Czechoslovakia The Arms Merchants' Dilemma

By KENNETH W. BANTA PRAGUE

In a secluded wood 55 miles east of Prague, smoking chimneys rise above the East Bohemian Chemical Enterprise. A large complex of ramshackle sheds and concrete buildings, the factory looks unprepossessing enough. But a "special production unit" is mixing batches of one of Czechoslovakia's most lethal exports: Semtex, the odorless, colorless plastic explosive of choice for terrorists the world over.

Semtex's most famous target was Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, killing all 259 on board and eleven people on the ground. Scottish officials have concluded that a terrorist group called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command blew / up the plane by concealing Semtex in a radio-cassette player and smuggling it aboard in a suitcase. Semtex is also thought to have been used to destroy a French DC-10 over the Sahara last September, killing 170 people. While visiting London last week, President Vaclav Havel acknowledged that his Communist predecessors sold Libya alone 1,000 tons of the stuff. Said Havel: "If you consider that it takes 200 g ((6 oz.)) to blow up an aircraft, this means world terrorism has enough Semtex to last for 150 years."

Other plants in Czechoslovakia are engaged in similar businesses, producing all manner of weaponry and components -- hand grenades, automatic rifles, tanks, armored personnel carriers -- almost all for export. In a high-security compound outside the industrial city of Brno, trainees from such countries as Angola, South Yemen and the People's Republic of the Congo are being drilled in what officials describe as "police methodology and criminology," a euphemism for paramilitary training.

In the four months since they came to power, Havel and his democratically inclined colleagues have practically erased communism from political life. They are finding it far harder, however, to do away with another legacy: Czechoslovakia's extensive role as arms supplier to Communist regimes, liberation movements and outright terrorists. Says an Interior Ministry official: "The Communists may be gone, but they have locked us into a web of arms deals and even terrorism that may be impossible to escape."

Over the past 15 years, arms exports outside the Warsaw Pact have earned Czechoslovakia an average of $850 million annually in cash or such essential raw materials as oil and mineral ores; additional revenues flow in from the sale of ammunition. All told, the arms trade accounts for a quarter to a half of Czechoslovakia's foreign exchange earnings. Havel said last week his country would continue to sell arms to democracies but not to totalitarian regimes. However, cautions Foreign Ministry spokesman Lubos Dobrovsky, "we have existing obligations that we must honor."

Current clients include India, China, Cuba, Viet Nam, Syria, Iran and, biggest of all, Muammar Gaddafi's Libya. A large-scale purchaser on its own, Libya has long been known to be a conduit for Czechoslovak-made arms to such terrorist groups as Abu Nidal's Fatah Revolutionary Council, Italy's Red Brigades and the Irish Republican Army.

Czechoslovakia's niche in the arms trade has been dependent on customers who are too poor to afford Western weapons, which are generally of higher quality, and those who for political reasons are denied access to them. Thus Prague has done a thriving business in exporting the L-39 jet trainer ($1.9 million apiece) to Ethiopia and other countries; the plane can easily be converted into a fighter or fighter-bomber for customers unable to pay for Western or Soviet aircraft. The lightweight Skorpion machine pistol sells for less than $220, the Israeli-made Uzi at least twice that. Czechoslovakia annually sells about 500 T-72 tanks, at $250,000 apiece; three-fourths have gone to Libya and other Arab clients, the balance to China. America's M-1 Abrams tank, by comparison, sells for $2.5 million and, under U.S. law, cannot be sold to such countries as Libya, Syria or Iran.

To their credit, earlier this year Czechoslovakia's new leaders halted exports of Semtex until chemical markers, detectable by airport and other security devices, could be added to the explosive. The government also claims to have shut down its tank plant in the Slovak town of Martin.

While officials pledge to convert most of the country's military production capacity to civilian use, industry experts in Prague doubt that it can be done. "You can't just turn a tank factory into a car factory," says one specialist. "Besides, as we try to revive this economy, we'll need all the hard currency we can get."

It has evidently been easier for the government to reduce other forms of military assistance. According to members of the country's Red Berets antiterrorist unit, there were often so many clandestine arms buyers in Prague under the old regime that the unit spent much of its time guarding hostile factions against one another. Today the Communist Party hotel just outside the city center, once reputed to be a safe haven for terrorists of the I.R.A., the Red Brigades and other European groups, is closed. At the Police Academy Foreign Branch, as the training camp outside Brno is called, 60 Afghans were sent home before Christmas, and there is speculation that the entire operation, which once trained up to 600 men at a time, will soon be shut down.