ReconsiDer Tidbits

From the Ottawa Citizen, September 14, 2001.  Dan Gardner of the Citizen
will be doing further research on this, so there will likely be more
detailed articles over time.

Terrorists get cash from drug trade
Trafficking prime source of funds for many groups

By Dan Gardner

In response to this week's terrorist attacks in the United States, U.S.
Secretary of State Colin Powell told a news conference Wednesday that "we
have to make sure that we go after terrorism and get it by its branch and
root."

Mr. Powell meant his comment to be a warning to states that support
terrorists. But the evil of terrorism has another root: money. Terrorist
groups may be forged by people holding fanatical beliefs, but their
operations still need material support. Weapons have to be bought, training
financed, travel paid for, bribes offered and terrorists sheltered. Even
zealots need cash.

"It used to be that the terrorism was funded by nation states, particularly
the old Soviet Union," said John Thompson of the Mackenzie Institute, a
Canadian think tank studying terrorism and organized crime. "But as the
Soviet Union weakened in the 1980s, more and more insurgent groups,
terrorist groups, started to resort to organized criminal activities to pay
their bills."

There are still a few state sponsors left, Mr. Thompson notes, although today
they try to hide that support. These include North Korea, Iraq and Syria.
And in some countries, such as Pakistan and India, officials "within a
state, without the state's knowledge, use their offices to fund terrorism."
A very few wealthy individuals fund terrorism with their personal fortunes.
Osama bin Laden, a prime suspect in Tuesday's attacks, is one such
benefactor. His wealth comes from the construction industry and, although
his assets were frozen a couple of years ago, Mr. Thompson believes he was
able to spirit out "several tens of millions" of dollars.

Another common source of cash for terrorists is money raised among
expatriates. The Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka are thought to derive much of
their funding from donations by Tamils living elsewhere, including Canada.
Sometimes those donations are voluntary, but often terrorist groups will
raise funds through fake charities, or extort them by threat.

But these sources of funding are not the bread and butter of terrorism, Mr.
Thompson said. "The big money earner for most of them seems to be
narcotics."

Law enforcement agencies agree. In 1994, Interpol's chief drugs officer,
Iqbal Hussain Rizvi, admitted that "drugs have taken over as the chief means
of financing terrorism."

After the fall of the Soviet Union, terrorists quickly moved into the
business that offers bigger, faster profits than any other.
In Northern Ireland, both Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries traffic
drugs to pay for weapons.

In Kosovo, "the creation of the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) was financed by
intense heroin trafficking from Istanbul," Alain Labrousse, the head of
Observatoire français des drogues et des toxicomanies, a French organization
that studies drugs, recently testified before a Canadian Senate committee.
"The heroin was sold in Switzerland to buy Kalashnikovs and handguns."
In Peru and Colombia, leftist rebels have tapped into the illicit trade in
cocaine and heroin to finance their activities. The leader of right-wing
paramilitaries in Colombia recently admitted that they get 70 per cent of
their funding from the illegal drug trade.

In his presentation to the Senate committee, Mr. Labrousse presented a list
of countries in which armed insurgents have been financed to some degree by
the black market in drugs. There were 29 nations in all.

Just how much of a group's financing comes from drugs varies widely, Mr.
Thompson said. "With the Islamic fundamentalists, (it is) maybe 25 to 30 per
cent. It's probably the single biggest money earner."

The drugs trafficked by Islamic terrorists include marijuana from Lebanon,
but more commonly they distribute heroin. Afghanistan is one of the largest
growers of opium poppies, the source of heroin.

Even Osama bin Laden may have his hands in the drug trade. According to a
Russian report, Mr. bin Laden has bankrolled Chechen gunmen in Dagestan with
funds generated from heroin trafficking.

The importance of illegal drugs to the financing of terrorism raises an
obvious question. If illegal drugs are the single largest source of funding
for terrorism, can you hurt terrorism by legalizing drugs?
"Probably," John Thompson said. "In fact I think you could hurt it
considerably."

Drug policy activists have long argued that by banning drugs and putting them
into the black market, Western nations have fuelled mayhem.
"We have to look at the ways that our drug policies are enriching terrorist
organizations just the way that they're enriching organized crime," said
Eugene Oscapella, an Ottawa lawyer and a founding member of the Canadian
Foundation for Drug Policy.

So far, that reconsideration hasn't happened. The G8 and the United Nations
have discussed the problem of terrorist financing over the past several
years, but they have never discussed drug prohibition in that light. The G8
went so far as to explicitly refuse to talk about drug legalization.
Instead, they have focused on fundraising among expatriate communities and
other, lesser sources of financing.

Yesterday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair insisted that in striking back
at terrorism, the West would have to cut off the money that pays for
terrorist atrocities.

There's little question that the drive against terrorism will be sweeping,
taking in all the "roots and branches," including financing. But Mr.
Thompson doesn't expect world governments to seriously consider whether they
might cut off much of the money flowing into terrorist hands by abolishing
drug prohibition.

"This is a sacred cow. It's going to be hard to kill."