizeable sections of the economy and organised crime must be weakened and eventually rescinded. Small workshops must be able to turn to banks in order to obtain loans, taxes must be low enough to reduce incentives to avoid them, and the legitimate labour market must be flexible enough to make local enterprises competitive without forcing them into the grey economy, where they become sweatshops. State regulations must be simple and straightforward and the machinery of justice must be rapid and fair. Next to structural changes in the economy, law enforcement must be able to bring to a halt the Camorra’s ability to kill and wreak havoc.

However, and sadly, one can barely imagine the scale and difficulty of the efforts required to bring such to pass. And that’s not even considering the fact that such groups are rarely passive in the face of new initiatives to eradicate their position.

Crime-Conflict and Race-Racism in Russia

A recent report by the Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy has found that nearly 60% of the more than ten thousand black people in Moscow have been physically attacked because of their race.

A BBC journalist was told that one Nigerian migrant had been repeatedly stabbed and then shot. Another said someone tried to remove his scalp.

The survey found Africans working or studying in the city live in constant fear of attack with many too afraid to go outside.

By the time I tried to go to the report on the Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy’s website, it was already unavailable. The rest of their website worked fine.

The Chaplaincy interviewed 200 people. A quarter said they had been physically attacked more than once and around 160 said they had been verbally abused.

Russia has always been a very multi-cultural country. But there has also long been problems between different ethnic groups here. Certain ethnic Russians view central Asians as an underclass, and Africans with curious disgust. The worrying thing is that with the rise of right leaning and far right politics here, that trend is becoming more prevalent among the young, and much more violent.

We’re talking neo-Nazis here. Recently a group in the city of Perm near the Urals threatened to blow up their local cinema unless it stopped showing the so-called “extreme pro-Jewish bloodlust” World War Two film ‘Inglorious Bastards’. There are worrying crossovers in rhetoric between young Putin mobs like Nashi (in Russian the group’s name means ‘ours’), and the extreme right, which is treated with more tolerance than any liberal groups here.

This all comes at the same time as the 70th anniversary of the start of World War Two. Hitler never managed to get as far as Moscow, and certainly not the Urals. But here we are with this nonetheless.

Say what you Sea

Russia says it has started unloading evidence from the tanker ‘Arctic Sea’, whose disappearance and rediscovery weeks later sparked widespread rumours of secret arms shipments and secret service intervention. But although investigators say they’ve finished the search of the ship, they haven’t yet released their findings.

So what happened to the tanker, Arctic Sea?

In Moscow the talk is of swashbuckling Baltic timber pirates, eager to get their hands on a $1 million ransom for some wickedly tempting wood.

Elsewhere, the story is rather different.

Sources are hard to come by. The Russians have pulled a shroud over the whole affair, and even those journalists who claim to have sources won’t name them, either out of journalistic selfishness, or because of source protection.

But wherever the story has come from, it most likely starts in the tightly controlled and highly militarised Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. The place may be of huge strategic importance to Russia, but it’s also a rundown hive of crime, which includes some very sophisticated gun smuggling operations.

After the ship was boarded in the Baltic near Finland, there began a farce of a search down past the French and Spanish coasts until the ship was found off Africa. It had disappeared in July and was re-discovered weeks later in August.

Israel is the country, however quietly, which is telling a different story to Russia. It differs as follows-

The cargo: not wood, but cutting edge Russian S- 300 anti-aircraft missiles.

The destination (or at least the cargo’s): not Algeria, but Iran.

The hijackers: Not pirates, but Mossad, desperate to stop Israeli planes being blown out of the sky on their bomb runs against Iranian nuclear installations.

If it’s true (pinch of salt required) Mossad were very clever. When The Arctic Sea left Kaliningrad it’s thought they let Moscow know that they knew what was on board. It’s even suspected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew briefly to Moscow to tell the Russians face to face what was going on. They then gave Moscow a window of opportunity to find the ship and save face before they went public. They created a lot of fuss around the ship, so the world knew it had been seized. But they also left the Russians a way out. By letting them find and capture the Arctic Sea back, it looked like the Russians had succeeded in a heroic rescue. In actual fact Mossad may have hired some criminals from the Baltic region to seize the ship, the hapless lackeys oblivious to its true cargo.

Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov dismisses these claims as ,’groundless’ and says Russia’s investigation will be transparent. Russia has also arrested eight men and accuses them of piracy. Russian authorities say they’ve found guns, masks and a boat used by the pirates.

There are some odd details to the story though. Foremost among them is that Russia has signed a contract to supply Iran with S-300 missiles, but reportedly hasn’t delivered any yet. Israel vehemently opposes the deal.

Some suggest that in return for cancelling the contract, the U.S. and Israel kept silent and allowed Russia to use the ‘hijack’ cover story.

Russia has not though openly denied trying to send missiles to Iran, merely stating that it is not against international law to supply defensive weapons.

Piracy experts believe that a hijack in the busy waters of the Baltic is very unusual.

Just after the ship was found off cape Verde, Russia sent three heavy lift cargo planes to the island, with far more capacity than was needed to take away just crew and suspected hijackers.

Both versions of the story are exciting but have a large note of improbability about them. Whether the public will ever be allowed a glimpse ‘below decks’ is another question.

Editor’s Note: On Thursday, the Guardian’s latest take on the affair included an interview with the lawyer for one of the accused pirates, who offers up a new (though no less absurd) story: that the so-called pirates were actually ecological activists rescued by the Arctic Sea, and they are now being set up as pirates to cover up more nefarious goings-on. (JM)

A Peek at Arms Trafficking

Just in time for the weekend, a few items from the world of arms trafficking and production.

FARC May Get Surface-to-Air Missiles

Colombia’s relatively effective anti-FARC campaign would be severely threatened should the group acquire SAMs (requisite historical precedent: the Afghan mujahidin). Kudos to the LA Times for not overdoing the tenuous Hezbollah link here.

GCC Steps Up Efforts Against Trafficking

UNODC is helping to set up a new anti-trafficking centre for the Gulf Cooperation Council, targeting flows of both arms and drugs. Based in Doha, the centre will target “various types of weapons and ordnance being smuggled out of Iran and the Russia-led CIS region moving via the GCC area – mainly through some of the UAE emirates – to Africa and through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon, as well as through a maritime shipping network active in the Mediterranean for delivery of weapons and explosives to North African and European countries.”

Caribbean Diplomat Tells US To Do More on Trafficking

Sir Ronald Sanders, addressing the RCDS in London, warns that small Caribbean countries are overwhelmed with drug and crime problems that could be alleviated by US action on arms trafficking and sales.

Kalashnikov Bankruptcy

OAO Izhmash, the Russian maker of AK-47s, faces possible bankruptcy — not because the guns are any less popular, but because of cheaper knockoffs from China and Eastern Europe. It’s sort of nice to see that globalisation can also be bad for the arms industry.

The Crime-Conflict Nexus in the Caucasus: Some Rocky Mountains

Ethnolinguistic Groups in the Caucasus Region

Hello dear readers. To introduce myself: I’m a journalist working in Russia. I’ve just joined the team at the Crime-Conflict Nexus Blog and will be contributing posts on Russia and the post Soviet space, though I won’t rule out trampling elsewhere if I deem it useful and interesting!

This post is an introduction to the Crime-Conflict Nexus in an area that well deserves such a label: the Caucasus. A deeply complex region with many different ethnic groups, and national loyalties of various strengths; Islam meets Christianity here, thrown in with old Communist Atheism and even Buddhism in nearby steppe regions. Many call the Caucasus the cradle of civilisation, and the history of loyalties and antagonisms here is a long and convoluted one. The search for power in the mountains has long been spun amidst a web of clan, religious, ethnic and national groupings. It makes for some bewildering, and markedly uncivilised behaviour.

When writing about Russia and the post soviet space at this time in its history, the Caucasus is the place to start. Earlier this year peace seemed outwardly to be returning to the Caucasus. On the 16th April 2009 President Dmitry Medvedev announced the end of a ten year anti-insurgency operation in the Russian republic of Chechnya.

More correctly perhaps, the open warfare is over. It may resume. But the time since the ‘end of violence’ in the region has been riddled with evil. Corruption, terror, murder, mudslinging and more. None of the dark arts of ‘peacetime’ seem taboo in the Caucasus.

The death toll in this ‘peaceful, developing territory’ tells another story. A short chronology to refresh the mind may help. This is by no means an exhaustive list.

16th April- Russia ends its ten year long ‘counter terrorism’ operation in Chechnya, the southern Russian Republic that borders the other Russian republics of Ingushetia, and Dagestan in the west and east and the country of Georgia in the south. According to Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s president, the Russian republic is, “a peaceful, developing territory, and cancelling the counter-terrorism operation will only promote economic growth in the republic.” They will prove to be foolish words.

5th June- Dagestan’s interior minister is shot dead by a sniper.

10th June- One of Ingushetia’s top judges is shot dead whilst dropping off her children at school.

22nd June- The President of Ingushetia, Yunus-Bek Yukurov, is taken to hospital after a suicide car bomb attempt. The Kremlin puts Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov in charge of security there in the mean time. Yukurov returned to his post on August 22nd.

24th June- Chechnya’s president Ramzan Kadyrov promises ‘cruel revenge’ on those who attacked Ingushetia’s president, Yunus-Bek Yukurov. He also says Moscow has allowed him to take charge of Ingush security until Yukurov gets better, a claim disputed by some Ingush politicians.

4th July- Nine Chechen police are killed inside Ingushetia and another nine are wounded in two separate gun and grenade attacks on police vehicles. The Chechen police were helping Ingushetia’s security forces as part of Ramzan Kadyrov’s promise of ‘cruel revenge’ on the militants that attacked Ingushetia’s president.

11th July- Four militants are shot dead by government forces in Ingushetia.

12th July- Five militants die in a gun battle with authorities in Dagestan.

13th July- Russian security forces shoot dead five militants in Chechnya. On the same day a policeman is killed and six others are injured by a bomb explosion in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital. Three militants and a soldier die in a firefight in Dagestan. Also in Dagestan the same day, gunmen ambush a police patrol killing two officers and a sniper shoots dead a third policeman in a separate incident.

15th July- Natalia Estemirova, a prominent human rights worker in Chechnya and friend of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya, is bundled into a van as she leaves her home. Her body is found in woods in neighbouring Ingushetia nine hours later with bullet wounds to the head and chest. On the same day two police officers and two soldiers are killed and six are wounded in a battle with militants in Chechnya. A court bailiff and a relative are killed in Ingushetia.

3rd August- Five policemen are killed by grenades and gunfire in an ambush in Chechnya.

10th August – Zarema Sadulayeva, a children’s charity worker and friend of Natalia Estemirova is taken with her husband from her office. They are both shot and their bodies are found in the boot of a car near Chechnya’s capital, Grozny.

12th August- Ingushetia’s construction minister is shot dead at his office in the town of Magas.

17th August- Twenty five people are killed and 160 wounded as a bomber rams his explosives packed car into the gates of a police station in the Ingush city of Nazran.

21st August- Four policemen are killed and more wounded in five separate bicycle suicide bomb attacks in Chechnya’s capital, Grozny.

This is crime, this is nationalism, this is religious extremism and this is state brutality. The militants are thugs, and so is Ramzan Kadyrov. He used to be a separatist rebel himself but was enticed into running Chechnya by the Kremlin. This is a low level insurgency with high costs in an area where order is notoriously difficult to enforce.

In fact, the point to remember here, your ‘pinch of salt’ perhaps, concerns image and reality. Rewind briefly to the start of our small chronology. The day after the end of the counter terrorism operation was triumphantly announced, police in Ingushetia released their own insurgency related casualty figures (see 9th paragraph) from January to March 2009. They estimate that 27 militants, 18 policemen, and 2 civilians were killed and 44 injured in gun attacks and explosions.

That doesn’t sound like peace to me. Even before the ‘new’ insurgency the killing was continuing at a merry pace. Few areas of the world fit the model of a ‘crime-conflict nexus’ better than the Caucasus. It is difficult and often fatally dangerous to try and glean reliable information about what is going on there. The politics of hate and ethnic brutality mix so incongruously with seemingly unthinkable political accommodations that the whole situation seems baffling to most people not up to their necks in it.

Its difficult to know what kind of Russian forces are there but some are still likely to be underpaid, frustrated conscripts. Government corruption involving the money thrown at the region has wasted vast sums and bolstered a dictatorial regime. Crime funds militant activities there (go to the question ‘which terrorist groups operate in Chechnya?’), who are also linked to international Islamic extremist networks. Violence is the question, and force the answer of choice.

There are a few things we can say about the Caucasus with reasonable surety. Russia’s hold on the region has always been tenuous and has involved periodic floods of troops. Power struggles between local warlords have always ground on regardless of who is nominally in control. Few tools in the sordid kits of the power seekers are off limits.

Unfortunately, there’s one word I think describes the region best, messy.

I’ll finish by linking this on to an anniversary which demonstrates just how messy and upsetting it can get. On the 1st of September it was the start of the Russian school year. Thousands of nervous, excited, blubbing and laughing Russian kids were singing songs, bringing in flowers for their teachers, welcoming in a year of discovery and saying goodbye to mummy for their first day at school.

It was also five years to the day when Caucasian (meaning in this instance ‘from the Caucasus’) Muslim terrorists herded more than a thousand children with their teachers and parents inside the gym of School Number One in Beslan. This is in the Caucasus region of North Ossetia, with strong ties to Russia. The terrorists were most probably from the regions covered above. In the botched storming that was never supposed to have happened three days later, over three hundred of the hostages, over half of them children, died. Here’s the link to Channel Four’s Dispatches programme on it, first transmitted just under a year later. It’s not the only one, but it lets the story do the talking. Try not to cry.

McChrystal Report Leaked

So the Washington Post got a copy of Gen McChrystal’s confidential assessment of the situation in Afghanistan, which outlines the key obstacles to ISAF success there. Once again, the significance of corruption in the Afghan government is highlighted as being as great a threat to the whole endeavour as the Taliban and mistakes by ISAF. This is such a serious issue because, while “protecting the population” is a key component of the strategy, “supporting the host government” is another fundamental basis of the strategy as well. But here’s the beef: if ISAF is so pegged to the Afghan government in its hopes for success, then what is the strategy for ensuring the Afghan government is a credible, legitimate, reliable and much less corrupt set of institutions than it is now? I have not seen such a sub-strategy presented anywhere, which constitutes a serious strategic gap, and therefore means the whole operation is based on a prayer (unless I’m wrong and there is a serious strategy for this of course). Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, if we examine the history of corruption in political institutions, is there anything available to suggest that any reasonable strategy to achieve this aim can be put together at all? I feel that there isn’t. All contributions, suggestions very welcome on this.