Asian nations risk becoming new narcotics outposts: UN
Asian nations risk becoming new narcotics outposts: UN
YANGON (AFP): More Asian nations must join in the region's fight against the burgeoning narcotics trade or risk becoming new outposts for traffickers, United Nations officials said on Thursday.
Senior officials from Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam are holding talks here this week aimed at improving cross-border cooperation on drug control strategies.
The United Nations Drug Control Programme (UNDCP) said the six nations represented East and Southeast Asia's major trafficking and production centers, responsible for more than 75 percent of the world's amphetamine seizures last year.
But the agency's law enforcement advisor Yngve Danling said neighboring countries were fast becoming new outposts of the narcotics industry.
Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines were being targeted under a new plan to stamp out the illicit business, he said. "We have to strengthen the capacity of vulnerable neighboring countries to prevent domestic and regional trafficking."
Danling said the UNDCP would focus on improving the skills of key anti-drug personnel and try to educate the general public in those countries, which he said were also producers of chemicals used to manufacture illicit drugs.
"We've also learned recently that there is great interest for other ASEAN countries (to cooperate)... Singapore and Brunei have expressed their interest," Danling said.
The senior officials are holding three days of preparatory discussions here ahead of a meeting Friday of their home ministers who will approve new drug-control strategies.
The six nations are all signatories to a 1993 pact which bound them to work together in the war on drugs by reducing demand, boosting law enforcement and encouraging crop substitution.
Their ministers meet every two years to evaluate the progress of cross-border anti-narcotics projects and approve new initiatives devised by the UNDCP.
UNDCP officials will unveil two new projects in Yangon this week. The first hinges on cross-border law enforcement cooperation and improving nations' capabilities to act against traffickers.
The second is a broad-ranging public awareness campaign, said UNDCP regional representative Sandro Calvani.
Calvani said the awareness drive would publicize the gritty details of regional drug trafficking while examining the drug problem without being quick to pass judgment.
"We want to try to have a better awareness program, to get away from the simplistic approach that drugs are bad and people should be punished, or in some places that people should be hanged," Calvani told AFP.
"We want to show the complexity of the problem."
At the opening of the meeting Wednesday, Calvani said the scourge of narcotics trafficking had spread from country to country and that a coordinated response was necessary.
"You squeeze the balloon somewhere, it will reappear somewhere else. I am confident that if we squeeze the balloon in all six countries, it will soon deflate and the criminals' illicit business will collapse," he said.
He added that today's drug traffickers were "inventive, fast, innovative, daring and have very clear ideas and objectives" and that anti-drug agencies could not continue using traditional methods of fighting them.
Following the meeting on Saturday the Myanmar hosts -- who have been roundly criticized for turning a blind eye to drug manufacturing within their borders -- will incinerate a stockpile of drugs in a ceremonial burning.