Russia
UP until last Friday, he was someone most people had probably never heard of. But for journalists like myself whose beat is covering foreign affairs, the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout was always a man somewhere on our radar.
In fact, it’s probably fair to say that in the vast majority of conflicts I’ve covered these past decades, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, the man dubbed the “Merchant of Death”, has been inextricably connected. From Angola to Rwanda, Sierra Leone to Liberia, Bout’s shadowy presence has always circled like some omnipresent vulture.
