Alpers, Philip and Conor Twyford. 2003 ‘Stockpiles and Trafficking in the Pacific: Arms Smuggling.’ Small Arms in the Pacific; Occasional Paper No. 8, p. 26. Geneva: Small Arms Survey, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. 31 March

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Arms Smuggling

In May 1988, only months after two military coups in Fiji, customs officers in Sydney seized a 12-ton container of 'used machinery' en route from North Yemen. Found to be full of second-hand Czechoslovakian arms, it was headed for Fiji.

Alerted by Australian customs, Fijian authorities subsequently discovered that a ten-ton shipment of mostly Soviet arms had arrived on the Suva wharves a month earlier.

The key figure involved in the incident was an expatriate Fijian Indian, Mohammed Rafiq Kahan, living in London.

Kahan was arrested and served jail terms in Britain for other offences.

While no conclusive explanation has ever surfaced about the intended end-users of these shipments, they are widely suspected to have been instigated by organizers of the 1987 coups.

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