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A Harvard fellow who is a high-profile advocate for South Sudan was arrested by federal agents in Arizona for trying to illegally smuggle weapons worth millions of dollars to his home country.
Peter Biar Ajak was charged with conspiring to purchase and illegally export fully automatic rifles, grenade launchers, Stinger missile systems, hand grenades, and sniper rifles. South Sudan is subject to an UN arms embargo due to violence between armed groups. He was arrested alongside a fellow activist, Abraham Chol Keech.
The charges against Keech and Ajak include fraud by ordering up to $4 million worth of weapons and creating a “fake contract” in the same amount for “consulting services.” These services related to “human rights, humanitarian, and civil engagement inside South Sudan refugee camps.”
If convicted both men could face up to 20 years in prison.
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Ajak, a 44 year-old Maryland resident, is well known in Africa circles in Washington D.C. as an exiled South Sudanese opposition leader and purported peace activist. A former World Bank economist and fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, he was granted refugee status in the United States last year.
Ajak is a former child soldier, who reported to have started his efforts to support South Sudanese democracy in 2011. In 2017, he founded the South Sudan Young Leaders Forum, an organization of emerging South Sudanese leaders across ethnic groups and factions committed to ending conflict and seeking to place the country on a path towards democracy and peace. But in 2020 he fled his home country “after being arbitrarily detained and possibly targeted for assassination,” according to his asylum petition lawyers at Paul Hastings.
According to charges filed Feb. 29 by the Justice Department, Keech began shopping for weapons to bolster the South Sudanese opposition in September of 2021, and he and Ajak began talks in earnest in February of 2023 with arms dealers who turned out to be federal agents. They allegedly transferred $4 million last month for a cache which was to include “fully automatic rifles, grenade launchers, Stinger missile systems, hand grenades, sniper rifles, ammunition, and other export-controlled items,” according to the Department of Justice.
“As alleged, the defendants sought to unlawfully smuggle heavy weapons and ammunition from the United States into South Sudan – a country that is subject to a U.N. arms embargo due to the violence between armed groups, which has killed and displaced thousands,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “The Department of Justice will not tolerate the illicit export of weapons overseas, and we will hold accountable those who would violate our laws.”
Ajak was set to lead a seminar last month on “Reviving the Spirit of Sudan.” The seminar, according to Harvard’s website, was canceled.