Friday, March 15, 2013

Mali's Bad Trip: Field notes from the West African drug trade

 

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/03/15/mali_s_bad_trip?print=yes&hidecomments=yes&page=full

 

 

Mali's Bad Trip: Field notes from the West African drug trade.

BY ANDREW LEBOVICH | MARCH 15, 2013

 

BAMAKO, Mali – "If he returns to Gao, people will make kebabs out of him," a

friend told me with a laugh over lunch in his home. He was referring to a

prominent businessman publicly suspected of links to drug smugglers and

support for jihadist groups who left the northern Malian city of Gao late

last year for unknown reasons. My lunch partner's comment was indicative.

Many Malians in the north and south are deeply angry at notables or other

local figures believed to be involved in the reportedly lucrative local drug

trade whom they suspect of working with jihadi groups -- the very same

groups that tried to turn the north of the country into a haven for their

hardline ideas before the French-led intervention in Mali in January.

 

The comment came just days after a crowd of angry youth in Gao reportedly

nearly lynched two other suspected traffickers accused of involvement in the

drug trade along with jihadi groups. Both of the men, Mohamed Ould Awainatt

and Baba Ould Cheikh, are alleged to have been part of what has become known

as the "Air Cocaine" incident back in 2009, when the burnt-out carcass

(shown above) of a Boeing 727 believed to have been transporting up to 10

tons of cocaine was found in the desert north of Gao. Just days after the

purported attack on the two men, the Malian government announced

international arrest warrants against a number of rebel leaders and

suspected traffickers, including both of the men attacked by the crowd. The

public anger against purported drug traffickers has much to do with the

widespread perception that their activities and corruption in general

contributed to the gradual breakdown of Malian state structures in the last

two decades, but in particular in the latter years of the presidency of

Amadou Toumani Touré. It's a perception that's likely justified.

 

Cross-border commerce is hardly a new thing for the Sahara, a part of the

world that has always served as a transit point for a variety of goods as

well as a market for goods from both sides of the desert. When the countries

of the region established formal borders after decolonization, smuggling

became a vital part of local economies. Trade in subsidized powdered milk

and other foodstuffs from Algeria in the 1970s eventually morphed into a

booming business in counterfeit and black-market cigarettes, subsidized

fuel, weapons, and narcotics, including cannabis resin and hashish.

Somewhere around 2005 the first Latin American cocaine is believed to have

begun to arrive in West Africa -- mostly in the region's seaports, where it

was then transshipped to Europe by boat. But as sea controls between Africa

and Europe were tightened, more and more of the contraband shifted to

overland routes. Cocaine shipments began moving to Europe from airports in

the Sahel, mostly using small propeller-driven aircraft, while other paths

went through northern Mali to Morocco, Algeria, and Niger into Europe or the

Middle East.

 

What outsiders have often failed to appreciate is the devastating effect

that this flow of drugs, coupled with other forms of corruption, has had on

governance in the countries of the region. And few countries demonstrate

this quite as well as Mali.

 

Given the recent efforts by militant Islamists to create their own enclave

in the north, and the subsequent French military intervention in response,

it's understandable that much of the recent coverage on Mali has focused on

the threat to the country's territorial integrity posed by separatists and

Al-Qaeda-branded insurgents. Less well-documented, however, has been the

continued presence of an even more pernicious problem, one that will be much

harder to uproot by well-intentioned outsiders or internal political

reforms: namely, the drug trade.

 

For most of the past twenty years, Mali occupied a place as a kind of poster

child for democracy in West Africa. Foreign supporters praised it for its

supposedly robust parliamentary institutions, wide-ranging press freedoms,

and decentralized government. Much of the positive press came from an

impressive series of peaceful power handovers. In 1991 Amadou Toumani Touré,

then a senior army officer, overthrew the existing authoritarian regime of

Moussa Traoré before handing over power to an elected president a year

later. Ten years after that, Touré won a presidential election of his own, a

position he retained until he was toppled in a military coup in March of

last year.

 

That coup was launched by army officers disgruntled by the inept official

response to a separatist threat in the north from the Tuareg National

Movement for the Liberation of the Azawad (MNLA) and jihadi groups linked to

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). An alliance of those groups had,

managed to rout government forces, expelling them from much of the country's

north in astonishingly short order. But the weakness of the Malian army came

as little surprise to anyone who had been watching the steady erosion of

state institutions, largely as a result of widespread corruption. For

several years, Malians and Western diplomats alike have voiced accusations

that Bamako politicians and relatives are believed to have benefited

directly from the illicit economy (among other forms of corruption), while

the government and elements of the military are said to have either

tolerated or actively participated in various smuggling schemes. According

to a journalist with close contacts within the Algerian security services,

for instance, Malian soldiers and officers were directly involved or

complicit in at least two flights carrying cocaine that landed in Mali

during 2009 and 2010.

 

Many Malians and outside observers believe that the rise of the drug

business offered members of government -- including, according to some

accounts, people close to Touré -- opportunities for personal enrichment as

well as a means of managing instability in northern Mali. The scale of the

trade's impact can be seen in the now infamous Gao neighborhood known as

"Cocainebougou", a part of the city flush with new villas and sudden wealth;

an official from the Timbuktu region told me a similar neighborhood sprung

up there some time after 2009. He added that the large traffickers even

built their own mosque in the neighborhood. While corruption accusations

also sometimes dogged the government of Touré's predecessor, Alpha Oumar

Konaré, the widespread perception of major corruption under Touré was one of

the reasons why many Malians supported the coup that overthrew Touré in

March 2012.

 

It's incredibly hard, of course, to come by reliable numbers on the drug

trade. The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated in a recent

report that 18 tons of cocaine worth approximately $1.25 billion in Europe

transited West Africa in 2010. Some might see this as good news, since that

figure is down from an estimated 47 tons in 2007. However, the United

Nation's information is based in part on extrapolations from drug seizures,

an uncertain metric given the flexibility of trafficking networks and the

ability to change routes, tactics, and sometimes simply buy off local

officials to avoid arrest. Still, the UNODC office in Dakar, Senegal,

estimates that more than $500 million gained from the trade either remained

in West Africa or was laundered through the region, in 2012. By comparison,

Mali's defense expenditures in 2011 were estimated at around $180 million,

according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

 

Among the policies that have had a particularly corrosive effect on

governance in Mali was Touré's informal ceding of some state control and

governance responsibilities to northern intermediaries. His government

helped to establish and empower ethnic Arab and Tuareg militias to deal with

violence linked to a 2006 Tuareg rebellion centered largely around the

region of Kidal. Among other things, the government used various northern

leaders as intermediaries in hostage negotiations. In an interview with The

Telegraph, Robert Fowler, a former U.N. diplomat who was kidnapped in 2008

by AQIM and held for 130 days, recalls that Touré referred to Baba Ould

Cheikh, the suspected trafficker who also helped negotiate Fowler's release,

as mon bandite ("my bandit").

 

As one former minister in Touré's government described it to me over glasses

of tea in his house, these intermediaries allowed Touré to exert some degree

of political influence in the north, but at the same time it allowed these

northern leaders to exploit state power for their own needs. A good example

is the career of longtime Tuareg powerbroker and Ansar al-Din founder Iyad

Ag Ghali. In 2003 Ag Ghali earned considerable political capital in Bamako

by helping to free European hostages seized in southern Algeria in 2003. In

2006 he then played a major part in separatist rebellions in the north --

and then lent his support to efforts by Bamako to end them. He ultimately

leveraged both episodes to gain a diplomatic post in Saudi Arabia. Ag Ghali

continued to play a key role in shaping events in northern Mali while he was

in Saudi Arabia, a country from which he was expelled in 2010 due to

suspected contacts with extremists. The maneuverings of Ag Ghali and others

weakened the state while helping deepen corruption, with disastrous results.

 

Illicit and semi-licit commerce existed in northern Mali and the broader

Sahel before the rule of Touré, of course. But the drug trade became

ingrained in the very fabric of the Malian state at a time when the Salafist

Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), the forerunner to AQIM, was

implanting itself in the north. The organization and its commanders

(including Mokhtar Belmokhtar, whom Chadian President Idriss Déby claims his

troops killed in fighting this month), developed deep social ties to local

populations as well as links to various illicit businesses, ranging from

hostage-taking to cigarette smuggling and taxing the smuggling of hashish,

cannabis resin, and cocaine.

 

While reliable details are predictably elusive, my interviewees in Mali --

including Western diplomats as well as Malian notables, including former

security officials from the north -- assert that the trade in illicit goods

(drugs, cigarettes, gasoline, weapons) continued, and may even have

intensified, during the brief reign of the separatists in the north, a

supposition supported by some anecdotal reports. (Not everyone agrees,

though.) Sitting on the floor of an upstairs room of a house on the

outskirts of Bamako, three former security officials, men who had spent

their careers in the north, told me that the trade had even become more

organized under separatist rule -- even as competing militant groups,

cartels, clans, and families continued sometimes long-running struggles for

supremacy. They said that the French intervention and the Western military

presence in the north, however, not to mention significantly tighter

monitoring of borders with Mali's neighbors (notably Algeria), appear to

have disrupted the trade significantly -- at least for the moment. But other

analysts suggest that the conflict in Mali has simply compelled the trade to

find new routes through Africa and into Europe.

 

Still, it would be a mistake to claim that drug smuggling has only been a

problem in the north. One Western expert who closely studies illicit trade

flows told me that the instability in the north actually stimulated the

narcotics trade passing through parts of the country that remained under

government control, especially in the Kayes region near the border with

Mauritania. This shows the flexibility inherent in drug smuggling routes,

which adjust and shift rapidly in reaction to changing security and

political environments, spreading or moving not just to different regions

but also to different countries as necessary. And just as the trade

allegedly flourished with the complicity of some linked to the Malian state,

it is difficult to imagine that illicit trade could continue in

government-controlled areas without some level of official support or

acquiescence. After all, as noted in the recent UNODC report, "smuggling is

often accomplished not by stealth, but by corruption."

 

Some sources allege that members of the Malian military, as well as

officials close to the current military junta, are linked to the trade,

either as active participants or via relatives whose activities they

tolerate. Last August, journalists revealed that several European men

believed to have helped organize the "Air Cocaine" incident had been quietly

freed from prison.

 

One night in Bamako, as my conversation with a Timbuktu Arab notable drew to

a close, I asked him if the drug trade would come back to Mali once the

situation stabilizes and French forces pull away from the north. His

response was matter-of-fact: "Of course it will!" The only way to make a

dent in the trade and the problems it causes, he said, was to "clean up all

of this administration" -- the security services, the government in Bamako,

and the system of rule that characterized northern Mali under Touré. And

that is a problem that goes far beyond al-Qaeda.

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