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France /AFP
A year after extremists used weapons manufactured in Serbia to gun down victims in Paris, Balkan countries are struggling to end the scourge of illegal arms trafficking.
The killers who opened fire at the Bataclan theatre, cafes and restaurants in the French capital last November used Yugoslav-era assault rifles produced by Serbia’s Zastava Arms.
Months earlier the Kouachi brothers, behind the deadly assault on the Charlie Hebdo magazine offices, carried a rocket launcher from the Balkans, a region littered with weapons since the wars of the 1990s. According to a top French magistrate, Robert Gelli, Serbian citizens come up in nearly a third of international arms trafficking probes carried out in France.
“The weapons getting through to western Europe and the effects they have is still a major problem,” said Ivan Zverzhanovski, who leads a UN Development Programme project in the Balkans to help combat illegal arms trafficking.
The international monitoring project Small Arms Survey said in late 2014 that an estimated 3.6 million to 6.2 million firearms were in the hands of civilians in the Western Balkans, a region home to less than 25 million people.
In Serbia alone there are between 200,000 and 900,000 unregistered weapons, according to authorities, despite various amnesty campaigns launched since the assassination of reformist prime minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003. On Wednesday, the interior ministry announced its biggest weapons haul in at least 16 years, which led to the arrests of 10 people.
Police in Serbia’s northwest seized arms including 111 hand grenades, 12 anti-tank grenades, two rocket launchers, 10 rifle grenades, 10 automatic or semi-automatic rifles, six pistols, 6,000 bullets and dozens of kilos of explosives.
In neighbouring Bosnia, “it is a fact that… there are weapons that are not under control and traffickers buy these weapons,” Security Minister Dragan Mektic told news portal Klix.ba recently, stressing that the problem existed across the region. Zverzhanovski said that, based on information from law enforcement agencies, a gun bought for 250 to 500 euros on the Balkan black market could sell for 3,000 to 5,000 euros in a country such as Sweden. The weapons are rarely transported by the truck-load but a few at a time, in private cars or the countless buses that link the Balkans with western Europe.