West Africa draws up plan to fight drug smuggling
Wed 12 Sep 2007, 5:50 GMT
 
By Alistair Thomson
 
DAKAR (Reuters) - West Africa is drawing up a plan to fight drug trafficking, 
 in particular of Latin American cocaine and Asian heroin being smuggled to  
lucrative markets in Europe, a regional crime fighter said on Tuesday. 
Abdullahi Shehu, who heads West Africa's programme against money laundering,  
received an additional mandate last month from the Economic Community of West 
 African States (ECOWAS) to fight drugs cartels, whose grip on the region 
appears  to be growing. 

"We don't want to reinvent the wheel, but we want to make a practical  
difference within the shortest time," Shehu said during a meeting in Senegal  where 
experts were drawing up the plan to submit to leaders of the 15 ECOWAS  
members in December. 
"They want something long-term, but they are also concerned about the short  
term," Shehu told reporters. "This will consist of a plan for one year ...  
reducing the traffic of cocaine in particular into the region, while other goals 
 are ongoing." 
Record drug seizures in recent months have exposed networks using West  
Africa's poorly policed shorelines and vast empty deserts to smuggle hard drugs  
into Europe. 
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reports say cocaine seizures in  
West Africa shot up by a factor of seven to 14 tonnes in 2006 from just two 
the  previous year, Shehu said in a speech to the Senegal meeting on Monday. 
He said lax border controls, civil conflicts, poverty, corruption, a huge  
pool of poor people ready to be turned into drugs couriers or "mules", and  
tighter law enforcement elsewhere in the world all made West Africa attractive  to 
drug smugglers. 
Another factor was geography, said Shehu, director-general of the  
Inter-Governmental Action Group Against Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing  in 
West Africa, known by its briefer French acronym GIABA. "Guinea-Bissau is a  
fairly straight 4,000 miles across the Atlantic from the coca fields of South  
America," he said. 
REGIONAL APPROACH 
Guinea-Bissau, a small, desperately-poor former Portuguese colony south of  
Senegal, has been identified by drugs trade experts as a hub for Latin American 
 gangs shipping or flying in Colombian cocaine to be smuggled on to Europe. 
"Guinea-Bissau is at the threshold of gaining (a) reputation as Africa's  
first narco-state," Shehu said in the speech. 
"Any leader that allows drug traffickers to take over his country is digging  
his own grave," he added on Tuesday. 
Yet the country's police chief told Reuters last week her force, pitted  
against well-equipped cartels spanning three continents, has no vehicles,  
computers, radios or handcuffs. 
"Drug traffickers fly the coastal waters in this region and the drug officers 
 don't even have flying boats," Shehu said. 
"We need to approach this matter as a region. Allowing drug traffickers to  
come from Latin America to Guinea-Bissau is not the problem of Guinea-Bissau  
alone," he said.
© Reuters 2007. All Rights Reserved. 



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