The Untold Yugoslavian Arms-Trade Scandal — Updated Documents

Slovenian journalists Matej Šurc and Blaž Zgaga documented the illegal arms trade that ran through Slovenia in the early 1990s in the trilogy In the Name of the State, an investigation built largely on records obtained through freedom-of-information legislation.

A trilogy built on official documents

The first volume, Sell, was published in June 2011 and focused on the sale of arms and ammunition. The second, Resell, appeared in October 2011 and dealt with the purchase of arms abroad and their subsequent resale to Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the UN arms embargo. The third, Cover-up, published in April 2012, described how those involved in the trade had managed to keep their activities largely concealed for some twenty years.

The authors said they had decided against combining their findings into a single book once it became clear the material was too extensive. Together with the director of the publishing house they chose instead to publish a trilogy, each volume focusing on a different aspect of the affair. Even after the third volume appeared, analysis of the documents continued, and further observations were to be published online. The research was co-financed by a Journalismfund.eu research grant.

Updated summaries and a conference presentation

After the trilogy was completed, English-language summaries of each of the three books were made available, together with a presentation given at the Dataharvest conference in Brussels, so that the material could be followed by an audience beyond Slovenia.

What the documents described

According to the authors, the former Yugoslavia had been one of the most prosperous socialist states during the Cold War before falling in the 1990s into military conflict, mass killings and war crimes. Many thousands of tons of arms and ammunition were illegally transported to the battlefields during the UN arms embargo, with Slovenia acting as the major logistics hub and selling arms confiscated from Yugoslav People's Army warehouses on its territory to Croatian and Bosnian buyers. More than twenty ships loaded with weapons reached the Slovene port of Koper from Bulgaria, Poland, Romania and Ukraine, and the authors argued that an operation on that scale could only have been carried out with the approval of the international community.

Because the shipments were illegal, intelligence officers and leaders bought weapons on a black market controlled by military intelligence services operating outside the law, paying millions in dollars and Deutschmarks in cash. Large sums disappeared, and, according to the authors, the politicians, military and intelligence officers involved became wealthy members of a new elite who concealed their activities and corrupted the judicial systems of their countries. One consequence, they said, was that the region continued to resemble a "black hole" in Europe, marked by corruption and organised crime closely connected to politics.

Obtaining and checking the records

The investigators sought as many different types of document as they could. The majority were classified police and secret-service cable messages and intelligence reports, but the databases also held port and shipping documents, ammunition warehouse releases, eavesdropping notes, police analyses, Interpol cables, bank-account information, parliamentary inquiry reports, witness hearings and diplomatic cables, as well as documentation from international conferences on Yugoslavia. Croatian and Bosnian colleagues Saša Leković and Ecad Hecimovic were credited with helping to obtain and analyse the material. The mechanics of pursuing such requests are set out in the guidance on how to use European freedom of information.

The process met considerable obstruction from parliamentary officials who tried to prevent access; had they succeeded, the authors said, the documents might have stayed locked away for thirty or forty years. Timing was a further obstacle: a first request sent to Slovenia's information commissioner in April 2008 produced the data only fifteen months later. Some of the documents had been forged by individuals within the military secret service to mislead investigators, and the authors said they filtered these out by cross-checking against as many other sources as possible. For the analysis they built four separate databases in Excel, entering the data manually and covering, in turn, police and intelligence material, logistics-company reports, sea transport and shipping, and an inventory of weapons. Tools for filing and tracking such requests are described under WhatDoTheyKnow.

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