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| Ousmane Conte |
In regard to Guinea-Conakry - as opposed to Guinea-Bissau which already holds the dubious title of the world's first 'narco-state', since the coup in 2008 there have been reports of Latin American cocaine traders moving in significant numbers to Conakry, where some relatives of the late President Lansana Conte have an established interest in the cocaine trade.
In 2010 the US government designated Ousmane Conte, the son of Guinea's late President, as a Tier 1 kingpin. He was arrested but subsequently released in 2010. This may appear a shocking development to some, but close observers of the situation are convinced that drugs and politics in West Africa have become intertwined to such an extent that the emergence of three or four more narco states in the region, with ties to Latin American Drug trafficking organisations, is not out of the question.
International drug traffickers from Colombia, Venezuela, Nigeria and Spain, among other countries, have moved their trade up the coast from Guinea-Bissau to Guinea after being driven out of Bissau because of increased government scrutiny, according to an official from the government’s anti-narcotics bureau (OCAD) in the capital Conakry. A senior official in the Guinean Ministry of Security who also asked to remain anonymous, said because of corruption, traffickers are often released hours after their arrest and many drug caches disappear. The official said this occurred in the case of Venezuelan and Colombian drug traffickers in May 2008, after they were arrested for storing large quantities of cocaine in Kipé, a Conakry suburb.
According to the unnamed OCAD official, drugs leave Colombia aboard a small Cessna airplane flying at an altitude of 2,000 metres, making them undetectable by radar. The planes land, often at night, in towns like Faranah in central Guinea, 455km from Conakry, and from here they are conveyed under heavy escort to the capital for storage, he said.
During August and September, small Cessna aircraft landed “repeatedly” in Faranah, and the town of Boke, 268km north of the capital, transporting drugs, the official said.
Locals tipped off OCAD on 4 September when a small aircraft carrying drugs landed in Boke during the night. The move led to the arrest of the governor, the mayor, a military commander, central commissioner, and the air traffic controller, according to the Security Ministry official. All are currently being held in Conakry for questioning.
While most of the profits from this business never touch down in Africa, a fair amount is laundered in construction and legitimate businesses in such numbers that some observers cynically reflect that drug money is a net plus for the treasuries of these most impoverished nations.This kind of thinking fails to take into account the long term effects of corruption and the social costs when drug dealing and drug using become endemic to the transit countries themselves.Already in relatively well off Nigeria and Ghana, drug kingpins have become cultural icons with the result that young people see the drug trade as a legitimate career path out of poverty. In the last few years dozens of Nigerian nationals have been arrested for dealing drugs in such far-flung locales as Malaysia, Thailand and India.For all its counter-cultural panache, the romanticising of the drug trade obscures the deleterious effects of civic corruption and fails to address the underlying socio-economic rot which invades poor neighbourhoods when drug kingpins and corrupt politicians get together.
These days drugs produced in South America and South Asia are being transshipped to Europe or sold into West African neighbourhoods through a wide variety of sources, some with connections to non-state political actors such as Hezbollah who use profits from drug sales to finance operations throughout the world. AQIM, Ansar Dine and the various Taureg elements involved in the civil conflict in Mali have also been accused of using drug profits to buy weapons and political allies.There is evidence that Lebanese business people in West Africa and South America are using family and commercial ties to launder money for groups such as Hezbollah, which uses the funds for operations in their traditional battle ground of south Lebanon (and now also in Syria as well as in North and West Africa).
In Nigeria three Lebanese businessmen are on trial for terrorism related charges after security forces discovered weapons caches that prosecutors are trying to link to a Hezbollah backed plot to attack Israeli and American targets in Nigeria. In this case drugs are not implicated. Two of the suspects own, respectively, an amusement park and a supermarket.One of the ironies of the situation is that in West Africa, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda operatives have also been doing deals with Israeli diamond merchants. If there is a buck to be made in the region, the enmities of elsewhere fly out the window. This sorry spectacle was reported on by former Washington Post West African Bureau Chief Douglas Farah in his 2004 book Blood from Stones:
An Israeli diamond dealer, who regularly did business with buyers he knew were Hezbollah and some he suspected were Al Qaeda, agreed. "Here it is business," he said."The wars are over there. Here we do business, there they do war."Levantine traders have been operating throughout West Africa for over a century. During this era they have built substantial fortunes and bases of political influence which they wield locally (even in places like Liberia which has made it virtually impossible for Lebanese to become citizens without marrying locals) but also back home in Lebanon. It is not surprising that since the Lebanese civil war of the '70s and 80's the fractious politics of the Levant have also washed ashore along the Gulf of Guinea. If ever there was a community that practices the code of omerta it is the Lebanese of West Africa. Even though there is a symbiotic relationship between Lebanese money and African political power, there is nevertheless a stone wall dividing the communities in ways that have led to mutual distrust if not outright rancor. For the most part, the last thing that Lebanese business people in West Africa want is the US Drug Enforcement Agency or Interpol showing up at their store-fronts searching for money laundering receipts or pictures of Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah. To a large extent the success of Levantine business in West Africa is due to its historically low profile.
Now that it is becoming clear that non-state political actors have infiltrated Levantine commercial networks, their preferred level of obscurity is about to be blown open by local prosecutors looking to audit books and warehouses and international security agencies looking to disrupt illicit transnational flows.It is essential that security and law enforcement personnel looking into these networks not tar the whole community with criminal intent. In some countries Lebanese/African relations can be easily frayed and the Lebanese could easily become targets of demagoguery and victims of violence.This might make them more likely to turn to criminal gangs or organizations like Hezbollah for protection rather than local police.There also needs to be an effort made to educate and fully support West African journalists - those courageous enough to take on the task - on how to investigate these types of criminal activities and to draw the lines, as in Guinea, between local politicians and international drug traffickers.Due to capacity issues, the media in West Africa is generally unable to carry out investigative reporting on the major links between corruption, drug trafficking and international terrorism. It's not an easy task, but it's one that is essential in order to maintain any hope of resistance against the combined power of money, guns and corrupt politics.
As the situation in Mali continues to boil and the conflicts in Nigeria continue to escalate more and more international attention will be drawn to the region. International drug cartels and transnational political actors will find common cause and first-mover advantage in countries like Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, etc. due to their weak legal structures, corrupt politicians, toothless journalism and unprotected borders.
Separatists in Senegal's Casamance Region are already using the drug trade to finance their rebellion and while they have historically used the sale of cannabis to do so, it is logical to assume that cocaine revenues will eventually contribute to this on-going instability, if they have not already."The first task, however, for security agencies looking into ties between drugs and terror in West Africa is to find out who is who, what are they doing, who they are connected to and what they are capable of.The complexity of the networks just described requires a level of sophisticated investigation and human intelligence that has heretofore been absent, hence the shock and dismay when Mali began to unravel.Another issue is that local authorities will try to link any threat to their power to 'outside agitators or criminal conspiracies' when in fact they may be referring to domestic groups with legitimate political grievances and
interests .Aggressive tactics will only exacerbate already complex enmities and might push the currently blameless into the arms of the bad guys. In that scenario nobody wins.