Viktor Bout, Arms Dealer, and His Rise and Fall. Viktor Bout made his first major foray into the weapons business in 1995, on a pleasant summer day in Bulgaria. A Russian entrepreneur who was then twenty-eight years old, he had flown to Sofia from Sharjah, the third-largest city in the United Arab Emirates, where he had lived for the previous two years. Sharjah was a kind of postmodern caravansary—as Bout told me recently, it was a place with “practically no law.” Although he had arrived in the Emirates not knowing much about Arab culture, he had a cosmopolitan ability to adapt to new circumstances. He was intending to enter the field of aviation. Supple with languages, he could flip among Russian, English, Portuguese, and Esperanto; today, he says, he can “read fifteen or sixteen languages, go to the market with nine or ten, and fluently speak five or six.”
In Sofia, Bout checked into the Park Hotel Moskva, a shabby, state-owned high-rise, and set out for the office of a Bulgarian arms dealer named Peter Mirchev. Epicentre of Corruption. Mark Hibbs • an ACW Network site. Limit Arms Exports to Reduce Violence Against Women" Limit Arms Exports to Reduce Violence Against Women Rebecca Gerome: The availability of small arms increases sexual violence against women. Therefore, gender based violence needs to be central to international discussions on the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), and states must act to end impunity for armed violence against women. Marie was gang raped on 10 June 2010. “When you call [for help], people hear but they don’t come out to help when there are people with guns around,” she says.
Her story is one of many others in Amnesty International’s January 2011 report on Haiti, entitled “Aftershocks: Women Speak Out About Sexual Violence”. Most of the rape victims interviewed were threatened by groups of men armed with guns. Between February 28 and March 4 2011, States gathered in New York for the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) Preparatory Committee. What impact do international transfers of conventional arms and ammunitions have on women’s lives? Yet the ATT is not enough. William Astore, Confessions of a Recovering Weapons Addict.
The twenty-first century hasn’t exactly been America’s greatest moment. Still, there remain winners, along with all the losers you might care to mention. If, in fact, you were to sum up the first decade-plus of the next “American Century” in manufacturing terms, you might say that -- Steve Jobs aside -- this country has mainly been successful at making things that go boom in the night. Start with Hollywood. Its action and superhero films -- the very definition of what goes boom in the night -- continue to capture eyeballs and dominate global markets in ways that should impress and that have left national movie industries elsewhere in the proverbial dust. And then, of course, there’s that other group of winners, the arms-makers of the military-industrial-homeland-security complex. They’ve had the time of their lives these last boom years (so to speak), with national security budgets soaring annually beyond all imagination.
Washington's New Arms Bazaar. On January 14, 2008, the State Department officially notified Congress of its intent to sell 900 Joint Direct Attack Munitions kits to Saudi Arabia. Though some in Congress balked at transferring such advanced military technology to a country still in a formal state of war with Israel, their protests soon faltered. The transaction is just the latest phase in the Bush administration’s plan to sell at least $20 billion of high-tech weaponry to Saudi Arabia and the five other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states—Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman.
These sales are part of a massive $63 billion package of arms transfers and military aid to Washington’s chief Middle Eastern allies first announced the preceding July. In addition to the GCC sales, over the next decade the US will provide $13 billion of arms grants to Egypt and $30 billion to Israel. The Saudi weaponry sale was announced during President George W. Rewarding Authoritarianism Priming Israel’s Aid Pump. The Modernization of Bribery: The Arms Trade in the Arab Gulf. The New York Hall of Science in Queens is currently showcasing “1,001 Inventions,” an exhibit documenting scientific advances made in the Islamic World while Europe was mired in the Dark Ages.
The standards are all there – the advances in surgery, astronomy, and mathematics without which we might still be engaged in trepanation, the reading of animal entrails and addition by abacus. But there is another pioneering regional development not on display: the modernization of the ancient art of bribery. Predictably, this innovation involves the global arms market, which by all accounts is the source of more bribes than any other sector. And although most actors in the global arms trade have abandoned briefcases of unmarked, nonconsecutive bills for the relative security of Foreign Sales Corporations and shell companies, corruption watchdogs are rarely more than a few steps behind – nipping at their perfidious heels.
Enter the Holy Grail of graft – “defense offsets. . ” [7] GAO. Arms Supplies and Military Spending in the Gulf. While not as great as it had been in the recent past, the role of arms and military spending in the societies and economies of the Gulf states is still much larger than in any other area of the world. It was not until after the Iran-Iraq War and the 1991 Gulf war that these states felt that they could make reductions, necessitated by the 1980s fall in world oil prices, in their very large levels of military spending. Only in Kuwait, for understandable reasons, did military spending in 1995, measured in current dollars, exceed that of 1985. Excepting Kuwait, military expenditures per capita are down across the region, as is the percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) spent on the military.
Those reductions, however, are in levels of military expenditure that were the highest in the world. Even today, the Gulf remains one of the most militarized areas of the world. The declines in overall military spending are reflected in similar declines in the dollar value of arms imports. Come and buy our weapons, UK arms fair tells Bahrain - UK Politics, UK. Transparency.png (PNG Image, 2000 × 1000 pixels) - Scaled (61%)