Exclusive: Somalia army weapons sold on open market - U.N. monitors

Somalia's army soldiers and peacekeepers from the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) enter the town of Barawe during the second phase of Operation Indian Ocean October 6, 2014.

CREDIT: REUTERS/FEISAL OMAR

BY LOUIS CHARBONNEAU

(Reuters) - Somali army weapons and ammunition continue to be diverted to open markets despite the government's pledges to prevent its arms from leaking and ending up in the hands of Islamist militants, U.N. investigators said in a new report.

The Somalia-Eritrea Monitoring Group, an 8-member panel of investigators that monitors compliance with U.N. sanctions on the two countries, said there had been improvements in government reports on the contents of its armories but suggested the situation remained unsatisfactory.

"The Federal Government has not imported weapons into Somalia in full compliance with its obligations pursuant to the modification of the arms embargo by the Security Council," the group said in its confidential 482-page annual report, obtained by Reuters on Friday.

The report was submitted to the council's Somalia-Eritrea sanctions committee.

The 15-nation Security Council's decision to ease Somalia's decades-old arms embargo in March 2013 was a controversial one, although Washington supported the Somali government's appeals for restrictions to be relaxed to enable it to better arm its security forces to fight al Shabaab.

Earlier this year, the council extended a partial suspension of the decades-old arms embargo on Somalia for eight months while highlighting concerns about the possible diversion of weapons to al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab militants. The government has pledged to crack down on arms diversion.

In their new report, the monitors said a number of assault rifles provided by Ethiopia and stored at the Halane armory had ended up for sale on the streets of the Somali capital.

The group said it "obtained photographic evidence of several brand new Type 56-2 rifles observed in two Mogadishu markets between February and April 2014, which match the factory markings and sequence of serial numbers of Type 56-2 rifles observed in the Halane weapons store."

It added that the weapons were "undeniably sourced from SNA (Somali army) stockpiles" and noted that arms dealers selling them had confirmed that they came from government stockpiles.

"Arms dealers also stated that al Shabaab agents were procuring weapons in at least one of the markets," said the report, noting that the monitors had viewed an al Shabaab propaganda video in which a militant was cleaning a brand new Type 56-2 assault rifle.

"The Monitoring Group can only conclude that the weapons were sold illegally by SNA officers taking advantage of poor accountability at the unit level, or that these weapons have been leaked at a higher level and the SNA's supporting documentation has been doctored or manufactured as cover for missing weapons," the report said.

It added that the group has consistently received testimony from individuals about high-level Somali involvement in direct transfers of the arms to markets and to al Shabaab.

Other weapons have wound up on the markets of Mogadishu, including different assault rifles with filed-off serial numbers. Arms dealers in the markets said the weapons came from the Somali army and had originally come from Yemen.

The group said that since the partial suspension of the arms embargo, the various weapons Somalia has imported exceed 13,000 along with 5.5 million rounds of ammunition.

"Given the size of the Security Forces ... these numbers of weapons exceed the needs of the current offensive against al Shabaab," the report said. "They are also additional to weapons sourced locally from stocks already in the country and weapons that have entered Somalia in violation of the arms embargo."

A diplomat at Somalia's U.N. mission did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

Somalia's government last year had asked for the arms embargo to be fully removed, and the United States supported that. But other Security Council members were wary of doing that in a country already awash with weapons.

The Security Council imposed the embargo on Somalia in 1992 to cut the flow of weapons to feuding warlords, who a year earlier had ousted dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and plunged the country into civil war. In 2012, Somalia held its first vote since 1991 to elect a president and prime minister.

The Security Council requires Somalia's government to report regularly on the structure of the security forces and the infrastructure and procedures in place to ensure safe storage, maintenance and distribution of military equipment.

There is a 17,600-strong African Union peacekeeping force and a U.N. political mission in the Horn of Africa country. The African Union force continues to fight al Shabaab.

(Reporting by Louis Charbonneau; editing by Gunna Dickson)

ANALYSIS: WHY STATES FAIL AND HOW STATES RECOVER – ANALYSIS

 Somalia and its twin Somaliland are prototypes of states that fail and states that recover. The difference between Somalia and Somaliland is the difference between a peace owned and a rent-seeking peace. Local ownership is but one aspect of the conditions for state recovery.

By Greg Mills

Somalia and Somaliland  on the Horn of Africa are prototypes of states that failed and states that recovered. Somaliland declared independence from Somalia on 18 May 1991 after a six-week Grand Conference of the Northern Peoples in Burao. The conferences in Burao and later, Bomora were managed and financed by locals, bringing their own food and shelter over many weeks, sometimes months.

These events were “bottom-up, not top-down”, emphasised Mohamed Omar, the minister of commerce, “unlike Somalia’s, which has been top-down, driven by donors through leadership and taking place outside the country”. Somalilanders concentrated on achieving peace, not on acquiring financial rents for delegates from the process, a feature which has continually by contrast blighted Somalia’s attempts to the south, where conflict entrepreneurs have fed off both the fighting and the talking.

State failure; state recovery

While the absence of international recognition might impede the consolidation of its development, Somaliland’s home-built steadiness so far exemplifies the limits of external intervention in stabilising countries and the necessity of local ownership. The irony does not end there. The route to reclaiming Somaliland’s independence lies through Mogadishu, in getting its southern neighbour to agree to a divorce; but the Mogadishu government is barely functional, little more than a Western-supported and African-military controlled client state.

The difference between Somaliland and Somalia is the difference between a peace owned and a rent-seeking peace. A lack of aid has meant that Somalilanders have had to find their own way, and the lack of external involvement has left local structures in place. It is a prototype for making peace elsewhere, the lesson for outsiders being: Less is often more. Foreigners cannot after all want peace more than the locals.

This is a first of several lessons in understanding why states recover and the role of outsiders in this process. State failure, of course, is not just about Somali-style collapse. The strains of fragility – of governance, economics, politics and society – intersect and play out differently in different circumstances. While many states are fragile, there is a group at one extreme that threatens to explode or implode, and is as a result prioritised by external actors.

At the other extreme, there are authoritarian democrats; states that might work for now, but whose lack of democratic governance threatens to undermine both their standards of governance and prospects of long-term growth.

Getting it right

There is no single reason or a tipping point at which a state becomes officially ‘failed’, an imaginary dividing line between success or normality and failure. This explains the difficulty in defining such states, and especially in categorising them. Hence terminology including failed, fragile, weak, collapsed, vulnerable, moribund, straggling, struggling, crisis, quasi-failed, ‘non-state’, broken, invisible, insufficient, stillborn, phantom, or even ‘Potemkin’ states. But these situations should be viewed on a spectrum or continuum rather than a balance sheet of failure.

Countries that work for some, at least for the relatively well-heeled visitor, can work against the locals. There are those that significantly and continuously under-perform, lurching from crisis to crisis, a roller coaster of political and economic collapse, but do not explode into violence and become the focus of international aid groups, one external metric of failure.

Getting it right depends on answering why the international community so often gets it wrong in managing transitions, from war to peace, and from poverty to prosperity. Even so, the difference between state recovery and failure involves more than the efficacy of external actors, no matter the attempts to plan and resource a coherent strategy, to achieve better coordination, staffing, commu¬nication, and to establish clear pillars, goals, objectives, systems of accountability, and clear priorities.

The drivers of state success include legitimacy, not just stability; soft systemic not just hard physical infrastructure; and the emergence of issue- rather than identity-led political and economic choices, where narrow self-interest is subsumed by national concerns. Transforming states is about the politics, and the political economy, and living with local solutions, however messy they appear.

Security is imperative: indeed, it is the door through which much else follows, including better governance and development. You can’t fix instability without fixing, first, security. To do that effective armed forces are required, including the police.

Thinking things through to the finish, by locals and outsiders, is also imperative.

Cost of failure

Countries are quick to respond to emergency situations, or to engage militarily, driven often by their own domestic political considerations. But few have the staying power, as is evidenced by Iraq, whatever the strategic folly in getting involved in the first instance.

The costs of failure and the potential rewards of recovery are enormous. Today the bulk of the world’s poor – totalling 1.1 billion of the planet’s seven billion people – live in failed or failing states. Not only is their lack of development and progress a missed opportunity for all, but their problems are unlikely to remain at home in a world increasingly connected by the flows of people, capital, goods, technology, information and news.

History teaches however that the period of recovery for states from failure is at least as long as the period of decline. The term ‘buy and hold’ is synonymous with taking a long-term view; not aiming to enter low and sell high, but rather to build a business over generations.

This approach discourages speculative investment and promotes the practice of holding onto shares for years in the belief that the stock is undervalued, and that sound management and patience will not only add value for the investor, but create wealth and jobs in the process.

Buy and hold is also the strategy necessary to fix states. Local leaders need to adopt this approach, investing in the future of their countries, and not simply using their power to extract personal wealth.

Greg Mills heads the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation and is currently a Visiting Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. His latest book – ‘Why States Recover’ (Picador/Hurst) – based on his assignments in three dozen case-studies across the world, is being launched at RSIS this month.

Israel's Kill List Inside the Mossad's campaign to off its most dangerous foes, one by one.

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YOAV LEMMER/AFP/Getty Images

BY RONEN BERGMAN

There'll be a summit conference in the sky," smiled an Israeli intelligence official Wednesday morning when he learned of the assassination of Hassan Lakkis, the Hezbollah commander in charge of weapons development and advanced technological warfare, in a Beirut suburb around midnight on Tuesday, Dec. 3. The killing of Lakkis is yet another in the latest in a long series of assassinations of leading figures in what Israeli intelligence calls the "Radical Front," which comprises two countries -- Syria and Iran -- and three organizations: Hezbollah, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hamas.

"We're talking about a number of organizations and people involved in nuclear and terrorist activity. [They] do it not only for their countries in various missions, but have created an international network -- the most dangerous and most efficient that I have met," the official added. The coalition's goals: "the construction of a nuclear bomb and of various missilery capabilities -- from very short to very long ranges -- and the implementation of suicide terror at the highest level." The Israeli goals: take these men out, one by one.

This isn't the first time Israel has faced very powerful enemies, of course. But Israeli intelligence officials think this may be the most diverse, most intricately woven set of foes the country has encountered. These foes range from those at the leadership level down to field operatives, according to Mossad and Military Intelligence Directorate (Aman) high-ranking officials. And it all involves deep, intimate cooperation that even spans the religious rifts between Sunnis and Shiites, driven by a single motive force: hostility toward the state of Israel.

Back in 2004, the Mossad began identifying various key figures within this Radical Front -- those with advanced operational, organizational, and technological capabilities. While other, better-known personalities in these extremist groups and their state backers dealt with strategy, these were the people who handled the details and the translation of strategy into actual practice.

The Israeli intelligence source, who dealt with the Radical Front, likens the anti-Israel coalition to SPECTRE, the fictional enemies of James Bond. With one difference: "SPECTRE usually did it for money." Israeli intelligence drew up a list of these men, each one the possessor of highly lethal skills that could be threatening to Israel, even if there had not been a coordinated network embracing of all of them. The list was headed by two men: Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah's supreme military commander, and Gen. Muhammad Suleiman, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's head of secret special projects, including the building of a nuclear reactor, and the person in charge of Syria's ties with Iran and Hezbollah. As Meir Dagan, the former Mossad chief, told me: "Gen. Muhammad Suleiman was in charge of Assad's shady businesses, including the connection with Hezbollah and Iran and all sensitive projects. He was a figure Assad was leaning upon. And these days, he misses him."

After them came Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, head of missile development for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the export of missiles to Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Islamic Jihad; Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Hamas official in charge of tactical ties with Iran; and Hassan Lakkis (also spelled in FBI documents as Haj Hassan Hilu Laqis), who was identified by Aman in the early 1990s as Hezbollah's weapons development expert. In an article about Lakkis's death, Lebanon's Daily Star called him a "key figure in Hezbollah['s] drone program." The Israeli intelligence source continued the analogy with the Bond movies and called him "Hezbollah's Q."

According to his Aman file, Lakkis was active in the radical Shiite movement since age 19, enlisting shortly after it was established. He had a certain amount of technical education at a Lebanese university, but most of his skills were acquired from his experience in developing and manufacturing weaponry. Almost from the outset he was the top procurement officer and coordinator with Iran on these matters. Thanks to his efforts, Hezbollah became the most powerful terrorist organization ever -- even more powerful than al Qaeda in many ways -- with "firepower that 90 percent of the countries in the world do not have," according to Dagan.

As early as the mid-1990s, there were Aman officers who marked Lakkis as a potential target, believing that he should be eliminated. But Hezbollah was not a preferred target at the time and was considered more of a nuisance than a strategic threat. By the time that this changed in the 2000s, he was already taking extreme precautions to protect himself.

As I detail in my book, The Secret War With Iran, Lakkis was also wanted in Canada and the United States for running Hezbollah cells in those countries in the early 1990s. He had dispatched "elements with criminal tendencies there, and they were therefore happy to send them to North America so that they would not carry on such activities close to the organizations members" in Lebanon, according to a classified Aman paper. These Lebanese criminals settled in Vancouver, North Carolina, and Michigan, where they worked in the wholesale counterfeiting of visas, driver's licenses, and credit cards, raking in huge profits. Lakkis permitted them to skim off a fat commission, as long as most of the cash was used for the procurement of sophisticated equipment that Hezbollah was finding it difficult to acquire elsewhere, such as GPS and night-vision equipment and various kinds of flak jackets.

In the wake of information conveyed by Israeli intelligence, the FBI and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service mounted a number of operations against these cells, and their members either fled or were arrested and sentenced to long jail terms for offenses including illicit acquisition of weapons and conspiring to attack Jewish targets. Lakkis himself learned about the raids in time and canceled a planned visit to the United States. In the last telephone calls recorded by the FBI before the crackdown, Lakkis was heard rebuking the cell members for not doing enough for Hezbollah and enjoying the good life in America while the organization's members in Lebanon were being hammered by Israel.

With Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, Hezbollah's military buildup and preparations for a general campaign against Israel became central in the organization's doctrine. Lakkis functioned in tandem with and under the command of Hezbollah's military commander, Mughniyeh. The two were aware of Israel's sensitivity to casualties in its military and of the lack of preparedness on the Israeli home front for sustained bombardment.

They built a complex array of fortifications in south Lebanon with a double goal: surviving for as long as possible under attack from Israeli land forces, which they were sure would happen sooner or later, and preservation of their own ability to fire as many missiles as possible at Israeli communities.

The formula was a success. In the summer of 2006, Israel lost its war with Hezbollah, thanks, in part, to fortifications equipped with advanced gear like communications, command-and-control systems, and night-vision optics -- all of which Lakkis played an important role in acquiring. In effect, it was Israel, the strongest military force in the Middle East, that was badly defeated, failing to achieve any of the goals it had set itself.

On July 20, 2006, the Israelis tried to take Lakkis out with a rocket fired from an F-16 fighter at his apartment in Beirut, but he wasn't home and his son was killed.

The 2006 war (known as the "Second Lebanon War" in Israel, to distinguish it from the war Israel waged against the PLO in Lebanon in 1982) was the high point of the Radical Front and the coordination between the coalition's top members. Since then, the wheel has turned a full cycle. Mughniyeh was killed by a bomb in his car in Damascus in February 2008; Suleiman was shot dead by a sniper on a beach in Syria in August of the same year; Mabhouh was strangled and poisoned in a Dubai hotel room in January 2010; Moghaddam was blown sky high along with 16 of his personnel in an explosion at a missile depot near Tehran on Nov. 12, 2011. And on Tuesday night, two unidentified masked men cut Lakkis down in the parking garage of his apartment building in a suburb of Beirut.

Hezbollah was quick to point the finger at Israel; Israel was quick to deny the attack. If indeed the assassins belong to some elite intelligence organization, by now they are most likely to be out of Lebanon, away from Hezbollah's grasp. But this tactical success -- if you can call it that -- is not necessarily a strategic one in the Middle Eastern political arena. 

To play assassin is to challenge history outright. Some hit jobs proved effective in changing reality, but not all changed it in the manner the perpetrators had hoped for. Take the 1992 assassination of Hezbollah Secretary-General Abbas al-Musawi. Retaliation attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets after his death cost dozens of lives, and the more radical and more effective Hassan Nasrallah took over as the organization's leader. 

For these reasons, assassinations should be considered a last resort. The Radical Front is undergoing changes. Iran had to come to a difficult compromise with the West after many years of sanctions brought its economy to its knees. Hezbollah has taken both tactical and political blows since it openly sided with Assad in the Syrian civil war and sent its troops to fight alongside his.

"Now they're all together," said the Israeli intelligence official. Then he recited words from the Jewish religious blessing that's meand to be said on hearing that someone has died: "Blessed be the Judge of the Truth."

But sometimes it's better to let the Judge -- and History -- take its own course.