APPENDIX I

Case Study:
Supplying the United Front: Iranian and CIS cooperation

In October 1998, a large train shipment of weapons and munitions en route from Mashhad, Iran to United Front forces in Afghanistan was intercepted and impounded at the rail terminus in Osh, Kyrgyzstan.²³⁵ During the period April-July 1999, Human Rights Watch investigated the circumstances surrounding this significant shipment.

Arms Hidden in Aid Shipment
According to official statements by the Kyrgyz government, the train, consisting of sixteen railway boxcars, was stopped and searched during the night of October 9-10, 1998. During a press conference, Kyrgyzstan's Minister of National Security Misir Ashirkulov claimed that this search uncovered approximately 700 metric tons of armaments in the train, hidden amidst humanitarian aid supplies.²³⁶ At the same time, the Kyrgyz Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied involvement in the attempted shipment. First Deputy Foreign Minister Aclikbek Dzhekshenkulov claimed: "It was a complete surprise for us that the cargo arrived in Osh."²³⁷ According to press reports, the armaments were returned, via rail, to Iran in early November 1998.²³⁸ One week after the shipment was exposed, First Deputy Minister of the Kyrgyz MNB (the successor agency to the KGB in Kyrgyzstan), V. Verchagin, flew to Moscow for urgent consultations with Russian Foreign Ministry and FSB officials.²³⁹ Human Rights Watch has learned that United Front officials told a Western intelligence official they did, in fact, receive the contents of the shipment; they denied this publicly, however.²⁴⁰

In actuality, the covert shipment that originated in Iran was spread among three different trains.²⁴¹ Between October 4 and October 6, 1998, two shipments from Mashhad arrived at the Osh-1 station as part of larger trains; one shipment consisted of six wagons, the other ten.²⁴² Another wagon with identical documentation arrived within a third train during the night of October 12-13. According to a Kyrgyz government document obtained by Human Rights Watch, the shipment of October 12-13 originally consisted of five wagons. This information was confirmed by a Kyrgyz journalist who told Human Rights Watch that, in fact, five rail cars en route to Osh were stopped in Bekabad, Uzbekistan.²⁴³ According to this source, of the five cars stopped, only one was ultimately allowed to continue on to Osh, with two rerouted back to Iran and two impounded by Uzbek authorities.²⁴⁴

The rail station at Osh is not the closest in the region to the Afghan frontier. Indeed, both Dushanbe and Kuliob, Tajikistan, are closer to the border and connected to the former Soviet rail network. Moving sensitive cargos through Osh, however, allows the shipment, during its transit through Tajikistan, to move through a single contiguous administrative and political territory-Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast-directly along the M41 road and former Stalin Track to the border crossing at Ishkashim. According to local experts, there is less danger of an arms shipment being intercepted and seized for local use along this route, as opposed to the rail lines to Dushanbe and/or Kuliob, which cross ethnically heterogeneous territory controlled by numerous different armed formations.²⁴⁵ Furthermore, the Osh-1 train station, thanks to its history as a Soviet military depot, is well equipped with the necessary storage and loading infrastructure to handle shipments of arms.²⁴⁶

On October 9, the sixteen wagons then on the track at the Osh-1 station were officially inventoried by Osh MNB and customs officials. Four days later, at 10:00 a.m. on October 13, the late-arriving boxcar was similarly searched. A total of approximately 700 tons of weapons and ammunition was found, concealed amid 300 tons of flour.²⁴⁷ Eyewitness reports as well as photographs in Human Rights Watch's possession confirm that the train's contents included: antitank mines, F-1 grenades, 122mm artillery shells, mortar bombs, and 122mm rockets. The 300 tons of flour on board the train were, according to one source, sufficient to produce bread to sustain a force of 5,000 men for a twenty-week winter period.²⁴⁸ This flour, according to the Kyrgyz government, was eventually delivered to northern Afghanistan. When questioned about the fate of the munitions on the train, United Front officials denied ever receiving the shipment; however, these officials had previously told a Western intelligence official in October 1998 that they had received the contents of the shipment. (See above.)

The shipping documentation accompanying the seventeen boxcars from Mashhad listed the consignee as the Embassy of Iran in Kyrgyzstan and the contents as "humanitarian aid" bound for Afghanistan. Inside the wagons, crates of weapons were surrounded and covered with bags of flour.²⁴⁹ Osh customs officials found that the overall weight for the 17 wagons was approximately 1,000 metric tons. This figure was too high for the boxcars to have been loaded exclusively with flour and triggered their suspicions.²⁵⁰

Kyrgyz Government Knowledge
The government of Kyrgyzstan has, on several occasions, denied having given permission for the transit of Iranian-supplied weapons to Afghanistan, or indeed having any advance knowledge of the shipment at all. The impounding and exposure of the shipment would tend to confirm this-or that the government's responsible agencies were not all privy to its nature. Human Rights Watch has found evidence-both direct and circumstantial-that suggests the shipment had in fact been authorized at a high level. Given the space and equipment limitations at the Osh-1 railroad station, for example, the transfer of 700 tons of munitions and 300 tons of flour onto waiting trucks would have been an operation the scope and profile of which implied the expectation of official cooperation.

A Kyrgyz government official in Bishkek told Human Rights Watch that the Kyrgyz ambassador to Iran, M. Aseyinov, met with an Iranian deputy minister of foreign relations on September 23, 1998, at which time a request was made for permission to transit "humanitarian and special" cargos to Afghanistan.²⁵¹ This account has since been publicly confirmed by Kyrgyz minister of foreign affairs, M.S. Imanaliev.²⁵²

Human Rights Watch obtained a copy of a letter that discusses the Iranian shipments. The letter, dated October 7, 1998, appears authentic. It was written by a Kyrgyz official in Osh and addressed to Minister of Foreign Affairs Imanaliev. (See Appendix II, Figure B.) Translated from the Russian, it reads as follows:

On October 6, 1998, 16 cars of freight from Iran came into the Osh railroad station, heading towards Afghanistan (another 5 cars are on the approach). The passage of the given cargo through the territory of our republic has been agreed to by the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs E. Abdyldaev, according to a communication of the embassy of Iran in the Kyrgyz Republic. However, he is currently away on business.

In connection with this we await your written orders concerning this freight. [We] urgently request you to communicate via fax (33222)2-74-05.

Head of the Osh oblast Committee for Foreign Economic Ties,

A. Shamshiev

This letter indicates that Kyrgyz authorities first of all were aware of the presence of the Iranian cargo at least as early as October 6 and did not, as they at first publicly claimed, discover the trains during the night of October 9-10. This also supports local journalists' allegations that the "special cargo" from Iran sat, unopened, at the Osh station for up to five days, from October 4 to October 9, before being searched and "discovered." The contents of the letter also suggest that the Kyrgyz government had warning of the train's approach when it was still in Uzbekistan, since the author of the letter, referring to the second installment of the shipment, mentions five more wagons still en route. As mentioned above, four of the five wagons in this second consignment were either rerouted or impounded in Bekabad, Uzbekistan. The letter, then, makes clear that Kyrgyz authorities were made aware-most likely by Uzbek rail or government authorities-of the train's approach before it reached the Kyrgyz border, in fact, before it had even reached Bekabad, on the Uzbek-Tajik border.

The exact reasons the arms shipment was stopped are not entirely clear. From interviews it appears that the search, seizure, and eventual return of the train to Iran were apparently the result of miscommunication and missteps within different branches of the Kyrgyz government, combined with Kyrgyz domestic politics.

Workers at the Osh-1 railroad station, as well as an employee of the Osh customs office, told Human Rights Watch that the train was detained and searched on orders of the chief of the Osh Customs Department at the time, I. Masaliev, and the head of the Osh MNB, Col. O. Suvanaliev.²⁵³ According to one unconfirmed report, Masaliev and/or Suvanaliev may have been unaware of the "special" contents of the Iranian boxcars, and thus ordered them searched after being unable to locate Abdyldaev, the Kyrgyz deputy foreign minister named in the letter (above). Once the wagons were officially opened and the contents exposed to public and media scrutiny, it was too late to proceed and the Kyrgyz government denied any foreknowledge of the shipment. This explanation is consistent with the facts and is supported by the Kyrgyz government's only concrete reaction to the scandal: Suvanaliev and Masaliev-the two men instrumental in exposing the shipment-were unceremoniously fired.²⁵⁴

According to several independent sources, other, smaller shipments of armaments transited Osh from Iran en route to Afghanistan prior to the October 1998 incident. None of these, however, approached the October shipment in size; according to a Kyrgyz truck driver who claims to have helped deliver one such shipment to Gorno-Badakhshan, these cargos did not exceed one metric ton in weight.²⁵⁵

Since the Iranian arms scandal in October 1998, there has been no indication of any further arms shipments from Osh to Afghanistan. However, the matter remains extremely sensitive within Kyrgyzstan.

Implications: Multinational Complicity in the Covert Shipment of Arms
The Iranian arms cargo incident in October 1998 makes clear that there is substantial regional cooperation in allowing, if not directly expediting, the resupply of United Front forces by Iran. Customs procedures at each interstate border within the CIS are fairly uniform and require that every wagon be accompanied by a "certificate of origin" and a "bill of lading" listing the cargo contained. Each shipment must also have documentation listing the consignee and final destination, as well as a pre-designated shipping agent who pays for the rail code fees prior to departure-in fact, before the boxcars are even at the marshaling area. Finally, in order to open a wagon and unload cargo, a customs declaration must be completed. Customs officials first require the certificate of origin, listing the transit codes and stamps of all transit countries.²⁵⁶ In short, it is impossible to ship a consignment by rail from Iran to Osh without passing through and being inspected by customs officials at five separate border crossings. And, as the actions of the Uzbek authorities in Bekabad illustrated (i.e., arresting, rerouting, and/or impounding portions of the October arms shipment), the Kyrgyz government was not the only one aware of the train's cargo.

The scores of heavy trucks that would have been required to transport the 700 tons of arms and 300 tons of flour seized in Osh could not have traveled from Osh to Khorog or Ishkashim on the Afghanistan border without the knowledge and permission of Russia's military and its foreign ministry. In addition to the fact that the Russian army transportation battalion regularly patrols and maintains the main M41 road from Osh to Khorog, Russian Border Guards in Kyrgyzstan are based in the town of Gulcha, through which the consignment from Iran would have passed had it not been halted.²⁵⁷ A shipping agent based in Osh with experience in transporting freight through Tajikistan told Human Rights Watch that a high level of cooperation with Russian forces is necessary just to get a convoy of trucks from Osh to Gulcha, since it requires interfacing with two separate Russian military commands: the Russian transportation battalion based in Osh and the Border Guards forces based in Gulcha.²⁵⁸

²³⁵ For the nature of the contents, please see the section on Iran in chapter IV above.

²³⁶ Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Daily Update, vol. 5, no. 198, October 15, 1998.

²³⁷ "Kirghiz foreign ministry denies involvement in arms scandal," Xinhua News Agency, October 12, 1998.

²³⁸ "Boepripasy vernutsia v Iran?," Vechernii Bishkek (Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan), October 21, 1999.

²³⁹ Ibid.

²⁴⁰ Human Rights Watch interviews with Amrullah Saleh, Dushanbe, Tajikistan, May 29, 1999; and with a former Western intelligence officer, April 14, 1999. Diplomatic sources in Dushanbe also told Human Rights Watch (in June 1999) that the munitions ultimately found their way across the border to Afghanistan and that the wagons sent back to Iran were empty.

²⁴¹ Human Rights Watch interview with a local shipping agent who works at the Osh-1 station, Osh, Kyrgyzstan, July 1, 1999.

²⁴² Railroad officials at sorting stations in CIS countries have the authority to consolidate wagons into trains. Human Rights Watch interview with a foreign shipping manager, Almaty, Kazakhstan, May 24, 1999.

²⁴³ Human Rights Watch interview with Alisher Toksonbaev, editor, Asaba newspaper, Osh, Kyrgyzstan, July 2, 1999.

²⁴⁴ The temporary seizure of these boxcars in Bekabad was confirmed to Human Rights Watch by a Western journalist who was there on or around October 10, 1998. Human Rights Watch e-mail communication with the journalist, April 1999.

²⁴⁵ Human Rights Watch interview with Mahamaja Hamidov, deputy editor, Echo Osh newspaper, Osh, Kyrgyzstan, July 3, 1999. Trucking industry sources in Osh have told Human Rights Watch that the planned route for the Iranian "humanitarian" cargo was: Mashhad (Iran) to Tejen (Turkmenistan) to Charjou (Turkmen-Uzbek border) to Samarkand (Uzbekistan) to Bekabad (Uzbekistan) to Osh, and then by truck from Osh to Gulcha (Kyrgyzstan), Murgab (Tajikistan), and on to the border crossing at Ishkashim. Human Rights Watch interviews with a local trucker and Kyrgyz government officials, Osh, Kyrgyzstan, July 1-3, 1999. The "Stalin Track" is the old road that runs directly along the Tajik-Afghan border from Khorog down through Ishkashim and up to Langar. (See "Pamir Track" below.)

²⁴⁶ During a visit to the Osh-1 station in July 1999, Human Rights Watch saw sixty-foot loading docks, storage warehouses, and cranes for loading/unloading cargo. Truck parks are also conveniently located next to the train lines.

²⁴⁷ Human Rights Watch telephone conversation and brief interview with a Kyrgyz official who claimed to have assisted with the inspection and inventory of the cargo, Osh, July 2, 1999.

²⁴⁸ A source with Western military experience told Human Rights Watch that approximately three to four kilograms of flour is consumed as bread per week per man on average, when supplemented with fresh meat and vegetables. Murgab-one of the transit points between Osh and the Afghan border-has a mill that relief organizations use to grind wheat in order to make bread.

²⁴⁹ This means that the munitions were loaded first, and then a wall of flour sacks was built screening them from the cargo doors of the boxcar; a layer of sacks was also laid across the top of the munitions pallets. Human Rights Watch was able to obtain photographs taken inside one of the wagons that confirmed this arrangement.

²⁵⁰ One boxcar of the type seized in Osh can typically carry forty-one tons of flour, according to shipping experts with experience in delivering humanitarian aid. Seventeen boxcars carrying a total of 1,000 tons of material results in a per-wagon average of 58.8 metric tons carried, just under the sixty-ton maximum load-carrying capacity of a boxcar.

²⁵¹ Human Rights Watch interview with a Kyrgyz government official, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, June 30, 1999.

²⁵² K. Karabekov, "MNB Sygralo v yaishik," Vechernii Bishkek, October 14, 1999.

²⁵³ On October 8 Colonel Suvanaliev was in Tashkent with MNB chief Ashirkulov. One source close to Suvanaliev told Human Rights Watch that, upon hearing about the train, Suvanaliev hurried back to Osh, where, between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m., he gave the order to have the wagons opened. Human Rights Watch interview, Bishkek, June 30, 1999.

²⁵⁴ Suvanaliev was fired on October 29, 1998. Alisher Niyazov, "Kyrgyzstan to Return Afghan Arms to Iran," ITAR-TASS, October 29, 1998. In Suvanaliev's case, there may have been a strong element of Kyrgyz domestic politics at play in his firing as well: He was reportedly a close associate and head of the election fund for former KGB head and Vice President Kulov, who was prevented from standing as a candidate in presidential elections held on October 29, 2000. "Eight Presidential Candidates out of Election Campaign," Kyrgyz Radio First Programme, September 19, 2000.

²⁵⁵ Human Rights Watch interview, Osh, Kyrgyzstan, July 2, 1999.

²⁵⁶ Information in this paragraph is based on Human Rights Watch interviews with an Osh-based shipping agent, Osh, July 1-3, 1999.

²⁵⁷ The 300 tons of flour eventually did arrive in Afghanistan via Gulcha.

²⁵⁸ Human Rights Watch interview with a shipping agent, Osh, July 1-3, 1999.