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Romania Arms Sales
Romania produced Soviet weapons and military equipment
under
license not only for its own armed forces, but also for
export to
the Soviet Union and to both Soviet-allied and nonaligned
countries
in the Middle East and Africa. In the early 1980s, annual
arms
transfers abroad averaged US$620 million, or between 5 and
6
percent of total exports, making Romania the world's ninth
largest
arms exporter and second only to Czechoslovakia among the
nonSoviet Warsaw Pact countries.
The Ministry of National Defense's foreign trade
division and
the state-owned firm Romtehnica handled Romania's arms
sales
abroad. The majority of its sales of Soviet-designed AK-47
and AKM
assault rifles, BM-21 and M-51 multiple rocket launchers,
TAB-72
armored personnel carriers, and munitions and ordnance
went to the
Soviet Union, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, and the Democratic
People's
Republic of Korea (North Korea) during the early 1980s. In
1983
Romania and Libya signed a formal military cooperation
agreement
based on the supply of Romanian-made infantry arms,
military
vehicles, and explosives to the latter. Iraq remained
Romania's
best Middle East customer. Besides selling arms, Romania
repaired
and overhauled Iraqi tanks and armored vehicles that had
been
damaged in the battles of the Iran-Iraq War.
In 1984 Romania agreed to sell 200 M-77 tanks, its
improved
version of the Soviet T-55, to Egypt as well as to provide
training
and maintenance and to assist Egypt in undertaking
licensed
production of the M-77. Romania exported spare
parts--produced
under license--for French Alouette III and Puma
helicopters in
service with the air forces of Algeria, Angola, and
Ethiopia. It
tried unsuccessfully to sell its versions of the
French-designed
helicopters, IAR-316B and IAR-330, in Latin America in
competition
with the original manufacturer Aerospatiale.
For Romania, arms sales represented a stable export
market that
helped to absorb some underutilized productive capacity in
its
heavy manufacturing sector and to earn hard currency until
the mid1980s . Arms transfers to the Soviet Union allowed Romania
to reduce
somewhat its trade imbalance with that country. Trading
weapons for
oil with countries in the Middle East enabled Romania to
develop a
non-Soviet source of energy supplies. After several years
of steady
increases, however, arms sales abroad dropped to US$270
million in
1986. Arms production and sales became a less valuable
part of the
economy in the late 1980s and even became a burden on the
civilian
sector.
Data as of July 1989
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