n;">They called themselves the "cut hands commandos" because they
lopped off their victims' hands with machetes; the "burn house
unit", for the thousands of families who were locked into
their homes and roasted alive; the "born naked squad", in
reference to the hapless hundreds who were stripped naked and
raped before being bludgeoned or burned to death.
The perpetrators were not savages operating alone in Freetown, Sierra
Leone's capital, during the two-day horror that marked the climax of
that country's 11-year civil war in January 1999.
Rather, Andrew Feinstein writes in his new book "The Shadow World:
Inside the Global Arms Trade", the swarms of men – most of them
teenagers driven to madness from forcible injections of crack cocaine
into their heads – were a machine oiled by the dollars of some of the
world's biggest arms traders, who handed the rebels caches of weapons
in exchange for unfettered access to the timber fields and diamond
mines of West Africa.
Those same weapons – carried into Liberia and passed across the
porous border into warring Sierra Leone aboard a British Aircraft
Corporation (BAC) 1-11 jet owned by the notorious Ukrainian-born
Israeli arms dealer Leonid Minin – were used to murder 6,000
civilians, maim and mutilate tens of thousands more and send 100,000
fleeing for their lives.
While this "orgy of bewildering cruelty" was being wrought on the
world's least developed country, on a population subsisting largely
on less than a dollar a day, Minin and his associates pocketed tens
of millions of dollars.
Such exchanges – of lives for "business as usual" – are the subjects
of "Shadow World", the first account of its kind to chronicle the
corruption, collateral damage and protagonists involved in the
world's most lucrative business.
Feinstein writes, "Global military expenditure is estimated to have
totaled 1.6 trillion dollars in 2010, 235 dollars for every single
person on the planet. This is an increase of 53 percent since 2000
and accounts for 2.6 percent of global GDP.
"The trade in conventional arms, both big and small, is worth about
60 billion dollars a year," he notes.
The U.S.'s national security budget alone reaches a trillion dollars
a year, with a defence portfolio topping 703 billion annually, but it
is by no means the only, or even |