ISLAMIC TERRORISTS LOOK TO MOLDOVA FOR DIRTY BOMBS Thomas Land

Transcription

1 ISLAMIC TERRORISTS LOOK TO MOLDOVA 221 ISLAMIC TERRORISTS LOOK TO MOLDOVA FOR DIRTY BOMBS Thomas Land HE BREAKAWAY Trans-Dniester region of Moldova has emerged as a thriving uncontrolled marketplace for all kinds of weapons including T nuclear materials as well as other contraband. The market is the only substantial local source of foreign exchange, operated with the connivance of the authorities and supported by the extensive local armaments industry inherited from Soviet times. It generates increasing and mutually profitable collaboration between conventional, profit oriented organized criminal gangs and international terrorists or rogue states seeking political, ideological or religious objectives. One of them is al-qaeda, which may recently have acquired there a cache of light, Soviet-made missiles armed with warheads capable of releasing radioactive material over population centres from a distance of eleven miles. The weapons, originally designed for a variety of altemative purposes, have disappeared in Moldova, according to an authoritative analysis concluded by a specialist at the independent Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) there. There is no doubt over the resolve of Islamic terrorists to acquire and deploy such weapons, concludes a timely new study issued by an expert panel of the United Nations. The fate of the Alazan missiles is urgently being investigated by several countries and intemational organizations. Their concem may well encourage efforts to shut down the Trans-Dniester arms bazaar, and to make safe and keep potentially lethal radiation sources and delivery systems everywhere out of the wrong hands. Alarm over the prospect of the weapons falling into terrorist hands was raised by this journal in May An article on the convergence of the interests of Islamic terrorists and organized criminals along the infamous Balkan route (see Contemporary Review No. 1648, pp ) quoted reliable Russian intelligence sources warning that high-level representatives of al-qaeda and Hamas as well as Iran and Chechnya had recently passed through Moldova to establish operational bases there. There was reason to believe that the terrorist agents had been attracted to that former Soviet republic by an abandoned rock mine at the village of Bicioc, Dubossari Judet, storing fourteen unguarded radioactive isotope warheads. Such weapons were designed to explode in the air in order to mark a territory for attack by bombers. However, they could produce consequences similar to a small nuclear explosion if detonated on the ground. The unguarded warheads were understood a year ago to have been removed from a stockpile of thirty-five missiles at Silo 13 of Military Unit 4043 at Tiraspol Airfield where the rest were being held under proper supervision. Oazu Nantoi, a former Moldavian government official and a widely respected political analyst at the IPS in Chisinau, now says that he has seen photocopies of Russian military documents stating that the remaining 'dirty bomb'

2 222 CONTEMPORARY REVIEW warheads, some ready to use, some dismantled, have disappeared from the Trans- Dniester military airport. The fate of the warheads at Bicioc is unknown. Officials in Moldova acknowledge their responsibility over the Trans- Dniester region but they lack any form of administrative power there. The breakaway region has been policed by Russia since its fight for independence from Moldova twelve years ago, ostensibly over fears that Moldova would reunite with neighbouring Romania. Since then, the Trans-Dniester administration has repeatedly refused to allow international inspection of its extensive military depots. A spokesman for the Trans-Dniester 'Defence Ministry' in Tiraspol denies that there have ever been Alazan missiles in the territory. He dismisses reports of their disappearance as 'pure propaganda from Chisinau'. There has been at least one confirmed case of smuggling Alazan missiles for use as a terrorist weapon. On 24 May 1992, two Moldavian policemen were killed when they tried to stop delivery of a consignment to ethnic Gagauz militants, according to local press accounts. Moldavian officials believe that the missiles originated from the Trans-Dniester region. Both Russia and the United States are acutely concerned with the case of the missing missiles. So is Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is promoting a convention to limit the availability of materials that could be deployed in radiation dispersal weapons. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which acts together with Russia and Ukraine as mediator between Moldova and the breakaway region, is discreetly investigating. That organization has also expressed concern over the emergence of the Trans-Dniester region as a major centre for the manufacture and smuggling of weapons and its involvement in money laundering and trade in drugs and human beings. All this may well promote renewed Western efforts at resolving the Moldova conflict. Colin Powell, the American Secretary of State, has called for the establishment of an international peacekeeping force for Moldova. And the European Union (EU) has promised an early action plan to promote the integration of Moldova with its Western neighbours. Vladimir Orlov, founding director of the Moscow Centre for Policy Studies, describes the Trans-Dniester arms market as 'an ideal meeting place for terrorists: cheap, efficient and forgotten by the world'. The Alazan is a slender, three-foot-long rocket. It started life in an extravagant experiment in weather control. After the collapse of Soviet power in 1991, scores of batteries of tube-fired Alazans were left throughout Eastern Europe, including Moldova. As ethnic clashes erupted in the newly independent former Soviet republics, the Alazan and a slightly larger related rocket called the Alan were reactivated for war. William C. Potter, director of America's eminent Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, estimates

3 ISLAMIC TERRORISTS LOOK TO MOLDOVA 223 that the missile has been adapted for combat use in at least fifty cases. He says the Alazan has proved 'notoriously inaccurate' as a surface-to-surface missile. Nevertheless, it is potentially useful as a psychological or terror weapon. Several terrorist organizations including al-qaeda have sought to build or buy such weapons, and the Trans-Dniester region provides an ideal marketplace for such devices. Many outlawed groups including various crime syndicates and terrorist organizations can strike deals there in a relatively protected environment. Potter says it is one of those rare remaining markets where illicit weapons dealers can connect without fear of intervention by the authorities. The smugglers of radioactive materials capable of deployment in conventional nuclear weapons or 'dirty bombs' used to be an amateurish lot often getting hurt in their quest for relatively small financial rewards. They are now being replaced by professional criminal gangs engaged by terrorist organizations and rogue states seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction. In an analysis of fourteen cases of theft involving significant quantities of plutonium or weapons-grade uranium in the former Soviet Union, Scott Parrish, senior research associate also at the Monterey Institute, detects the involvement of professional criminal organizations. His evidence points towards the exploitation by organized criminals of a lucrative illicit market in the Middle East and Asia for radioactive materials stolen from inadequately protected nuclear facilities by sophisticated insider conspiracies. He believes that the traffickers follow the traditional southern smuggling routes through Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Balkans. Al-Qaeda continues to have access to funds from business and criminal activities, including the drug trade as well as charities and deep-pocket donors, concludes a new analysis compiled by a panel of experts reporting to the UN. It asserts that only a lack of technical expertise is preventing Islamic terrorists from deploying weapons of mass destruction. Michael Chandler, chairman of the UN monitoring group, observes that many of al-qaeda's sources of funding have not yet been uncovered or blocked. The CIA takes a less pessimistic view. More than two-thirds of the known senior al-qaeda operatives, as well as ten important al-qaeda financiers have been killed or captured, says the American intelligence agency in a newly unclassified brief. It considers that 'the central leadership of al-qaeda is at a growing risk of breaking apart'. But the study cautions that 'it takes only a handful of terrorists with little more than creativity, dedication and luck to cause mass casualties'. (The appalling bombing of commuter trains in Madrid on 11 March sadly prove this.) One reason for disquiet is the easy availability of materials that can be used in the construction of radiation dispersion weapons. Up to seventy radioactive sources disappear from regulatory control annually within the EU alone, according to disturbing current estimates. Some 1,500 radioactive sources have been lost in the US since 1996, more than half of which have not been recovered. Russia recently removed thirty pounds of weapons-grade uranium - enough

4 224 CONTEMPORARY REVIEW to make one atom bomb - from an insecure Soviet-era storage site at the Pitesti Institute for Nuclear Research, west of Bucharest. The Romanian uranium was targeted because of the ease with which it could have been transported by terrorists. The operation was financed by the US. The State Department in Washington has compiled a list of twenty-four other overseas reactors holding nuclear fuel posing significant security risks. Officials say efforts to persuade governments to surrender uranium are progressing slowly. In the light of the increasing proliferation threat by terrorists as well as states, the Vienna-based IAEA is lobbying for the universal enforcement of the provisions of the Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel and Radioactive Waste Management. Two years after its formal acceptance, that instrument has still not been ratified by Russia, the main source of lost radioactive sources, much of Latin America and the entire Middle East and Africa. The convention covers all kinds of isotopes, from radioactive materials used in medicine to spent nuclear reactor fuel that can yield bomb-grade uranium or plutonium. For the longer term, the IAEA is advocating far more radical new restrictions on the processing of weapon-usable material in civilian nuclear programmes. In a widening search for collective security, the IAEA proposes to place all nuclear reprocessing and enrichment operations under strict multilateral control. Global anxiety generated by the apparent loss of the Alazan missiles to Islamic terrorists may well hasten the introduction of such a nuclear safety regime. Thomas Orszdg-Land is an author and foreign correspondent who writes on global affairs.

5 COPYRIGHT INFORMATION TITLE: Islamic Terrorists Look to Moldova for Dirty Bombs SOURCE: Contemp Rev 284 Ap 2004 WN: The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher: Copyright The H.W. Wilson Company. All rights reserved.