One of the main stated causes of the Kyrgyzstan uprising was corruption by ousted President Kurmanbek Bakiyev and his son, Maksim, and one of the opposition’s chief points of fact was the son’s profiteering at the U.S. military base. Maksim Bakiyev seems to have earned several hundred million dollars under a fuel contract with the base, called Manas, and U.S. officials — including the U.S. Embassy — by all appearances looked the other way, as Aram Roston writes over at the Nation.
There has been much strong investigative journalism on the fuel contract, which now has been central to bringing down two Kyrgyzstan governments in five years; in 2005, Bakiyev himself railed against the sweetheart fuel deal enjoyed by the family of his predecessor, Askar Akayev. the questions surround a shadowy company called Red Star, which is run at least publicly by a former defense attache at the U.S. Embassy in Bishkek, named Lt. Col. (retired) Christopher Squires. It’s Red Star that actually provides the fuel to Manas under a sub-contract with the Pentagon. No one is saying who its actual owners are, a secrecy compounded by its registration in the haven of Gibraltar.
A congressional subcommittee chaired by Rep. John Tierney of Massachusetts today will air all of this, and an expert on U.S. foreign bribery law will testify that, while one arm of the government — the Department of Justice — is carrying out a huge crackdown on foreign bribery, the Pentagon itself may have become the biggest culprit.
Scott Horton, who is steeped in the details of high corruption in Central Asia, will testify today before Tierney’s committee. I’ve known Horton since the mid-1990s, a bit after he began traveling to and working in Kyrgyzstan, and co-founded American University in Bishkek. he has gained a large following for his No Comment blog at Harpers. I went over to his hotel in Washington to talk about the case.
“The United States says we face a national security threat from corruption in connection with procurement” in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Horton said. “At the same time, the U.S. is pursuing high-profile contracts in which it is using fraud and corrupt payments as tactics. to this extent, the leading perpetrator of foreign bribery appears to be the United States.”
This is no small matter. These contracts put the U.S. in the position of being perceived by local governments as corrupt, a charge that Washington itself levels at leaders around the world with a sanctimonious pointed finger. Horton points out that, until now, the Department of Justice has elected not to pursue a case in which it would come down with both boots had it involved a U.S. company. the question is whether U.S. government lawyers are going to force the Pentagon to come clean in the service of national security.
“One of the policy questions is whether the Department of Defense believes it proper to bribe foreign heads of state in connection with obtaining procurement contracts,” Horton says.
Labels: chuck squires, fuel contract, kyrgyzstan, manas, red star, tierney
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