IVORY COAST/SENEGAL: Ivory Coast peace deal throws spotlight on regional drug trade

Record ID: 181853

  • Title: IVORY COAST/SENEGAL: Ivory Coast peace deal throws spotlight on regional drug trade
  • Date: 18th June 2007
  • Summary: (AD1) ABIDJAN, IVORY COAST (RECENT - MAY 29, 2007) (REUTERS) POLICEMAN RUNNING DOWN A STREET/ FIRES TEAR GAS DOWN ALLEYWAY ARMED POLICEMAN STANDING CLOUD OF TEAR GAS IN THE STREET POLICEMEN ENTERING ILLEGAL DRUG DEN
  • Embargoed: 3rd July 2007 13:00
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  • Reuters ID: LVA9Z5OZWFWBTXZ2NCJ453WKBJCZ
  • Story Text: A recent peace deal in Ivory Coast turns the authorities focus towards the drug trade which had expanded unchecked during the years of civil conflict. The region's porous borders and weak law enforcement has turned West Africa into a transit point for drug dealers targeting Europe, America and emerging markets in countries like South Africa and the Middle East.
    Police in the Ivory Coast have turned their focus on burgeoning substance abuse which has spread fast amid five years of political crisis.
    A raid which involved police using tear gas to clear an area and enter squalid drug dens was conducted at an abandoned hotel in the bustling Adjame neighbourhood of the economic capital Abidjan.
    Nearly 200 suspected drug abusers were arrested in mid-May by a similar number of police in a dawn swoop on the seven main "smoking rooms" in an operation yielding seizures of heroin, cocaine and 55 kilograms of cannabis.
    "The smoking rooms are a new category of closet business where individuals are illegally providing others individuals with drugs of all nature and are also providing them with a place to use them," said Auguste Zoguehi Gnahoua, a security ministry spokesman.
    After more than four years of largely fruitless efforts by foreign mediators to reconcile the factions, a home-grown peace deal in March between Gbagbo and rebel leader Guillaume Soro has brought some progress and kindled hopes of a return to normality.
    Gnahoua said grappling with drug consumption was one way the police could contribute to that effort.
    The former French colony's former image as a haven of peace in conflict-prone West Africa was shattered by a brief 2002-2003 civil war in which rebels seized the north of the country.
    ''It is true that with the crisis the country was plunged into for more than four years, living conditions for a number of our citizens deteriorated, exposing them to the solicitations of unscrupulous people,'' Gnahoua said.
    16-year-old Tidiane Cisse says he had given up everything to live in the drug den where the police arrested him along with 191 other suspected drug users.
    "It is because of drugs that I have been arrested. I have been away from home for 4 months since the beginning of the year, I left my mother, my sister, and my whole family to stay at the smoking room. I spent 4 months in the ghetto, I left my family," Tidiane said.
    Local media reported in May that police arrested a man arriving at Abidjan airport from Pakistan, who was carrying 14 kilograms of heroin packed inside a suitcase full of shirts.
    ''The government will extend and intensify its action across the country in order to stop this plague which is a key factor for the recrudescence of high criminality and create safe conditions for people to live in," Gnahoua continued.
    But the drug consumption boom in Ivory Coast is just the visible part of the iceberg. United Nations (UN) experts say West Africa has become a conduit for Colombian cocaine destined for Europe and elsewhere as weak law enforcement services as well as the region's vast territories and porous borders lessen the risks for traffickers.
    "All the pictures seems to confirm what we have already claimed that West Africa has become a hub for cocaine trafficking from Latin American countries to Europe and new emerging countries in the world," said Antonio Mazzitelli, the west African representative for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
    Mazzitelli also said that some regional governments were slow to grasp the extent or severity of the threat.
    "A part of the drug remains in the country. Even if it is trafficked by large foreign criminal organisation, this drug, on one side, breeds corruption, breeds consumption, breeds a culture of quick enrichment," he added.
    Evidence pointed to the cartels setting up logistics bases, including clandestine airstrips, ship moorage's and even refuelling depots in isolated, unsupervised corners of the region.
    Several thousand miles away across the Sahara in Niger, the army recently intercepted another drugs convoy of vehicles guarded by heavily armed traffickers, indicating another route.
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