Archive for May, 2005
I’ve been handed the report that an Antonov 26 belonging to something called “Kisangani Air List” has been crashed in the DRC by our esteemed colleague Soj. Rather, Soj handed me the report. She didn’t crash the Antonov 26, or at least I don’t think so. At the moment, I can offer little further information expect that “List” is a typo, it should be Kisangani Air Lift. This outfit was created sometime this year, and its only known aircraft was the one that crashed. Apparently it was leased from “Aeroworld”, but I have yet to trace any company of that name. There is a World Aero Airways in Kisangani, though, started this year, which possesses one aircraft, an An-26B registered EK-26060, serial no. 17311107. Its past includes various small operators in the CIS and a period with “private users” in Kyrgyzstan.
Various media reports disagree on key points, some of them stating it was leased to, not from, “Aeroworld” which might anyway really be called “Euroworld”. However, no operating airline of that name exists either – it is however the old (pre-1992) name for BA’s subsidiary Cityflyer Express. I suspect the disagreement is down to mistranslation as there seems to be a majority of each version in different languages.
Everyone seems to agree it was an aeroplane, that it crashed, and that ten people were killed. Four of them are described as being Russian and making up the crew. One “Rayomon Mokeni” is quoted by all sources as the airline’s president, however who he may be is a blank.
I don’t think this helps any, but thar ye go.
Back in January, I asked What’s Up in the Yemen? after noticing regular flights by Irbis Air Co., a Kazakh-registered airline owned by Viktor Bout and now placed on the US Treasury seizure list, from Sharjah to Riyan-Mukalla airport in the eastern Yemen. Since then, we’ve seen confirmation of this with the crash there of Air Bas/Irbis’s Antonov 12 UN-11007, which failed to take-off from Riyan and ran off the runway despite having 9,000 feet of concrete to stop on, suggesting overloading. Mysteriously, the firemen who responded to the crash would only speak to the Arab News on condition of anonymity.
This is a UN Expert Panel report on violations of the arms embargo on Somalia. Note Paragraph 90, which lists a number of sailing ships – sailing ships! – implicated in smuggling weapons into Somalia, and records their home ports. In all cases it is nowhere else than Mukalla. Not that smuggling is anything new around there, of course, a corner of the world where dhows (dhows!) have smuggled pretty much anything up to and including slaves since before Saint Paul took that route, supposedly, to India. Killer quote:
“Even though the security of the Yemeni ports — and in particular the Aden
Container Terminal — has markedly improved, the long Yemeni coastline remains
virtually unpoliced and continues to serve as a trans-shipment point for arms to
Somalia. Vessels, especially traditional dhows, can land and depart from the coast
unregistered and undetected. Weapons, machine spare parts, alcohol and fuel are
among the goods frequently smuggled out of Yemen. The fact that an estimated
1,000 refugees from Somalia arrive in Yemen each month proves how easy it is for
ships to land undetected.”
Indeed. In 1916, some survivors of the sinking of a German raider at the Cocos Islands, where she was trying to cut the transoceanic telegraph cable to Australia, sailed out in a lifeboat and hijackeda fishing boat, which they later replaced with a more seaworthy schooner. They sailed right across the Indian Ocean and landed on the Yemeni coast, in fact only a few miles from the British colony of Aden; but nobody spotted them, and they succeeded in trekking across the desert as far as the railhead in Medina, from where it took them but days to reach Berlin and a heroes’ welcome by Orient Express. Their main problem on landing wasn’t avoiding detection by the British, but avoiding being murdered or betrayed by the locals, who were unimpressed by their argument that the distant Turkish overlord was Germany’s ally.
Now, you may accuse me of taking the opportunity to tell a good story, and you’d be right. But, returning to seriousness, what about this?
“Upon departure from Boosaaso for the return flight to Sharjah (via Riyan airport in Yemen) this same aircraft changed its registration from Russian to Ukrainian.”
Funny things, it seems, happen at Riyan, probably because of this:
“Riyan airport in Yemen does not provide any inspection for air cargo in transit. Most Somalia-bound operators justify their visits to Riyan as technical stops for refuelling, but it is unclear why they should choose to do so, given that there is no appreciable difference in the price of aviation fuel between Yemen and the United Arab Emirates.”
How odd, eh. UN-11007, for example, officially carried out a “refuelling stop” on its fateful visit to Riyan although an An-12 should be able to do the trip from northern Somalia to the UAE direct. The only other reason to do so would be tankering – that is, the practice of taking on as much fuel as possible where it is cheap, in order not to buy where it is expensive. But if the fuel in Riyan is no cheaper, this would be pointless. It’s at least plausible that the reason 007 didn’t get off again is because it picked up more cargo there.
Why should we care? According to the report, the two SA-7B missiles used by al-Qa’ida in an attempt to shoot down an Israeli Boeing 757 in Mombasa on the 28th November 2002 originated in Bulgaria in 1993. This would be in-pattern with the source of much of the armaments distributed by Viktor Bout. It appears to be unclear whether the weapons reached Somalia, where they were bought by the terrorist cell, as part of assistance by the Eritrean government to one of the Somali warlords in 1998 (presumably to secure their flank during the war with Ethiopia) or whether they were obtained commercially. However, the missiles made it from Bulgaria to the Horn of Africa as part of a shipment to the Yemen in 1994. At this time, a civil war was raging there between the government of reunited Yemen and a Saudi-backed countergovernment based in – guess where? – Riyan. And none other than Viktor Bout’s Phoenix Aviation was delivering supplies there, using a Boeing 707 piloted by British cocaine smuggler and fraudster Chris Barrett-Jolly. It is not stated whether the weapons in question were delivered to the government or the rebels, but perhaps, all things considered, it doesn’t matter.
Now consider this. The oil tanker route from the Gulf to Europe and North America passes close by these shores, as does the shipping route through the Suez Canal. Al-Qa’ida destroyed a US destroyer in Aden harbour in 1998, and blew up a French oil tanker off – guess where? – Mukalla in 2002. Can you guess why the US Marines paid the good people of the Puntland shore a visit last week?
Right. I’ve been a split-brain blogger for the last month, putting all my election stuff over at General Election ’05. After tonight, there will be more TYR. There is some interesting news to come on what, exactly, is going on in the Yemen.
On that theme, you will probably be pleased to know that our occasional reader and long-term enemy Richard Chichakli’s house was raided by the FBI this week. They yanked the hard drives from his computers to study, seized a safe full of diamonds (you can’t make these guys up), and were very surprised when Viktor Bout’s brother Sergei phoned Dick up during the raid to find out how things were going. (Hi! I…can’t really talk just at the moment..yeah, I’ll get back to you when I have a moment..please not the taser again!..click, brrr)
And – here’s interesting – someone at The Times paid a visit to this site searching for “asterias commercial sa trouble”. AC is, readers will recall, the Greek-flag, Ukraine-based shellco opened up late last year to receive the aircraft from Aerocom.
Tonight, I will probably be posting to GE05 fairly frequently. I won’t promise formal liveblogging, but expect reports once I get away from watching the poll for my local Lib Dems sometime after 2200.
(With apologies to Gough Whitlam)
It’s time to do a final election post. If you haven’t voted yet, kindly take a moment to read through the archives. We’ve had masses of Iraq and secret detention, mass surveillance, any amount of stupidity, cash-burning PFIs, schools controlled by anyone who will stump up one-tenth of their cost, blah blah blah. Please do not vote Labour. Voting for this government is a negation of voting itself, because they have constantly and repeatedly flouted the terms of our democracy. What matters for Tony Blair is not parliamentary or electoral sanction, but the approval of the powerful, whether they are the US Republicans, the British state’s control bureaucracy, the rulers of Russia, China or Saudi Arabia, or any one of several press barons.
But don’t go thinking that voting Conservative is at all a sensible option. The Conservative Party has never been sufficiently committed to resist this government’s worst excesses. The two main parties have become a cartel, operating a tacit understanding not to broach any important issue. Did you spot the debates on Europe, energy, defence policy (other than “Save the Scottish Regiments” and like flagwaving), regional development, the constitution? I thought not. What is needed is a wedge driven between them.
Even if they were to make the cartel manifest, forming a coalition of self-interest in the event of a hung parliament, this would at least make fully clear that the political choice is now between the Party of Incumbency and the Party of…well, everyone else.
And finally, consider this:
CB: Oh come on Tony, strip off. Let’s see that fit body we’ve been talking about.
TB: You can keep your hands to yourself, Cherie!
Sun: So how fit are you Tony?
CB: Very!
Sun: What, at least five times a night?
TB: At least, I can do it more depending on how I feel.
Sun: Are you always up to it?
CB: He always is!
TB: Right that’s enough – interview over. And I’m not doing any kissing pictures!
Well, everyone else and their dog in the blogosphere quoted this from the Sun‘s eve-of-poll front-page interview with Tony and Cherie. So I may as well. Interestingly, the Sun voice in the quote is that of their specialist royal photographer, Arthur Edwards. It says something that he was sent to Downing Street. Edwards, tiresomely described by the paper as “Our Arfur” (Remember, you are too stupid to spell! Obey!) and constantly played up as “close” to the royal family, was once insulted whilst photographing a royal occasion. The Sun predictably erupted in a storm of fake proletarian outrage, before he was predictably given a CBE. If this sick relationship is to typify the approach they will now have to politics, I dread the next four years. Now, ask yourself this: what on earth did Blair promise Rupert Murdoch in return for that?
Vote Liberal.
It’s all over the press that various killer documents have been leaked: including the Foreign Office’s legal advice on the admissibility or otherwise of a war with Iraq, and the detail that contrary to his repeated denials, Tony Blair read it, and even further that Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, told the government in the spring of 2002 that President Bush was determined on war and that “the intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy”.
Ten out of ten for policy analysis, C.
This shouldn’t be surprising. In the official US Army lessons learnt report, On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, it is stated that base development in Kuwait was underway at the time Blair flew to see Bush in March, 2002. In the House of Commons Select Committee on Defence’s report on Operation TELIC, which I blogged on here (you can get a copy from the links provided), it became clear that the Ministry of Defence was in talks with industry regarding Urgent Operational Requirements (UORs, purchases under a special procedure to obtain immediately needed equipment) as early as May, 2002. This was the same time that PJHQ operations chief Lieutenant-General John Reith told the committee that he became “aware” of planning going on. However, the UK Component commander, Air Marshal Brian Burridge, met General Tommy Franks of CENTCOM in April, 2002. And the UK Defence Logistic Organisation (DLO) was apparently involved from “day one of the strategic planning options”.
Surely the DLO must also have been involved in the UORs, which would put “day one” somewhere before May, 2002? General Applegate of the DLO stated that
“there was an impact of when we could start doing the planning… We had to wait to get the approval to go forward with the AS90 work… actually, we were planning for the end of March / beginning of April for that work to be conducted…”
That it was the AS90 job – work on the army’s self-propelled guns to stop them overheating is significant. Other UORs, such as minesweeping gear for the Navy, were of limited relevance before the January 2003 decision to shift the British axis of effort from Kurdistan to southeastern Iraq and to launch an amphibious landing there.
We’ve just had a surge of traffic, for once not entirely associated with Viktor Bout. Metafilter linked to a story, from some time ago, regarding Shanaz Rashid, the grateful Iraqi woman who appeared on stage with Blair at the Labour conference. She had every reason to be grateful, because her husband had been named Minister of Waterways by the IGC. He’s the new president’s brother-in-law. She had also had only limited opportunities to reconsider, having been in London since 1968 and only having returned once for a flying visit to the Green Zone. I flagged this and pointed out the curious similarity of George Bush also appearing with a grateful Iraqi woman who had, ah, other reasons to be grateful.
Interestingly, she has also now appointed herself Permanent Representative of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in the UK, so I take it she won’t be going anywhere near Iraq any time soon.
There’s also been extra traffic from Bout googlers. People seem to be searching pretty constantly for Richard Chichakli…not an unusual statement all things considered, but searches include the Bank of America, American Express, HSBC, a lot of people in Texas, the Spanish Ministry of Defence and the US Department of Justice. “Sir, we’re sorry, but your card has been, ah, declined. In fact, it’s been placed on a trap watchlist lookup table that requires us to cut it up and hold one of your legs as security until the FBI get here..” Yeah, but no doubt he’s in the UAE by now, or some hellridden African state where he married the warlord’s daughter.
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