Fake Vigra on sale
2007-10-01 15:06
Dakar - Militants are exploiting weak law enforcement in West Africa to raise funds from rackets ranging from people smuggling to drug trafficking and even fake Viagra, said experts said.
While blacklisted groups like al-Qaeda and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) had not attacked targets in West Africa, intelligence sources said their members and supporters were using the region to finance activities elsewhere.
In the past two years, South American cartels had switched their trafficking routes into Europe to funnel drugs via lawless swathes of war-scarred West Africa, particularly Guinea-Bissau, aiming to put Western anti-narcotics officials off their trail.
Amado Philip de Andres, deputy head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in West Africa, said: "There is a link between the financing of terrorism and the activities of these cocaine dealers in specific countries in West and Central Africa.
"These extremely organised and well-funded networks do not only fund terrorism, they traffic arms from post-conflict countries ... they do cocaine trafficking, and that is linked to smuggling migrants."
Al-Qaeda 'linked' to smuggling
One of two Colombians arrested in Guinea-Bissau this month in a police anti-drugs operation was a member of the FARC left-wing guerrilla group, de Andres said. Despite an extradition attempt, the Colombians were freed due to pressure from "interest groups" in Bissau, he said.
In West Africa, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, formerly known as Algeria's Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), had long been linked to smuggling and extortion in Mauritania, Mali and Niger.
Investigations of attacks, such as the March 2004 Madrid train bombings, which killed 191 people, had unearthed links between Islamic groups and drug smuggling.
UN officials urged greater co-operation on border security to clamp down on terrorism funding. A new UN-backed customs programme in Dakar port to track containers from certain states recently seized a consignment of tiles from Pakistan filled with cocaine.
Senegalese Interior Minister Ousmane Ngom said: "To beat terrorism, we need to fight it globally, with the same strategy. Its links with cross-border crime rings, drug smugglers and organised mafias make it more difficult to beat."
'Laboratories' produce Viagra
During a decade of brutal, intertwined wars which spilled across borders from Sierra Leone and Liberia, smuggled "blood diamonds" were linked to the funding of al-Qaeda and Hezbollah.
The Kimberley certification scheme, launched in 2003 to stop diamonds financing rebel groups, had closed off that option, but criminal and terrorist gangs had found more ingenious means to fund their activities, such as fake pharmaceuticals.
De Andres said: "In Nigeria and Ivory Coast, fake laboratories for Viagra are producing massively and these medicines are then used to launder money and to finance terrorism."
Desperate economic migrants, often trafficked from as far afield as Afghanistan or Pakistan, could be duped into carrying illegal drugs to pay smugglers for a passage costing $20 000.
Home to some of the world's poorest countries, West Africa was fertile recruiting ground for mafia groups, whose resources often far outweighed the cash-strapped authorities they face.
De Andres said: "We are facing the destabilisation of West Africa through specific states, which have no means to fight against terrorism, the financing of terrorism and specifically drug trafficking from Latin America."