The booming narcotics trade via West Africa is a ”shocking” problem that could further destabilise fragile states in the region, a senior official at the US military command for Africa said on Wednesday.
Mary Carlin Yates, Africom’s deputy commander for civil-military activities, said the US military was training local navies to help cut off the heavily plied drug smuggling routes from Latin America via Africa to Europe.
”It is shocking what is happening,” Yates, who returned from a tour of the region last week, said in an interview in Berlin where she was attending a conference.
”It is gargantuan and growing. Of course the less stable the nation is, the easier it is to destabilise.”
Yates said the value of narcotics sent via West Africa waters to Europe had doubled every year since 2005 to reach nearly $2-billion in 2008.
She said the ”tragedies” of the assassinations of the army chief of staff and then the president of Guinea-Bissau in early March had served as a wake-up call on the corrosive effect of drug trafficking on regional stability.
Guinea-Bissau has been wracked by coups and political unrest since gaining independence from Portugal in 1974.
In recent years the country has achieved notoriety as a transit point for the cocaine trade between South America and Europe, raising the stakes in long-running power feuds between political and military leaders.
”There are definitely leaders and there are people in the country that don’t want to turn their nation over to the drug traffickers,” she said.
”Because these drug traffickers are not West African, the traffickers are coming from Latin America.”
Yates said Africom, which was launched in October to prevent conflicts and bolster security on the continent, had an eye on Guinea as another country that could be vulnerable.
She said the African Partnership Station, an international initiative developed by the US military, had sent a large transport ship to six or seven port of calls in the region for periods of two to three weeks to train African navies in drug search-and-seizure operations.
”I think that we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us but we’re already well-started on that path,” she said.
Yates said the world’s focus on the piracy off the east coast of Africa had dramatically boosted the interest in training from US troops in other parts of the continent, particularly in countries with modest means.
”They’ve worked hard on maybe building an army, their armed forces, but they may be as vulnerable if not more vulnerable from the sea,” said Yates, a former ambassador to Ghana and Burundi who
is the only civilian deputy commander of a US joint command.
Yates, who will be leaving her post in May, said countries that had been sceptical at first about Africom’s motives such as South Africa and Nigeria were now beginning to accept a US joint command
committed to Africa.
She said the reception had grown warmer as it became clearer that Africom was not intended as a tool to militarise Africa or exploit its energy resources, and with the election of an African-American US president.
”We’ve made definite progress. This command thinks about the African continent and these nations 24/7,” she said.
There are no plans to move Africom’s headquarters from the south-western German city of Stuttgart, home to the US European command, before 2012 after a number of African countries last year declined to play host.
However the number of Africom personnel working from US embassies in Africa would continue to grow, Yates said. – AFP
