Guns and Money
On the Thai-Malaysian
border, Mageswary Ramakrishnan goes inside an arms-smuggling
network that supplies a vast underworld of pimps, pirates-and
terrorists
2002.02.11
Time
It looks more like a sack of potatoes than anything
else-the coarsely woven brown bag the skinny Thai corporal is
hefting onto the rickety table with a grunt. The sack gapes
open and dozens of guns clank out, covering the tabletop, several
dropping onto the grimy concrete floor. We stare at the jumbled
heap of handguns, which I know from Joe, the arms trader who
has brought me, are either Brownings or Smith & Wessons.
Some have seen long service, the butts chipped and scored. Joe
ignores these, instead picking up a snub-nosed Browning, still
shiny with gun oil. In less than a minute he strips it down
to four component parts, inspects the barrel and reassembles
the pistol, slotting the parts back together with a series of
clunks. Outside, we can hear the muffled stomp of boots and
the cries of an NCO as squads of soldiers are marched around
the camp's compacted red earth parade ground. "All right,"
Joe finally grunts after an interminably slow inspection of
40 or so guns. "I'll take five Brownings and five Smith
& Wessons. My friend here wants one, too, for protection
like I told you. She'll take a Smith & Wesson."
Joe is speaking to the colonel who is selling him the guns.
The colonel glares at me. I know he doesn't believe that I'm
a friend of Joe's from across the border in Malaysia who needs
a gun for protection. He starts to shout in Thai. Joe nods politely,
putting to one side the 10 weapons he has selected. Smiling
all the time, carefully avoiding eye contact with the colonel,
Joe reaches into a waist pack and counts out a thick wad of
Malaysian currency. "I won't bring her again, I promise.
Here, this is 11,000 ringgit [$2,895], right?" The colonel
stops his tirade and waves to the corporal, who takes the cash
and laboriously counts it. "Next week," Joe says,
accepting a Carlsberg from the colonel, who is now smiling,
"I'll be back. I want about 20 or 30 AKs and maybe also
some M-16s. We can move the pistols in the same shipment."
For all its latent menace, what happened at that army camp
on the Thai-Malaysian border is mundanely commonplace. In Thailand
and Cambodia scores of illicit arms exchanges happen every day,
some of them for as little as one or two pistols, others for
crates holding several thousand Chinese-manufactured AK-47s,
still encased in a thick layer of protective green grease. The
two countries are the spring from which a flood tide of weapons-pistols,
automatic rifles, rocket launchers, mortars, even the occasional
light artillery piece-flows to every corner of Southeast Asia.
The weapons are the lifeblood of the region's criminal activity,
supplying robbers in Johor Baharu, pirates preying on the cargo
ships that chug through the narrow Strait of Malacca and, yes,
traders and buyers say, the region's radical Islamic groups
such as Abu Sayyaf, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, Laskar
Jihad and the Free Aceh Movement.
Gun trafficking feeds
the tide of violence that blights the region, threatens democracy
and development, and destroys lives. But despite all that, there
are few signs that it will be stopped, or even slowed. It's
too lucrative for too many people. Take Thailand, for example.
"After the collapse of military dictatorship in 1973,"
says Sungsidh Pirayarangsan, a professor at Chulalongkorn University
in Bangkok and a specialist on the issue, "local godfathers,
drug traffickers, traders of war weapons and others involved
in illegal trade laundered themselves through the election process.
Today, the contraband arms trade is able to survive because
of political influence."
Because of the secretiveness of the business, experts say it
is hard to estimate the trade's size. "Income from the
underground traffic in arms is lower than that generated by
other sources, in particular gambling and narcotics," says
Yeshua Moser Puangsuwan, regional director for the Geneva-based
Nonviolence International. But those two highly profitable illegal
activities-which earn billions of dollars annually worldwide-are
so entwined with arms smuggling they cannot be separated. "If
you trade in narcotics, human beings or contraband, you must
have access to arms," says Puangsuwan. "It ties them
all together."
Joe-an amiable 30-year-old Malaysian with bloodshot eyes and
a two-pack-a-day habit-knows what that means in the real world.
As the jeep bumps down the earth road leading from the army
camp, his mobile phone squawks. He answers, grunts a few times,
then puts the phone down with a grimace. "I have to go
to Indonesia tomorrow."
Joe, who has three daughters of his own (his family thinks
he is a building contractor), is to collect three 12-year-old
girls and take them to Kuala Lumpur as prostitutes. As they
are virgins, they will fetch $4,700 each. He hates doing it,
Joe says, grimacing again, but he's only a lower level operative,
a cog in a huge machine.
A few large syndicates based in Thailand and Malaysia control
the arms-smuggling trade but it is administered by a dizzyingly
complex system of middlemen like Joe. When the police do crack
down, those at the top, the brains running the muscle, are never
touched. Take a man like Samnang. A 45-year-old arms trader,
his daytime job is as a border guard on the Thai side of the
border with Cambodia. "I am an ex-Khmer Rouge soldier,"
he says, smiling easily. We are talking outside his office at
the bustling gateway, and Samnang is dressed for work-blue shirt
and pants and a walkie-talkie. "Even when we were in power,
I started selling weapons to make more money. You know how poor
we were and the war made us poorer."
Samnang gets the weapons from his contacts within the Cambodian
army, ex-Khmer mates and the villagers along the 700-km border.
He mainly sells AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and hand grenades.
"I sell them to my buyers but I don't know about the end
users because there are so many people in the chain. I have
some protection from my boss who runs a syndicate. He is close
to the powerful people."
According to one estimate
by Panitan Wattanayagorn, a regional security specialist, one-third
of the arms flowing into the region is left over from Cambodia's
decades of war. Another third consists of new weapons smuggled
into Cambodia-and sometimes into Thailand through neighboring
Laos-from China. The last third is from illegal sales by the
Thai army, like the one I saw with Joe.
One level up from buyers like Samnang are the brokers who collect
large orders from buyers and arrange for the gun shipments.
Chay, a broker in his early 30s, seems nervous when we meet
just after dawn in the urine-redolent upper room of a bar 15
minutes outside Bangkok. A heavily built Thai, Chay fidgets
a lot, looking down at his hands. His discomfort may be caused
by his boss who is sitting at another table, an obese, balding
man in his 50s who scowls behind thick, gold-rimmed glasses
and cigar smoke.
When I arrived I was searched by guards who found a tape recorder
in my back pocket. One pulled out a gun and pointed it at my
head. I said I just wanted a record of what was said, that I
had no idea they would object. After half an hour the men calm
down but the boss still isn't happy. Slowly, Chay starts to
talk, glancing at his boss regularly. "The network is huge,"
Chay says. The weapons he buys are stored in warehouses on the
Thai-Cambodian border, then moved by truck to Burma or other
destinations. "Usually my trucks don't even get stopped
for checks. It's easy to bribe people. Who does not want money?"
At this point, Chay's boss takes over. He is in touch with
many overseas syndicates, he says: "I have never met the
end buyers but from my syndicate contacts, I know that it goes
to Acehnese rebel groups, Burmese minority groups like the Karen,
Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines and the rebel groups in Indonesia."
Since he is playing such a dangerous game, doesn't he worry
about getting caught? "The Thai army openly sells weapons,"
he says. "They are the biggest source of protection for
the people involved in this business. What more do we want?"
