World

Europe's Small Arms Plague

April 28, 1998 / 3:37 PM EDT / AP

First there was giggling, then raucous laughter. A deafening blast and the tinkling sound of a thousand shards of glass. Thirty seconds of silence. Then screams and sirens.

Khalid Lemqaddem was only 8 years old; his best friend, Othman Zarouali, only 10. It was April Fool's Day afternoon this year, and the two Moroccan-born school chums were playing on the sidewalk with the grenade they'd just found in a nearby park.

The grenade, authorities say, came from the former Yugoslavia, whose war surplus has become the latest source of light arms and explosives for militants, gang members and petty street criminals throughout Western Europe.
In Paris in February, French police detained three suspected collaborators of the Basque separatist group ETA who were armed with Serbian grenades and other weapons.

In December, someone fired two anti-tank grenades into an Amsterdam car dealership, heavily damaging it. A police commando unit concluded the grenades were Yugoslav-made.

Slovenian border police last year arrested a former soldier of the NATO-led peace force in Bosnia after the Austrian was caught trying to smuggle grenades and other arms in a spare gas tank of his truck.

"There's a rising tide of this weaponry, and law enforcement seems to think it can't do anything about it," said Daniel Plesch, director of the British American Security Information Council, which advises governments on small-arms trafficking.

"Central and Eastern Europe are awash in this stuff. Yet it's not really on anybody's screen."

Dutch authorities say the number of grenades circulating on the black market has increased fourteen-fold since the signing of the 1995 Dayton accords ending Bosnia's war. Estimates run into the tens of thousands.

Ordinary citizens are finding the explosives in parks, alleys and other public places with alarming regularity.

Last year, according to the Dutch Central Research Information Service, people found 48 grenades. The phenomenon peaked along with the war: in 1994, 163 grenades turned up; in 1993, 160.

Practically all of them, authorities say, bore markings indicating they were either made in the former Yugoslavia or were the same Russian- or Chinese-made grenades that were handed out for free by the dozens to the Bosnian Serbs.

"We're concerned about the very weak and porous nature of European Union arms controls," said Brian Wood of London-based Amnesty International. "The weaponry stocks are just not controlled."

Although both the EU and the United Nations last year promised a crackdown on small-arms smuggling, "so far it's not much more than a piece of paper," Wood said. Officials will discuss the problem at the mid-May Group of Eight summit in Birmingham, England.

Grenade trafficking persists despite Operation Harvest, an attempt by NATO troops to get Bosnians to turn in the arms they have stockpiled at home. Eihteen thousand grenades, 3,000 small arms and tons of ammunition have been handed over since the amnesty began in February.

As for weapons being smuggled west, "it isn't something we're concerning ourselves with," says Maj. Peter Clarke, a spokesman for the NATO-led peace force based in Sarajevo.

Though it can be risky, difficult and dangerous to get arms and explosives out of the Balkans, Central European border controls have relaxed since the end of the war and to the west, many have been dismantled completely.

Small-caliber handguns, knives and switchblades remain the weapons of choice for street thugs. Grenades, though, have exotic appeal and they're as cheap as $12 apiece.