posted on the web on April 20 2003

Country Data

Full Name: Republic of Liberia Capital: Monrovia Population: 3,288,198 (2002 est.) Location: Africa Total area: 111,370 sq km Language: English, endogenous laguages Ethnic groups: Indigenous tribes 95% Religions: Indigenous beliefs 40%, Christian 40%, Muslim 20% Currency: Liberian Dollar IGO memberships: UN, WHO Internet site: none Source: CIA World Factbook

On September 10, 2002, Uziel Gal, age 79, died in his Philadelphia home. A refugee of Nazi Germany, Gal fled to British Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s, where he soon took up work supporting the Jewish underground and making weapons for the Israeli Defense Force. He is survived by his son, Iddo, his daughter, Tamar, and approximately 10 million copies of his ghastly gift to the world, the 9 mm submachine gun, nicknamed the "Uzi" (1).

The Cold War’s end was undoubtedly positive, but it did produce some unpleasant side effects. Most notable was the glut of arms left over from the greatest arms race the world has seen. Substantial efforts have been made over the past decade to deal with the threats of nuclear weapons, missile systems, and other heavy weapons left over. But until recently, virtually nothing has been done to address the cascade of small arms—handguns, rifles, and grenades—that has flooded the rest of the world, what the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has called "the most extensive yard sale in history—a massive unregulated sell-off of low price surplus armaments in to the most fragile, conflict-ridden corners of the earth" (2). The incredible inertia displayed by the international community on this issue is nothing short of shameful given that these "orphans of arms control" are the sine qua non of some of today’s deadliest wars.

Indeed, small arms represent an ever-worsening crisis requiring urgent international attention.* It is estimated that 8 million licensed copies of the American M-16, 7 million copies of the German G-3, and 6 million Belgian FN-FAL’s are currently in circulation today. This says nothing for the countless counterfeit versions of these weapons. Since its introduction in 1947, more than 70 million AK-47’s, or Kalashnikovs, have been produced, many still in use. This incredible oversupply has bottomed-out the world price for these deadly devices. In Afghanistan in 2001, an AK-47 cost ten U.S. dollars. In Mozambique, it was worth fifteen (3).

But these assault rifles make up only a small fraction of the light arms cache that is currently threatening world stability. Ignored are the "civilian" firearms—pistols and other slower-firing weapons. Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based research agency, estimates that in 2001 there were 639 million firearms in the global small arms stockpile (this works out to roughly one gun for every American, Japanese, German, and Russian citizen) (4). According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, these assault rifles and other small arms are responsible for 90% of the conflict-related deaths in the last decade, killing 300,000 around the world each year (5).

Further, because of their small size and easy portability, controlling the flow of these weapons into the world’s most conflict-ridden countries is nearly impossible. This, combined with their low cost and ease of use, explains why small arms are the weapons of choice in most of today’s intra-state conflicts. Their presence in these countries challenges traditional notions of security and diplomacy. As Michael Klare of Hampshire College puts it "the abundance of arms at every level of society means that any increase in inter-communal tensions and hostility will entail an increased likelihood of armed violence and bloodshed" (6). Further, because small arms are so readily available to those who can manage the cash for them, they are increasing the number of armed non-state actors. Michael Renner of the World Watch Institute points out that "$50 million, the cost of a single modern jet fighter, can equip a small army with some 200,000 assault rifles" (7). These newly armed and active groups, like the rebel factions in Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, and Congo, reaping the benefits of what are now understood to be perpetual war economies, are rarely constrained by traditional tools of diplomacy.

The result is that over the period from 1989 to 1996, of the 101 armed conflicts in the world (those which passed a threshold of 1,000 casualties) only 6 were international. Further, these conflicts were increasingly multi-dimensional: 254 separate warring parties were involved in the 101 armed conflicts (8). Small arms also have had the frightening effect of increasing the number of children involved in warfare. As the Economist put it, the equation is simple: "Children tend to be used heavily as soldiers during prolonged civil wars; and such civil wars abound at present" (9). Because small arms increase the number of parties involved in civil conflict, the competition for arms-bearing adult males becomes stiffer. Naturally, children are the next logical pool of recruits. For all these reasons, addressing the small arms trade represents one of the principal challenges for the global community—rich and poor countries alike—in the 21st century.

Combating the crisis of small arms will not be easy. Small arms constitute a $7 billion a year industry. The major suppliers include 13 governments who dominate the legal trade—all 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council among them—and a vast, shadowy network of brokers, including such international notables as Leonid Minin and Victor Bout, who control the illegal procurement and transport markets (10). Over 1,000 companies worldwide are involved in the production of small arms or ammunition (11). Added to this is the problem of secondary markets (small arms have a long life span), regionally centered in Bangkok, Beirut, Peshawar, and Prague (12).

Small Arms and National Interest

Small arms represent a unique security threat and a singular diplomatic challenge precisely because they straddle the border between subnational security and international security. That is, small arms fuel ordinary crime, a subnational issue, just as much as they support organized crime, terror operations, or major armed conflict, which are transnational issues of concern.

In the traditional sense, though, small arms do not threaten the national security of most of the developed countries of the world. The United States, Western Europe, and Japan are all insulated enough from conflict areas geographically and politically that small arms do not threaten their borders directly. Inside their borders, the case can be made, for example, that lethal crime is fueled by the overabundance of handguns in the United States, but this is not a national security issue, because it does not involve the direct threat of a foreign adversary (nor are the majority of handguns owned the United States purchased illegally). As the ICIJ reports, "The United States, despite having the best anti-arms trafficking legislation in the world, lost interest in the global trade outside its borders just as that trade was mushrooming" (13). According to a U.S. customs official involved in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, there was a general lack of interest in pursuing small arms controls. "People were basically saying, why are we sticking our noses in these matters? Okay, there’s a guy from Russia selling weapons to Ethiopia. Why should we care?" (14).

This attitude represents a fundamental miscalculation by the world’s great powers. There is a considerable nexus between organized crime, arms trafficking, and terrorism that is only now beginning to be understood as a major security threat. This, added to the newly recognized danger of "failed states" like Somalia and Afghanistan (which often fail because of the destabilizing presence of so many armed factions) makes a world awash in small arms a dangerous one for all countries. As the disastrous October 1993 U.S. action in Mogadishu showed, small arms can challenge even the most sophisticated military force. In that incident, Somali militiamen employing rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s were able to bring to its knees an American force with far superior transportation and firepower.

It has always been recognized as an essential danger of official arms transfers that there is the possibility of a "boomerang effect", that is, the weapons that one nation transfers to another may one day be turned against it. As Hartung writes, "Small arms almost always outlast the political relationships that existed between the original supplier and recipient" (15). Nowhere was this more evident in recent history than in Afghanistan. During the period of its U.S.-supported resistance to Soviet incursion, Afghanistan received between $6 and $9 billion in arms transfers from the United States. Among these transfers were at least 900 Stinger shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles delivered to the Mujahedeen, but only about 350 of these were ever used against Soviet forces. By 1996, the CIA, recognizing their potential danger, had budgeted $65 million in an attempt to repurchase the leftover Stingers, finding itself in a bidding war with rebel groups and foreign governments (16). Their use against allied aircraft involved in Operation Enduring Freedom indicates that this effort was largely unsuccessful.

Finally, an abundance of factions armed with light weaponry forces governments like the United States to deploy troops in situations that they wouldn’t otherwise wish to. Somalia was one example of this. More recently, France, bound by a 1961 treaty, has been forced to deploy over 1,000 of its troops in Cote d’Ivoire to protect the capitol (and French nationals living there) from the three armed insurgency groups currently threatening to overrun it.

Policy Options and Response Strategies

Small arms are traded legally and openly by both governments and private companies. These legal transfers constitute 90% of all international light weapons sales worldwide (17). Generally these transfers are governed by some system of national licensing for import, export, and transit. In the United States, for example, the Defense Department exports weapons under the Foreign Military Sales program in addition to supplying weapons and equipment to friendly states through the Excess Defense Articles program. What are called Direct Commercial Sales, those deals transacted directly between a manufacturer and a foreign buyer, require licenses from the State Department and include strict standards for reporting (18). Needless to say, covert transfers by governments, even those which are legal under international law, bypass this system of licensing and reporting.

In addition, the UN imposes restrictions on arms trade to some countries. Iraq, Liberia, Rwanda, and Somalia are the four countries currently under UN weapons embargoes, with weapons sales also prohibited to specific groups in Afghanistan (Taliban), Angola (UNITA), and Sierra Leone (RUF and other rebel factions). In addition, the UN strongly discourages weapons sales to Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Sudan. These embargoes, authorized by the Security Council under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, are binding on all members, and require both that states refrain from making weapons sales themselves, and actively enforce the embargo internally on individuals and companies within their jurisdiction (19). UN-imposed embargoes are limited in their effectiveness, however, because they are responses to violence, not preventative measures. Says Gillard, "UN embargoes do nothing to head off situations of violence deemed to be below this threshold. In addition, lack of political will within the Security Council or other relevant bodies frequently has stymied the imposition of sanctions" (20).

In order to better determine where export licenses should be denied, a group of Nobel laureates, led by former Costa Rican president Oscar Arias, has proposed that all arms-producing countries of the world adopt a legally binding code of conduct governing arms transfers, including small arms and ammunition. Such a code would articulate common criteria for denying export licenses. Currently there is no internationally recognized code, though working toward one was one of the goals of the 2001 UN Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects. The EU adopted its own Code of Conduct in 1998, based on eight principles governing arms exports. They include a requirement that the importing country respect human rights and not support terrorism, and they call upon EU governments to take into account the regional security implications of sales, the effect that the weapons will have on the economy of the country, and the risk that equipment will be diverted or re-exported (21).

Though an important first step, the EU Code is viewed by many as a disappointment, as it does not meet the standards set out by the commission of Nobel laureates (22). Further, since it was adopted only as a council declaration by the EU Council of Ministers, the Code is politically but not juridically binding on member states. This means that governments are still free to ignore these minimum standards and authorize irresponsible arms transfers. Such was the case in the Czech Republic, an EU-member-to-be and a party to a similar 2000 OSCE small arms agreement, where $1.4 million in arms was exported to Colombia in 2002 to undisclosed non-governmental parties (23).

Understandably, a global code of conduct has met resistance. Producer countries are reluctant to give up arms sales as a foreign policy tool, and do not want to be constrained in the future. Ultimately, even if a comprehensive code is adopted, many believe it would be inherently ineffectual. As Emanuela Gillard writes, codes of conduct "do not themselves actually impose substantive new limitations on states’ freedom to transfer weapons" rather they are "a mechanism for the development of international public opinion about which kinds of arms transfers should be considered unethical and worthy of censure or sanction, and which should be considered legitimate" (24).

William Hartung has argued, along with others, that in establishing an international code of conduct for arms sales, there should be a presumption against arming non-state actors. This too has been met with controversy. Of course, during the 1980s, the Reagan administration regularly completed covert arms deals with anti-communist rebel groups—sub-state actors—in Angola, Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Nicaragua, transferring billions of dollars of small arms. These transactions, says Hartung, "were viewed as a legitimate expression of U.S. national security interests within the Reagan administration" (25). Most recently, the U.S. government waged a successful campaign in Afghanistan (against soldiers armed with weapons it had provided them only 20 years earlier), in part by supplying weapons to the Northern Alliance, a group of non-state actors. A similar campaign to arm resistance groups in Iraq has been underway for years. Thus, the usefulness of this practice, both in reducing the burden of fighting for U.S. soldiers, and lowering the cost of war, may outweigh the ethical justifications for ending it.

Two Cases

Ultimately, the greatest challenge facing the international community is not the legal trading of small arms, but the illegal trade. International trading schemes, conducted by private brokers in violation of international sanctions, are incredibly sophisticated and lucrative Two recent cases involving warring states in Africa illustrate just how difficult controlling illicit small arms trading is for the international community.

Liberia’s civil war began in 1989, and though a nominal peace was brokered in 1996 between the NPFL and Krahn and Madingo rebel groups, much of Liberia is still lawless and armed violence abounds (27). The international community has at least nominally taken notice of this tragic condition. Since 1992, Liberia has been under a UN weapons embargo as well as embargoes imposed by the EU and national governments. In addition, there is currently a moratorium on all weapons shipments and sales to countries in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Yet, as UN investigator Johann Peleman points out "When you say that the arms embargo should stop the war and it doesn’t, obviously the conclusion is that embargo is leaking left, right, and center" (27).

Indeed, there are several examples of these "leaks" that have now been exposed and documented in a UN report on Liberia’s embargo. For example, in 2000, a complicated series of events led to a diversion of weapons from Uganda to Liberia. The original deal involved a shipment of 2,250 assault rifles and submachine guns from a manufacturer in Slovakia to the Ugandan military by way of an Egyptian arms broker named Sharif Al-Masri. When the Ugandan military rejected the weapons, saying that they did not meet the specifications which they had agreed to in their contract, they demanded that rifles be sent back to Slovakia. In November 2000, a Moldovan-registered cargo plane (operated by Centrafican Airlines, a Central African Republic company) arrived in Entebbe, Uganda to pick up the weapons, but rather than returning to Slovakia, flew an alternate flight plan to Monrovia, Liberia. Al-Masri had in the meantime found another buyer for the weapons—the Guinean-based Pecos Company, which offered him a false End User Certificate so that the weapons could be diverted to Liberia.

Probing deeper into the matter, the UN panel found that the airplane that had arrived in Entebbe had actually been missing for three weeks. The Moldovan Civil Aviation Authority had records showing that the plane had permission for a chartered passenger flight to the United Arab Emirates on November 4, 2000, yet on November 24, 2000 the plane arrived back in Moldova with no passengers from the UAE. Computer records showed that the plane had in fact arrived from Liberia. Further research into the documentation for the airline found that the plane was owned by Victor Bout, a well-known illicit arms broker (28).

A similar transaction was discovered in 1999, when the government of Burkina Faso provided false end-user documentation for a 68-ton weapons shipment from Ukraine to Liberia. Official documentation for the flight shows that the weapons were part of a contract between a Gibraltar-based company representing the Ministry of Defense of Burkina Faso, and the Ukrainian state-owned company Ukrspetsexport. An End User Certificate signed by Lieutenant-Colonel Gilbert Diendéré, head of the Presidential Guard of Burkina Faso, shows that the weapons were to be used exclusively by the armed forces of Burkina Faso and would not be re-exported. However, within a matter of days, according to the UN report, the weapons were headed for Monrovia onboard a BAC 111 owned by Ukrainian gunrunner Leonid Minin (29).

These cases are but two examples of how arms controls are evaded in Liberia, but they are representative of a general pattern of sanctions busting. Dealers and brokers use misdirection techniques, creating false documentation for import licenses and flight plans, so that all that appears to occur on paper is that weapons move from a supplier country to another country not under embargo. They make clear that there are major flaws with the current system of tracking and regulating arms transfers, each requiring novel methods of international cooperation in order to address them.

EUCs

In addition to import licenses, transit permits, and non-reexport agreements, virtually every weapons shipment that is made must be accompanied by an End-User Certificate, issued by the receiving government, that validates where the weapons will ultimately be used. The chief problem today is that these certificates are often now available to the highest bidder. Pecos Company, the Guinean firm that provided the EUC for Minin’s 2000 shipment to Liberia, has recently been labeled "The EUC Factory" by Human Rights Watch. According to their report, Pecos "supplied a seemingly endless stream of false End User Certificates to the arms smuggling network of Victor Bout." Bout, a Russian arms broker, is one of the most notorious gunrunners in the world today, having been named in several UN reports.

Currently there is no standardized system for End User Certificates, nor are countries required to go to great lengths to verify the authenticity of the documentation. The EUCs used to purchase weapons for Liberia carried years-old approval dates and the signatures of officials who had since left government service, yet these are considered internationally valid. The result is that in several eastern European countries, there exists today a system "characterized by weak laws, lax attitudes, low capacity, endemic corruption, and a strong incentive to sell on the part of the arms-exporting countries" (30). Put simply, the lure of hard cash in these weak economies has undermined the ability to control arms exports effectively.

Legal Deficiencies for Dealing with Brokers

In addition, many countries simply don’t have the legal instruments to deal with arms brokers, because the activities of the brokers do not violate any of their laws. Often a broker will complete an arms delivery without ever taking possession of the weapons or having the weapons cross into his country of nationality or residence. An arms broker in Berlin, for example, can, with a telephone and a fax machine, arrange a deal between a supplier in Slovakia, an airfreight company in Moldova, and a buyer in Sierra Leone, providing financing and technical consulting, in return for a fee which is channeled into an offshore front company. In the process, the broker never violates any German national laws.

In fact, the United States has perhaps the most comprehensive anti-brokering law in the world today. This is because, of all producer-country governments that have laws relating to arms brokering, only the United States has one that is extra-territorial in scope. The new statute, adopted in 1996 as an amendment to the 1976 Arms Export Control Act (AECA), requires U.S. brokers living anywhere and foreign nationals residing in the United States to register and obtain licenses for all arms deals they transact. The statute defines brokering as "the financing, transportation, freight forwarding, or taking of any other action that facilitates the manufacture, export, or import of a defense article or defense service, irrespective of its origin" (31). Violators are subject to U.S. jurisdiction wherever an offense is committed. To date, though, this law has not been tested in a real case, and it is questionable whether states will be willing to accommodate U.S. custodial claims.

A New Kind of Crisis, A New Kind of Cooperation

The insufficient resource and legal capacity of some states to deal with arms brokering ought to make it clear that small arms trafficking is a different kind of crisis altogether, requiring different kinds of international cooperation among nations. While a country like the United States may show its concern about the small arms trade by enacting a strict anti-brokering law and assiduously monitoring arms sales directed by its own nationals or through its own territory, all this means is that brokers will simply avoid doing business in the United States in the future. In the global arms trade, dealers will move to where they can do business, and as long as some countries are unable, or unwilling, to pursue offenders, the net will never be drawn up on these international criminals.

Some have suggested the answer is greater intelligence and information sharing. Peleman, for instance has proposed creating and maintaining global blacklists of persons known to be involved in illicit trafficking which would aid authorities in these under-resourced bureaucracies in identifying potential violations. This is a challenge, however, to traditional practice. As Ted Leggett points out, "Police intelligence is a little too close to military intelligence for many countries to feel comfortable about sharing it" (32).

If the international community has learned anything in the past half-century, though, it is that crises are best managed before they happen. A new security strategy of preventative intervention is gradually becoming accepted more and more as a vital imperative. In the new world environment, the threats to states, security, and stability have shrunk in size, but increased in elusiveness. Now spidery networks of international entrepreneurs can fuel endless conflicts and cost countless lives. They increase the opportunities for violent action by non-state actors, thereby threatening the very notion of statehood. The recent phenomenon of the failed state that the world is witnessing is the direct result of the incredible availability of small and light arms to rebel factions and warlords.

As Peleman put it in a recent interview with PBS:

The United Nations deals with nation states...[It] does not know how to deal with any other entities, black holes on the map, if you want—state entities that no longer exist...If the state ceases to exist, as it has in Liberia and, to a certain extent, in Sierra Leone and Somalia, maybe some places in the Balkans, where whole regions of territory are basically run by groups that could only be described as bandits or warlords, that’s a phenomenon the world has not had to deal with for hundreds of years (33).

The connection between small arms and humanitarian crises is clear, as is the connection between small arms and failed states. International action is required, and it is happening, but the response has so far been reluctant and haphazard. Ultimately, if the world wishes to avoid the further destruction of statehood, it must recognize the crisis that exists now and end it before it deepens.

James Saulino is a student at Princeton Univeristy, USA.

Works Cited

Boutwell, Jefferey and Michael Klare, eds. Light Weapons and Civil Conflict: Controlling the Tools of Violence. Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, 1999
Chapter 5 "The European Union and the Light Weapons Trade." By Paul Eavis and William Benson.
Burkeman, Oliver. "Modest Inventor of Uzi Dies at 79." Guardian. 10 September 2002.
"Country Profiles: Liberia." Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Accessed on www.fco.gov.uk
Graduate Institute of International Studies. Small Arms Survey 2001: Profiling the Problem. Oxford University Press: 2001.
Hartung, William "The New Business of War: Small Arms and the Proliferation of Conflict." Ethics and International Affairs. Vol 15, No. 1. 2001.
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. "Making a Killing: The Business of War." Center for Public Integrity, 2002.
Klare, Michael and Robert Rotberg. The Scourge of Small Arms. World Peace Foundation, 1999.
Lumpe, Laura, ed. Running Guns: the Global Black Market in Small Arms. Zed Books, 2000. "Introduction to Gun-Running" by Laura Lumpe, Sarah Meek, and R.T. Naylor. Chapter 2, "What’s Legal? What’s Illegal?" by Emanuela Chiara Gillard. Chapter 9, "Law Enforcement and International Gun Trafficking" by Ted Leggett.
"Kalashnikov Kids" Economist 8 July 1999.
Peters, Rebecca. "A Plague of Small Arms," International Herald Tribune. 28 October 2002.
Paris, Roland. "Human Security: Paradigm Shift or Hot Air" International Security. Vol.26 No.2
"Security Concerns Raised by Arms Transfers from Candidate Countries" Open Letter to EU Foreign Ministers. Human Rights Watch. 19 October 2001. Accessed on www.hrw.org.
Farah, Douglas "Cash for Cached Weapons: When Asked No Questions Salvadorians Respond." Washington Post, 1 November 1996.
Renner, Michael. Small Arms, Big Impact: The Next Challenge of Disarmament. World Watch Institute, 1997.
"Report of the Panel of Experts Concerning Liberia." United Nations Security Council. October 2001.
"Report of the Panel of Experts in Relation to Sierra Leone." United Nations Security Council. December 2000.
"No Questions Asked: The Eastern Europe Arms Pipeline to Liberia." Human Rights Watch. 15 November 2001.
"Sierra Leone: Gunrunners." Frontline World report. May 2002. Video files accessed on http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/sierraleone/thestory.html

Bibliography

1. Burkeman, p. 1.
2. "Making a Killing: The Business of War" Center for Public Integrity, 2002.
* For the purposes of this paper, small arms are defined according to the definition used in the UN Program of Action to Prevent, Combat, and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects. This covers the general categories of revolvers and pistols, rifles, assault rifles, sub-machine guns, heavy machine guns, grenades, grenade launchers, and portable anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns.
3. Renner, p. 20.
4. Small Arms Survey Yearbook 2001. Accessed online at http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/Yearbook/EngPRkitCH2_11.06.02.pdf
5. "Illegal Arms, Not Nuclear Weapons, Are Destroying Countries" Georgie Anne Geyer, accessed online at www.uexpress.com. "A Plague of Small Arms" Rebecca Peters, International Herlad Tribune, 28 October 2002.
6. Klare, quoted in Renner, p. 14.
7. Renner, p. 18.
8. Renner, p. 12.
9. "Kalashnikov Kids" Economist 8 July 1999.
10. Hartung, p. 82.
11. Small Arms Survey Yearbook 2001.
12. Renner, p. 39.
13. "Making a Killing: the Business of War," ICIJ 2002.
14. Ibid.
15. Hartung, p. 91.
16. Renner, p. 39.
17. Small Arms Survey, p. 165.
18. Klare and Rotberg, p. 17.
19. Gillard, in Lumpe, p. 33.
20. Ibid, p. 35.
21. In addition, the Code requires that EU member states notify one another when refusing an export license. However, if one country wishes to grant an export license where another has denied it, the guidelines only require that the two countries consult on the issue. After consultation, there is no restriction on the new country granting an export license.
22. Eavis and Benson, in Boutwell and Klare, p. 94.
23. "Security Concerns Raised by Arms Transfers from Candidate Countries" Open Letter to EU Foreign Ministers. Human Rights Watch. 19 October 2001. Accessed on www.hrw.org.
24. Gillard, p. 45.
25. Hartung, p. 86.
26. Country Profiles: Liberia. Foreign and Commonwealth Office www.fco.gov.uk.
27. "Sierra Leone: Gunrunners." Frontline World report. May 2002. Video files accessed on http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/sierraleone/thestory.html
28. "Report of the Panel of Experts Concerning Liberia," p. 39. United Nations Security Council. October 2001.
29. "Report of the Panel of Experts in Relation to Sierra Leone," p. 46. United Nations Security Council. December 2000.
30. "No Questions Asked: The Eastern Europe Arms Pipeline to Liberia." Human Rights Watch. 15 November 2001.
31. International Traffic in Arms Regulations, cited in Small Arms Survey 2001: Profiling the Problem, p. 125.
32. Leggett, p. 217.
33. Peleman, Frontline interview. November 2001. Accessed on http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/sierraleone/peleman.html