West Africa: West African Cocaine ‘Trade’ Doubles in Five Years–UN

31 May 2011

The amount of cocaine trafficked through West Africa to Europe may have doubled since 2006 and drug cartels are cooperating with al-Qaeda in the region, an official with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said.

As much as 80 metric tons of cocaine, worth $1.2 billion, might pass through West Africa to Europe this year, Manuel de Almeida Pereira, legal adviser to the Vienna-based anti-crime unit of the UN, said recently.

Much of the product comes from South America and is brought across the Atlantic by plane, then transited toward Europe through the Middle East, he said. Drug cartels are beginning to share weapons, information, safe houses, and other assets with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Pereira said, citing “sources of intelligence we cannot reveal.”

“I’m sure that they are in this country,” Pereira said from Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau on West Africa’s Atlantic coast. “This is a new trend we have to address.”

Three Malians were detained in Ghana in December 2009 and extradited to the U.S., where they were charged with trafficking cocaine in order to finance terrorism. The case is ongoing. The arrests “and other reports and congressional testimony suggest that there may be collaboration between drug traffickers and terrorist organizations in the region,” the Congressional Research Service said in a report in February, 2010.

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb operates in North Africa and has kidnapped and ransomed foreigners in countries like Mali, Niger and Mauritania.

In a May 18 interview, Guinea-Bissau’s Attorney General Amine Michel Saad said terrorist activity in the country has become “a reality.”

“This is more a problem for Europe and the U.S. and other Western countries than it is for Guinea-Bissau,” Saad said.

UNODC is also concerned that cartels trafficking Afghan heroin into the U.S. are passing through West African states, particularly Nigeria and Guinea-Bissau, Pereira said.

“This is a very recent trend that we are still studying,” he said. Saad described those concerns as “speculation.”

UNODC’s estimates of cocaine trafficked through West Africa don’t include Guinea-Bissau, where the state’s inability to patrol the islands beyond its capital has made the former “a blank in terms of statistics,” Pereira said.

The coastal country of 1.5 million people doesn’t have a single helicopter, airplane or boat that can monitor activity in its 80 islands, where much of drug trafficking is thought to take place.

“The areas where we have narco-trafficking are those where we can’t even reach, no matter what’s happening there,” Saad said. “It’s an impossibility.”

UNODC is also concerned about West African consumption of drugs, particularly crack cocaine, Pereira said. In the past year, the organization witnessed a rise in the amount of crack being sold locally, often at prices as low as 14,000 CFA francs ($30) a gram.

The crack trade poses a security threat to regional states, particularly Guinea-Bissau, which has only one rehabilitation center and no prisons.

“This will increase violence, this will increase robberies, this will increase many forms of criminality,” he said. “This is a weak society, it can be destroyed.”

AllAfrica – All the Time