ARMS TRADING : S. Africa Firm Under the Gun to Explain Wayward Weapons

An aging Danish freighter, now anchored off Port Elizabeth, is an unseemly reminder of this nation’s unsavory past--and uncertain future--in the shadowy world of international arms trading.

Aboard the Arktis Pioneer are enough guns to equip a fair-sized army--almost 25,000 AK-47 and G-3 assault rifles, plus 14 million rounds of ammunition. But controversy rides with them.

The rifles were bought from Armscor, South Africa’s state-owned weapons broker, by a Lebanese middleman named Eli Wazen. Armscor says Wazen provided an end-user certificate, the required international document, showing that the guns were for the government of Lebanon. The ship sailed for Beirut on Aug. 25.

But in a still-unfolding scandal, the vessel instead went to Hodeida, a Red Seaport in war-torn Yemen. Press reports suggesting that South Africa’s new government would fuelarmed conflicts in Africa, not to mention violate an international arms embargo against Yemen, have created huge embarrassment here as President Nelson Mandela completes his state visit to Washington.

Armscor officials claim that they were conned. Wazen faked the certificate, they insist, and now has dropped from sight. The Justice Department has begun to investigate. For now, there are more questions than answers.

It’s unclear why the ship did not off-load in Yemen, for example, or what will happen to the cargo now. The intended recipient of the guns has not been identified. Armscor has denied press reports that the cache was meant for Jonas Savimbi’s rebel UNITA forces in Angola. That too would violate a United Nations arms embargo.

And perhaps most important, it is not clear if Armscor was duped for the first time, as officials insist, or whether it was simply the first time the company’s long-covert business practices were exposed.

After all, until the last U.N. sanctions against the old apartheid regime were lifted in May, all of Armscor’s foreign trade violated international law. The United States retains an arms embargo because Armscor and two former subsidiaries are under a 1991 federal indictment in Philadelphia for allegedly smuggling banned military components to South Africa and Iraq.

Experts say the errant arms shipment simply reflects Armscor’s long tradition of subterfuge and deception. “This is one of the old-type Armscor transactions,” said Bill Sass, a retired brigadier who is now senior researcher at the independent Institute for Defense Policy. “A year or so ago, this was how they did most of their business.”

Armscor spokesman Don Henning doesn’t deny it. “Up until May, we were never in the position to demand end-user certificates,” he said.

Armscor’s dirty side was never very secret. Under apartheid, they armed the police who brutalized black townships, helped the government develop a nuclear weapon and sold arms to renegade states such as Iraq, Libya and Sudan. Despite sanctions, Armscor boasted that it was South Africa’s largest exporter of manufactured products and the world’s 10th-largest arms dealer.

But since then, Armscor has desperately tried to fend off critics who say the new government should not sell arms and should divert military spending to hospitals, schools and other social programs.

With exports last year of about $250 million, South Africa controls about 0.5% of the world arms trade. Armscor aims to double exports this year, and double them again next year.

But officials fear that the current uproar has hurt Armscor’s image. “We believe it’s had a very negative impact on us,” Henning said. “We lost credibility.”

Sass said he doesn’t fear for Africa’s strongest weapons industry, however. “Wars may come, and empires may change, but arms companies go on forever,” he said with a laugh.