AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War (15 page)

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Authors: Larry Kahaner

BOOK: AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War
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Within hours of the plane crash, Hutu militia began hunting down and killing Tutsis in the capital city of Kigali. The killing spread throughout the country, with Hutus ordered to kill Tutsis or be killed by the militia. Between April and July 1994, at least half a million people were killed, according to UN relief groups, but some U.S. intelligence groups put the toll at over one million. About 2 million Rwandans, split evenly between Hutu and Tutsi, fled the country, about 1.5 million to Zaire, 200,000 to Burundi, and 460,000 to Tanzania, according to the UNHCR, the United Nations refugee organization.
 
Most news accounts emphasized the use of farm implements such as machetes, hoes, and axes in the genocide frenzy, but these reports did not tell the full story. Before the well-planned, systematic killing began, the Hutu government distributed thousands of AKs to militia, paramilitary gangs, and citizens to facilitate the roundup of Tutsis for slaughter. Many were then killed by traditional tribal weapons, and the rest were mowed down by automatic fire.
 
In mid-July, RPF forces led by Major General Paul Kagame finally defeated the FAR forces and ended the genocide, and Kagame became Rwanda’s president in April 2000. During a ceremony in 2004 honoring those who died in the genocide that ended ten years earlier, Kagame blamed France more than any other country for its role. “They knowingly trained and armed government soldiers who were going to commit genocide,” he said during his speech. However, Kagame failed to mention the role of other countries such as China, which supplied half a million machetes, and Egypt, which supplied more than eighty-five thousand tons of AKs and hand grenades. Incidentally, with its purchase of $26 million in weapons after a large-scale RPF attack in 1990, Rwanda became Africa’s third largest importer of weapons. The catalyst for some of the earliest deals was Egypt’s foreign minister, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, with guarantees from a French bank. Boutros-Ghali would later become the sixth secretary-general of the United Nations in January 1992.
 
There was little public mention of inaction by the United States, although U.S. officials knew about the genocide and did nothing to stop it. In fact, in communiqués from the Clinton administration’s State Department, officials were careful not to use the word “genocide,” because that would have provoked action under the 1948 International Treaty on the Prevention of Genocide, to which the United States was a signatory. Not until July 1994 were U.S. troops sent to Rwanda, but only to help refugees. Although many reasons have been proposed for why the United States did not intervene earlier—other countries and the United Nations had their own reasons—the one most probable was that America had been hurt so badly by its failure the year before in Somalia against mobs with AKs and other light weapons that it was reticent to engage in such an asymmetric conflict again.
 
Other reasons were much more nefarious, based on details that have only recently been made public. Some evidence suggests that the RPF, with the cooperation of Western nations including the United States, shot down the plane carrying the two presidents in an effort to provoke a “genocide” that they could then stop by force. Why? Chris Black, lead counsel at the International Tribunal for Rwanda, suggests that the United States wanted to replace the Hutu regime with one that would be more favorable to its aggressive stance toward Zaire; that the United States wanted to reduce French influence in central Africa; and that the ultimate U.S. goal was control of the Congo Basin’s natural resources. By provoking the genocide, the RPF could legitimately fight the FAR and defeat them with the world’s blessing.
 
There is also evidence of a so-called genocide fax sent to UN headquarters in New York that outlines plans for mass killings, but this document has been discredited by many as a hoax, another attempt to bolster support for the RPF among Western nations.
 
One of the ironies of the genocide was that Kagame and his 12,000-strong RPF defeated the FAR and Hutu paramilitary groups with no artillery, aircraft, or armored vehicles. Their main weapon was the AK. In his best-selling book
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
, author Philip Gourevitch noted this about Kagame: “That he had pulled it off [the defeat of FAR and the end of genocide] with an arsenal composed merely of mortars, rocked propelled grenades and, primarily, what one American arms specialist described to me as ‘piece of shit’ secondhand Kalashnikovs, has only added to the [Kagame] legend. ‘The problem isn’t the equipment,’ Kagame said, ‘the problem is always the man behind it.’”
 
Whether the Rwandan war turns out to have been a true tribal conflict, a war perpetrated by Western nations, or a combination of these factors, one thing is certain: the AK was the main fuel that fed this terrible tragedy.
 
 
 
RWANDA AND OTHER COUNTRIES in Africa make up just a small part of a long list of devastation brought about by the AK and other small arms. In some countries, people half jokingly call the AK the “African Credit Card,” because in many parts of the continent having one is necessary for everyday existence. In Angola, for example, refugees and former rebels fleeing from government forces during their civil war traded AKs to Zambian villagers for food.
 
In pastoral areas, traditional people such as the Karamajong in Uganda had always fought other groups using spears because of traditional and spiritual imperatives. Introduction of the AK, however, spewing hundreds of bullets a minute, turned their societies topsy-turvy. The weapon not only raised the level of destruction among warring groups but also ratcheted up hostilities against repressive governments with whom the tribesmen formerly held no advantage. On a tribal level, AKs immediately endowed power to warlords over the authority traditionally held by tribal elders. Age and wisdom no longer determined status; Kalashnikovs did.
 
The AK changed cultural patterns in ways that westerners could hardly fathom. It became a standard-exchange barter amount for cattle among the group. In 1998, an AK might be worth three or four cattle. If the gun was registered with the Ugandan government, it was considered more valuable and the investment could be recouped in a few years. It also could be used to increase a person’s herd through cattle rustling, which until the advent of the AK was a relatively small-scale activity.
 
The AK also began appearing as parts of dowries.
 
This day-to-day incorporation of the AK was far from unique. In South Africa, black youths considered buying an AK as a rite of manhood as well as a way to fight government-sponsored apartheid. The rifle became such a strong icon of antigovernment groups like the African National Congress (ANC) that the government demonized the weapon in the media, equating it with the Soviet Union and Communism and thus justifying its legitimate suppression of such groups. In this way, the government used the ANC’s interest in the AK to allege that it was supported by the Soviet Union and was not a homegrown, grassroots organization.
 
Many AKs in South Africa came from Mozambique in the early 1990s as that nation’s twenty-year civil war was winding down. (South Africa is the only sub-Saharan nation that produces its own AK version, the Vektor R4, which is actually a copy of the Israeli Galil, itself a modified AK.) In that country, AKs were so commonplace, so easy to get, that they were used as currency.
 
This was a far cry from the situation when Mozambique in 1974 won its independence from Portugal. When the colonial power left, it took most of its arms with it. However, this did not deter groups contending for power from increasing their small-arms caches. According to UN estimates, armies on both sides of the ensuing civil war—the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), which had initiated the armed campaign of independence against Portugal in 1964, and the Mozambique National Resistance (RENAMO)—never amounted to more than 92,000 people, so outside authorities were shocked when they looked at the number of weapons left over after fighting ended in 1993.
 
 
Introduction of the AK turned pastoral people’s societies upside down. It not only raised the level of destruction among warring groups, who usually fought with spears and swords for traditional and spiritual reasons, but also ratcheted up hostilities against repressive governments over whom they formerly held no advantage. Here, Hamer warriors in Ethiopia’s Omo Valley patrol Lake Chew Bahir for protection against the Boranas, their worst enemies. ©
Remi Benali/Corbis
 
One report had the Mozambican government handing out 1.5 million AKs to civilian self-defense groups. But a 1994 Interpol presentation noted that 1.5 million AKs came from the Soviet Union alone. UN reports pegged the number at between 5 and 10 million weapons.
 
The true number may never be known. Although the United Nations collected almost 170,000 AKs from uniformed troops, many more weapons were kept by private individuals or smuggled or sold to neighboring South Africa, which saw an unprecedented surge in AKs as evidenced by prices plummeting to as low as five to ten dollars in some instances.
 
As a cultural icon, the AK clearly left its mark on Mozambique. The country’s flag features an AK crossed with a hoe on a field of horizontal red, green, black, gold, and white stripes. Both images are superimposed on an open book. The flag symbolizes the country’s commitment to defense, labor, and education. Mozambique’s coat of arms also displays the AK, hoe, and book over a map of the country and is seen every day on paper money and coins.
 
In 1999, the country held a contest to change the flag, ostensibly to replace the AK with a more peaceful symbol. Jose Forjaz, a widely known Mozambican architect, won the design competition, but nothing further happened. A constitutional package that would change the flag and coat of arms, and provide a new national anthem along with some other amendments, has been stalled for years. It’s unclear when or if the flag will ever change.
 
Even if the AK image is deleted from the flag and emblem, it remains embedded in the country’s consciousness, not only through the estimated one million deaths it caused, but through children, many of them now grown, who were named for the gun. “When I met the Mozambique minister of defense, he presented me with his country’s national banner, which carries the image of a Kalashnikov gun,” said Mikhail Kalashnikov. “He told me that when all the Liberation [FRELIMO] soldiers went home to their villages, they named their sons Kalash.”
 
By the late 1980s, the Kalashnikov’s reputation had already spread like a virus throughout the Far East, Middle East, and Africa, leaving a path of destruction and human suffering. In the Western Hemisphere, Central and South America were not spared the AK’s wrath. This ten-dollar weapon of mass destruction had already penetrated Latin America, leaving millions dead and displaced and helping to foster the world’s most powerful and brutal drug cartels.
 
5
 
THE KALASHNIKOV CULTURE REACHES LATIN AMERICA
 
AMID THE COLLAPSED buildings of Nicaragua’s capital, Managua—many structures remain in ruins after a devastating earthquake in 1972—rises the city’s largest statue, an iron figure with his outstretched arm thrusting skyward, defiantly gripping an AK.
 
Because of his exaggerated muscle-rippled chest, this statue of a Sandinista guerrilla was dubbed the Incredible Hulk by locals, who employ the comic-book hero’s name to direct tourists, telling them to “take a right at the Incredible Hulk.” At the base of this landmark, erected to honor the freedom fighters who drove out the Somoza-family dictators, are inscribed the words of General Augusto Sandino, for whom the Sandinistas are named:
In the end, only the workers and peasants will remain
.
 
Sandino got it partly right.
 
Along with the workers and peasants are tens of thousands of unaccounted-for AKs left over from the country’s forty years of strife that spilled over into neighboring Honduras and El Salvador and caused Kalashnikov Cultures to spring up in Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. Like Kalashnikov Cultures in the Middle East, these are just as ingrained and just as deadly.
 
 
In Nicaragua’s capital of Managua, this statue of a Sandinista guerrilla thrusting an AK skyward was erected to honor the freedom fighters who drove out the Somoza-family dictators. Because of its exaggerated muscle-rippled chest, the locals dubbed it the Incredible Hulk after the comic-book hero. ©
1999, James Lerager

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