The Security Challenge of West Africa’s New Drug Depots

Last week, gendarmes in the Senegal seaside resort of Nianing seized fifty-one 24-kilogram sacks containing a record 1.25 metric tons of cocaine with a street value of over $100 million.

What makes this bust even more spectacular was that it came in the course of officials wrapping up their investigation of another seizure at the nearby Atlantic coastal port of Mbour, 80 kilometers south of Dakar, where just forty-eight hours earlier the police had come across a sailing boat carrying their previous record haul of 1.2 metric tons.

The twin seizures in Senegal underscore West Africa's new role as a major hub on the global drug traffic, a development that poses a new challenge to already complex security situation in Sub-Saharan Africa.

• In April, police in Guinea-Bissau, acting on a tip from the international criminal police agency Interpol, seized 635 kilograms of cocaine. Unfortunately, lacking both manpower and vehicles – and perhaps political will as well – they failed to stop the traffickers from making off with nearly two metric tons of the drug.

   

• Last October, a Royal Navy frigate, HMS Argyll, was diverted while en route to an amphibious training exercise in Sierra Leone to assist Spanish authorities in the Canary Islands to stop a Panamanian-registered freighter, the Ster II, which turned out to carrying nearly two metric tons of cocaine.

   

• One month earlier, police in Guinea-Bissau seized 674 kilograms of cocaine and arresting two Colombian nationals who had smuggled the drugs into the West African country, reportedly using a military airstrip.

  Evidence such as this contribute to the grim picture painted by United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) chief of operations Michael A. Braun in his testimony last year before a joint oversight hearing of the House Committee on the Judiciary's Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security and the House Committee on International Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere:

  Colombian trafficking groups have established ties with African criminal organizations in such countries as Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Senegal, and Togo. Together, they take advantage of the weak governments in those nations in order to smuggle drugs to Europe. Africa is also becoming a key command and control platform for Spanish and Italian drug trafficking organizations. … From western Africa, trafficking organizations ship cocaine to Europe via fishing vessels or sail boats. Trafficking organizations exploit historical ties as well as cultural and linguistic similarities to further their goals. Cocaine transiting this region is destined for Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands, and France. Over the past twelve months, we have seen several metric-ton quantities of cocaine seized in West Africa and off the coast of Africa. … In many parts of the world, DEA has a strong relationship with our foreign counterparts. However, effective law enforcement is a particular challenge in Africa due to the sheer number of containers that transit through the seaports, the lack of trained inspectors and investigative intelligence, weak governments, and the widespread practice of corruption. Therefore, Africa is seen as an ideal place for drug trafficking, and Colombian traffickers are ready to exploit this opportunity.

  These findings are confirmed by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) whose World Drug Report 2007, released in late June, notes that while levels of illegal drug production, trafficking, and consumption have remained virtually stable worldwide, there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of cocaine and other drugs trafficked through and consumed in West Africa. While there have also been major drug busts in Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone (as well as in Kenya in East Africa), the nexus of recent activity seems to be in the former Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau. When Senegalese officials arrested three of their own citizens along with a Colombian, an Ecuadorian, and a Venezuelan last week, they found them in possession of airline tickets indicating that they had traveled from Brazil to Guinea-Bissau. The crew of the Ster II was led by a national of Guinea-Bissau. No less a figure than UNODC executive director Antonio Maria Costa has expressed fears in the aftermath of the April bust that the country was turning a “narco-state.”

   

  Costa's concern is, unfortunately, more than the rhetorical flourish of another drug czar. The two Colombians arrested in the September 2006 bust in Guinea-Bissau were freed within days by a local judge who gave no legal basis for his decision. Worst, the 674 kilograms that had been confiscated at the time of their capture – whose street value today is equal to about a fifth of Guinea-Bissau's gross domestic product – disappeared without explanation from the national treasury where they had been placed in storage as evidence (two weeks ago, former Prime Minister Aristides Gomes proffered the incredible explanation that the drugs had been burned on his orders, although he provided no evidence of the alleged destruction). Meanwhile the suspicion that the government of Guinea-Bissau is indeed influenced by drug cartels acquired fresh currency last month with the sacking of Orlando Antonio da Silva, head of the country's judicial police, as well as his chief of investigations, two figures who were respected by the international law enforcement community for their efforts to combat the narcotics traffic through West Africa.

  It is not hard to appreciate why South American drug cartels would happen upon Guinea-Bissau. As Dr. Thomas Pietschmann, a German researcher at UNODC who is the main author of the agency's annual World Drug Report, already noted two years ago, with direct routes from South America increasingly under scrutiny, if the smugglers want to penetrate Europe, they “look for the weakest point … that's West Africa.” The governments in the subregion, when they are not too preoccupied by their own problems, are too weak, too corrupt, or both. And few are weaker and more corrupt than that of Guinea-Bissau, a country that has placed 173rd out of 177 countries scored on the UN Development Programme's Human Development Index for 2006.

  While the human misery may provide an opening, it is the combination of Guinea-Bissau's geographical characteristics (a jagged coastline of some 350 kilometers plus the largely uninhabited Bijágos Archipelago of eighteen major islands and dozens of smaller ones jutting into Atlantic) and its lack of governance capacity, much less transparency and democracy (President João Bernardo “Nino” Vieira has been in office this time around since 2005, he had previously seized power in a 1980 coup and established a repressive dictatorship only to be overthrown in turn in 1999), which make the nation so attractive to the drug cartels. And, perversely, until recently Western nations have indirectly contributed to the problem through their neglect of the country. The United States, for example, shut down its embassy in Bissau, the capital, in 1998, while Guinea-Bissau has no diplomatic representation in Washington (relations are conducted through the American ambassador in Senegal is officially also accredited to Guinea-Bissau – Belgium, Canada, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom have similar arrangements for their Dakar-based envoys).

  While the primary destination of the West African traffickers is Europe, Americans have little cause for schadenfreude, since the criminal networks are also beginning to use Africa as a transshipment depot for the lucrative U.S. market since relatively greater attention has been paid to the security of our southern borders in recent years. Last year, for example, a six-month joint investigation by the DEA and the Chicago Police Department, “Operation Saheroin,” resulted in the arrest of one Moshoodi E. Ajijola and eight associates, all West Africans, for importing pure heroin originating in South Asia and moved through West Africa to be distributed in Chicago, Rockford, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.

  As bad as the drug problem is, perhaps worse from the security point of view is the connection between narcotics trafficking and terrorism. The September 2002 iteration of the National Security Strategy of the United States of America implicitly acknowledged the link: “Weak states … can pose a great danger to our national interests as strong states. Poverty does not make poor people into terrorists and murderers. Yet poverty, weak institutions, and corruption can make weak states vulnerable to terrorist networks and drug cartels within their borders.” As DEA Administrator Karen P. Tandy noted in her speech in May to the 25th International Drug Enforcement Conference (IDEC) meeting in Madrid, the explosives used in the Madrid train bombings of 2004 were bought with hashish. While the link between drug trafficking and terrorism in Africa is less well documented, it stands to reason that a connection exists. In short, it would seem obvious that this traffic has all sorts of possibilities for international terrorism, both in and out of Africa, in terms of access to armaments, if not direct financing. The suspects arrested in Senegal last week, for example, each came fully equipped with a cellular telephone, an AK-47 with two clips, and a 22-caliber submachine gun. On the seized sailboat, some 125 sticks of dynamite were found.

  The drug bust in Senegal took place because of the diligence of a special unit under Commander Moussa Fall who enjoyed the support of the commandant of the Gendarmerie, General Abdoulaye Fall. In Guinea-Bissau, in contrast, ex-police chief da Silva did not even have his own car until he seized one in a drug raid while the Reuters news agency reported last month that “police have to beg gasoline from foreigners to be able to chase criminals.” In presenting his annual report at a June 26 press conference in Vienna, UNODC chief Costa observed, “Africa is under attack, targeted by cocaine traffickers from the West (Colombia) and heroin smugglers in the East (Afghanistan). This threat needs to be addressed quickly to stamp out organized crime, money-laundering and corruption, and to prevent the spread of drug use that could cause havoc across a continent already plagued by many other tragedies.”

  As if strengthening local governance capacity, promoting economic development, countering transnational terrorism, and securing access to natural resources were not enough of an agenda for America's increased engagement in geostrategically significant Sub-Saharan Africa, it now appears quite certain that the comprehensive mission of the new Africa Command will also have to include working with the relevant civilian federal agencies and international partners as well as appropriate nongovernmental organizations to fight a “cold war” of containment against international narcotic traffickers before things heat up in the new drug depots of West Africa.

  – J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs and a Research Fellow of the Institute for Infrastructure and Information Assurance at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is also an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.