ARMS RACKET

Waipukurau Press, Volume XXX, Issue 99, 3 May 1935, Page 5

ARMS RACKET

Government Flouted BY GUN RUNNERS PORT OF ANTWERP USED LONDON, March 18. Antwerp has become one of the groat centres of the international arms racket. During Hhe Greek revolt many thousands of pounds’ worth of arms and munitions were consigned from that port to Crete for the rebels. A high officer of the Belgian Customs and Excise Department related how the League of Nations and individual governments are being openly flouted by gun and munition runners who are backed by big business, and use Antwerp as ia collecting centre f«r illicit consignments of arms. “We are absolutely powerless to prevent them,’’ he said.

10,000 Men Needed

“To break up this international racketeering we should need 10,(100 men in every port doing nothing but inspecting the scores of thousands of consignments of merchandise which pass through the quays every week.”

One of the men who have been engaged in arranging supplies of arms for the Greek rebels is now warned by the Antwerp police. He is a .Tew from the Baltic States who has failed to register as an alien. He has been suspected of being engaged in the drug traffic, and is typical of those who are causing so much concern to the port authorities. The Customs officer said that in many instances those who are engaged in gun running are also cocaine and opium smugglers. When the drug business is slack, and rebellion, or a small war, breaks out they turn to the arms racket. When this business is exhausted they revert to drugs.

Machine-gun parts have been consigned as “sewing-machines,” or simply as “machinery.” “The international agreements respecting arms exports are evaded quite easily,’’ said the Customs officer.

“For example, some time ago a consignment of arms for Brazil came through the Antwerp Customs from a town in Belgium. The declaration forms were all in order, and there was no reason for holding them uip. “Those arms found Itheir way to the Chaco front. There was trouble about it, hut the Customs were powerless to do anything. The arms were consigned to Brazil quite properly, and then diverted to Chaco illegally. Had we held up that consignment we should have been liable to pay damages. Seiarch Impossible “Furtherfore, by international agreement we cannot interfere with arms in transit. Provided the usual declaration papers are in order, we have no right to interfere, so that arms may be sent here for transhipment, and we have no control over them.

“If arms are taken to pieces and (packed as machinery it is difficult for our people to detect them.

“If we could search every corner of these docks to-day we might find hundreds ,or even thousands, of cases of arms, or armament parts, disguised as sewing machines or just as machin-

ery in transit. “But. such a search could not be made with our present staff.”