The following is the text of a memo I wrote to The Africa Fund Trustees
on the shotgun case in April 1998. It
included two press clips, one from the South African newspaper Business Day and
one from New York Newsday. The layout
here is somewhat different from the original. Please note the address and phone
below for The Africa Fund is no longer correct.
Richard Knight
November 2002
[Return to Shotguns] [Home to
richardknigt.com]
The Africa Fund
50 Broad
Street, Suite 711, New
York, NY 10004. (212) 785-1024
Tilden J. LeMelie, Chairman
Fax: (212)
785-1078 • E-mail: africafund@igc.apc.org Jennifer Davis, Executive
Director
To:
Africa Fund Trustees
Re:
Shotguns and ammunition for South Africa
From: Richard Knight
Date: April 7, 1998
I thought this reminder of
the consequences of a past Africa Fund victory would interest you. Attached is
a recent newspaper clip from the South African newspaper Business Day. It
reports on the case of Fred Tatos, who acquired
shotguns and ammunition illegally from the U.S. in violation of the arms
embargo. The US Commerce Department has banned Tatos
and his company, Suburban Gun, from buying firearms in the U.S. until 2007. Tatos moved to South Africa from Zimbabwe after that
country became independent but still used his old Zimbabwe business as a front
for his purchases of U.S. firearms.
The Africa Fund was
responsible for bringing this matter to the attention of the Commerce Department.
We obtained shipping reports indicating shotguns were being transshipped
through South Africa to Namibia and Zimbabwe; but we believed that the guns
were actually destined for South Africa and would be used in the tremendous
political violence going on in South Africa at that time. The Africa Fund
compiled a considerable amount of other evidence and pushed both State and
Commerce officials. In 1991, with the assistance of the Center for
Constitutional Rights, we filed a request for documents from the Commerce
Department under the Freedom of Information Act. When this request was turned
down, we filed a court case to get the documents. While the case was being
heard we received from an anonymous source a series of internal State Department
and Commerce Department cables and letters indicating that government agencies had
issued licenses based on fraudulent applications with no accompanying
documentation. Although we eventually lost the court case, we did succeed in
cutting this source of weapons to South Africa and got considerable publicity
for the fact that the U.S. government was not seriously enforcing the arms
embargo. As Jennifer Davis noted in her September 1992 Senate testimony “One
can only conclude that U.S. officials were asleep at the switch.”
Business Day, April 7, 1998 (Date is
approximate) |
|
US bars Cape Town gun dealer from suppliers |
|
Simon Barber |
|
WASHINGTON — The US
commerce department announced lass. week that it was barring a well-known
Cape Town gun dealer, Fred Tatos, and his firm
Suburban Guns, from US sources of firearms and ammunition until 2007 as a
result of their conviction last year for apartheid-era smuggling. The potentially
bankrupting penalty was draconian compared with the US government's treatment
of Armscor, whose access to US military technology
was restored last month despite its having been convicted a year ago on far
more serious charges that directly affected US security. Furthermore, un-
like Tatos, Armscor has
yet to come entirely clean about all it obtained illegally or from whom. Court records show that,
unlike Armscor which stonewalled US prosecutors for
six years, Tatos came for- ward and gave a full
account of his activities and suppliers to US authorities as soon as he
became aware in 1992 chat his company was under investigation by the New York
district attorneys office. When his
case finally came to court
last July, Tatos pleaded guilty to importing Sl,8m worth of mostly hunting weapons from the US between
1982 and 1991. He confessed that his company had evaded the arms embargo by
falsifying export documents to make it appear that the weapons were being
shipped to affiliates in Namibia and Zimbabwe. In the dying
days of the anti- apartheid campaign, the case became grist for the mill of
US activists who |
claimed,
on evidence not borne out in the court record, that Suburban Guns had been a conduit for weapons
to Inkatha. Tatos could have been fined up to $l,5m.
Instead, federal judge Loretta Preska assessed a
nominal impost of $10000, accepting the recommendations contained in a
probation officer's report on Tatos's background
endorsed by the justice department. The report included affidavits, sworn in
mid-1996, from a senior SA prosecutor, John Welch, a deputy attorney-general
based in Pretoria, and Abraham Burger, head of the SA Police's central
firearm register. Welch, who said he was chairman of a cabinet
task group to investigate SA drug laws, and also a past president of the SA
Gun Owners' Association, called Tatos “a
respectable, responsible and law-abiding arms dealer”. Burger said Tatos
had “a good working relationship with the SAPS and “has in the past assisted
(the SAPS) in any investigation relating to unlawful dealing in arms and
ammunition”. The report found Tatos,
who emigrated to SA from Zimbabwe after that country's independence, to be
penitent, quoting him as saying, “I do sincerely apologise for breaking
American law for many years in order to procure products for my business.
Under the circumstances (it) was necessary for the survival of the business
and my ba- sic livelihood.” Tatas's counsel Philip Hare is lodging an appeal on Tatos's behalf against the department's action. |
NEW YORK NEWSDAY,
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1992 Suit Asks Release Of
Gun Sale Data By M.P. McQueen STAFF WRITER An
antiapartheid group gave documents to a federal judge yesterday that it
contends show U.S. government agencies are trying to cover up the illegal
sale of guns to South Africa by U.S. manufacturers who smuggle them in
through surrounding countries. The Africa
Fund, a nonprofit educational organization, contends that many of the arms
are winding up in the hands of the Inkatha Freedom
Party and are being used to promote violence against the rival African
National Congress in the black townships. Among the
unclassified documents given to U.S. District Court Judge John Keenan in
Manhattan were copies of a cable sent from then-Deputy Secretary of State
Lawrence Eagleburger in July, 1991, to a U.S. Customs attache in Rome in
which he states that gun export licenses to a firm in Harare, Zimbabwe, which
borders South Africa, “all appear to be fraudulent.” The Africa
Fund contends the cable is evidence that the illegal gun sales have occurred
but that the Department of Commerce and other agencies are dragging their
feet about putting a stop to them. The fund submitted the cables yesterday during a hearing in a
civil lawsuit the group filed against the U.S. Department of Commerce and
then-Secretary Robert Mosbacher in January, seeking
to force him to release more than 1,000 pages of documents under the Freedom
of Information Act. The fund contends the documents detail illegal
transactions involving American gun dealers' diversion of shotguns and
ammunition to South Africa from surrounding countries. But the
Commerce Department is fighting release of the information, claiming it is
part of an ongoing criminal probe. Assistant U.S. Attorney Chinta Gaston, who is representing the Commerce
Department, has asked Judge Keenan to delay the request. Assistant U.S.
Attorney Peter B. Sobol, who represents the
government in a criminal probe of illegal arms shipments that he said was started 1991, also asked the judge not to release the
information. Another cable
submitted to the judge yesterday by the Africa Fund that was sent from the
U.S. Embassy in Gaborone, Botswana, to the
Department of Commerce last July says that two of the department's Office of
Export Enforcement investigators were being denied entry to that country because
“the government of Botswana doesn't want multiple Clouseau
impersonators tramping about, each conducting his / her own little
investigation,” likening them to the inept French inspector of the “Pink
Panther” films. Yesterday,
attorney Franklin Siegel, who is representing the Africa Fund, charged the
government is engaged in a cover-up, a charge Gaston and Sobol
denied. |