IRIN Focus on the dangers of cross-border crime

//This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations// LAGOS, 30 October (IRIN) - Born 29 years ago in Lagos, Osaro Achidi left the Nigerian commercial capital at the age of 10 years when his parents moved to Cotonou in neighbouring Republic of Benin. By the time he was 20, he was fluent in Yoruba, Edo, French and English. It was about this time, too, that he became involved in crime, specialising in stealing luxury cars and four-wheel drives from oil-rich Nigeria and taking them across the western border. Cars Achidi and his gang stole were either recycled in West Africa, or taken across the Sahara Desert into North Africa and occasionally as far as central Europe, he revealed during his trial. Achidi’s arrest in 2001 and his conviction early this year represented a tiny battle won by the Nigerian security agencies in what has become a major war on cross-border crime. The trails used by car thieves are the same favoured by narcotics and arms dealers as well as traffickers of women and children, police sources said. "Nigeria’s entire border areas with Benin, Niger, Chad and Cameroon, and even the over 500 kilometres of Atlantic coast, are all fair game to these criminals," a senior police official told IRIN. “And all the security agencies are having to rise up to the challenge.” The Nigerian Customs Service recently reported that it had intercepted small arms and ammunition worth more than 4.3 billion naira (US $34.1 million) on their way into the country in the first six months of this year. A lot had come through the border with Benin, and was being brought into Nigeria either overland or by sea - in small boats. Equally active in this respect are the northern borders with Niger, Chad and Cameroon. The upsurge in the traffic of weapons has been linked by Nigerian analysts to the creation of private armies by politicians desperate to secure power in general elections due early in 2003. But the weapons more often than not end up in the hands of criminals who use them for their own activities. In parts of northeastern Nigeria, the movement of people and arms across borders has created severe security problems in recent years. Large bands of gunmen, remnants of rebel wars in Niger and Chad in the last decade, have slipped into Nigeria where they have become bandits, making major highways and many isolated towns and villages unsafe. In recent times police reports indicate that some of these gunmen from neighbouring countries have become involved as mercenaries in an ethno-religious crisis rocking the central state of Plateau. A number of them have been captured fighting on the side of herdsmen against local farming communities in some Plateau districts. Nigeria's northern border areas are also frequently used by car thieves and the criminal rings that specialise in trafficking young women through North Africa to Europe, where they work as prostitutes. The area along Nigeria's southeastern border with Cameroon has been identified over the years as one favoured by child traffickers. Studies conducted by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) indicate that coastal and border towns in the southeastern states of Cross River, Akwa Ibom and Rivers are frequently used as staging points by child-trafficking rings for moving children, mostly by sea, to destinations including Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon. "There are many cases of children and young women taken from Togo, Benin and other West African countries, who are brought into Nigeria and moved to the southeast areas," Chinwe Okonji, a researcher who has investigated child trafficking, told IRIN. "Through coastal and border towns such as Eastern Obolo, Eket, Ibeno, Ikom and Oron, they are transported mostly by sea to the recipient countries." Security agencies in Nigeria and other regional countries have in recent years become alert to the variety of cross-border criminal activities and the dangers they pose to national and regional security. Early counter-measures have included a moratorium on the manufacture, import and sale of small arms that was adopted by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in 1998. Early this year President Olusegun Obasanjo set up a national committee to implement the ECOWAS moratorium. Joint border patrols have been established with the security agencies of Benin and Niger. Similar arrangements are also being negotiated with Chad and Cameroon. Since the 11 September terrorist attacks in the United States security experts are beginning to see global ramifications to cross-border criminal activities and the possibility that they could be exploited by terrorists. This was the subject of a workshop sponsored by the United States in the northern town of Katsina in September, involving officials from the police, customs, immigration and state security services. A senior Nigerian security official said afterwards: "What we have realised from recent events is that cross-border criminal activities pose one of the gravest dangers to our national security". [ENDS]