Drug Trafficking: a challenge for Central Asia

For many centuries, Central Asia was at the heart of the Great Silk Road serving as a link connecting Asia to Europe. Caravans of camels carrying goods rolled through its deserts and steppes from China and India to markets in Europe. The villages and towns located alongside the route flourished and its residents grew wealthier. Those glorious days are long gone, but the Great Silk Road is still in use. This time it is serving as an illicit drug trafficking route. Instead of eastern silk and spices, caravans of trucks now carry heroin, opium, and hashish and other narcotics from Afghanistan to Russia and onwards to Europe. Struck by plummeting living standards and grappling with social problems, the towns along the route are becoming homes to thousands of drug-addicts.
Trade in drugs is proliferating across the borders in Central Asia. Afghanistan remains the world’s largest producer and supplier of illicit opium and heroin. According to the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime Control (UNODCC), the country is the source of 70 percent of the global illicit opium production, and almost 100 percent of the opiates consumed in neighboring countries. Afghanistan also supplies over three quarters of the heroin sold in European markets, and almost all of it sold in Russian markets. The country is the main site for the production and trafficking of significant quantities of morphine base and hashish.
Concurrently with the rise of drugs production in Afghanistan, its immediate neighbors in the North – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan- are seeing a staggering rise in trafficking of opium and heroin en route to Russia and Western Europe. According to the 2002 Open Society Institute report, as much as half of all narcotics produced in Afghanistan may pass through the Central Asian states. The UNODC World Drug Report 2004 indicates that from 1997 to 2002, heroin seizures increased 137 percent throughout the region.
The Central Asian republics have long regarded the narcotics trade and trafficking as a peripheral problem. However, the rapid increase in drug abuse has become a national threat to the regional governments. As Central Asia is transforming itself from a transit region into a consumption region of heroin and other drugs, the spread of HIV/AIDS has reached enormous proportions because of intravenous drug users. Drug abuse also contributed to the rise in criminality and domestic violence. The authorities are also alarmed that the revenues from narcotics trade are going to the hands of the international terrorist groups.
The Central Asian governments, with the help of international donors, have devised various strategies and national programs to respond to challenges posed by drugs. They introduced new laws regulating drugs, set up border controls with new detection equipments, launched training programs for officials, and began to coordinate their activities amongst themselves. However, they faced criticism for poor performance. The authorities complain that difficult border terrain makes guarding against smuggling almost impossible. They also lamented about the shortage of funding for continuing border guard training and specialized equipment. Reports in local and international press indicate that these constraints have been only a part of the broader picture. The major cause of poor performance in drugs interdiction is the endemic corruption among government official and others who are actually charged with fighting the drug trade. Most critically, the Central Asian governments’ approach emphasized largely punitive rather than preventative measures that have often been directed against political opponents of the regimes instead of the drug mafias.


Author: Alisher Khamidov


Sommario

Introduction
Brief history of drugs trade
Realities of drug trafficking today
_ Main routes of trafficking in CA
_ Main methods of trafficking
_ Actors involved in drug trade
_ Drugs trafficking and HIV
Regional response to Drugs Trafficking
_ Central Asian Cooperation Organization (CACO)
_ Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)
_ Collective Security Treaty Organization
_ Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO)
Counter-narcotics efforts of the governments
International Responses
Conclusion