The Lebanese AK-47 Index

A fascinating article in The National:

Abu Mahdi spends most of his day sitting in a plastic chair in front of a dilapidated concrete block shack on the outskirts of Beirut’s southern suburbs puffing on a water pipe and pouring coffee for a steady stream of visitors and customers that have come to examine his inventory.

Two of his first customers on a cold winter morning are young fighters in their late teens from the militant Shiite movement Hizbollah who are enraptured with a selection of gleaming new 9mm handguns from Belgium, the United States and the Czech Republic.

But these young fighters make only about US$400 (Dh1,500) a month for their work in “The Resistance”, putting the sleek automatic pistols, listed at $2,000 each, well outside their price range.

Although Hizbollah obviously issues military-grade weaponry to its fighters, the boys say only the highest-ranking members – leadership, undercover operatives, bodyguards and security teams – are given pistols, making them a critical, if expensive, status symbol among the youngest fighters, who have been known to take second jobs or save for years just to add private weapons to their inventory.

The group does not buy its weaponry on Lebanon’s back market, according to people familiar with its acquisitions process, but from the international black market. Hizbollah’s arms also come direct from Iran and Syria.

A few minutes after the Hizbollah gunmen arrive, a jeep from the Internal Security Forces, Lebanon’s federal police force, pulls up outside the shack but neither Mr Mahdi nor his militant customers seem worried. The police officers have arrived to pick up two assault rifles that they ordered a few weeks earlier. They seem to know the fighters and all start happily chatting and playing with the dozens of weapons stuffed in the back of Mr Mahdi’s truck.

...“I am exhausted,” [Mahdi] says, thanks to non-stop business demands. “I am making a lot of money but I have no time to sleep. Anyone who tells you that Lebanon is peaceful and stable is lying. Everyone is buying weapons; I can’t keep up.”

.... Arms dealers have used an interesting metric for judging the stability of the country: the price of the ubiquitous AK-47 assault rifle.

“There were so many AKs in the country at the end of the war that it’s almost pointless to import them, everyone just sells the same guns back and forth,” Mr Mahdi says. “So I can tell you, according to the price of one gun, how Lebanon is looking. And things are not good.”

Just before the death of the former prime minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005, whose assassination ushered in Lebanon’s longest period of chaos since the end of the civil war, a new model AK-47 in very good condition could be bought for $300. A month after his death, the price had doubled to $600. By the outbreak of the July 2006 war between Hizbollah and Israel, it had tripled to $900 as people expected either an occupation by Israel or ongoing civil strife in the aftermath.

“The war was terrible for Lebanon but I made $10,000 profit in just a few weeks,” Mr Mahdi admits. “But prices just kept rising.”

He says the high point for the price of the AK-47 was in the period of major Sunni and Shiite sectarian tension that preceded the May 2008 clashes between Hizbollah and its allies against groups of Sunnis loyal to the government.

“In the days before the action, I knew that something was going to happen because prices jumped to $1,300 per AK,” he said. “It’s come down just a little but business is too much for this peace to last. Everyone is walking the streets acting all good, but they’re lying.”

This prediction is based on several factors, according to Mr Mahdi. The first is a widespread concern by Hizbollah that al Qa’eda-style groups, who cannot resist having their biggest enemies – the Shiite and Israel – in such close proximity, will target Lebanon. The second problem is a lack of faith in Lebanon’s government.

“There is no government, those people are useless,” says Mr Mahdi. “No one trusts them to keep the peace, so everyone buys weapons to protect their homes and families. Normally I sell about 30 to 40 machine guns a month but right now, it’s double that. And the price is $1,200 for a gun in good condition, almost as high as May 2008.”

“But I know there is a real problem on the streets right now not just because of the machine guns but because I am selling so many RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) launchers. People only buy grenades when they think war is coming. An RPG isn’t really a weapon you use to protect your house, but everyone is buying them anyway. Not good.”