INCB calls for greater drug control compliance

The International Narcotics Board (INCB) has called on Turkmenistan to fully comply with its obligations under a number of international drug conventions to which it is a party. "There has been an improvement, but it is far from satisfactory," Beate Hammond, an INCB drug control officer, said from their headquarters in Vienna on Tuesday. Sharing over 700 km of common border with Afghanistan - the largest producer of illicit opium in the world today - those efforts were simply not enough, Hammond stressed, prompting the independent UN body monitoring global proliferation to call for more action. Until just recently, Turkmenistan had been the only country neigbouring Afghanistan which had not participated in Operation Topaz, an international monitoring operation launched by the INCB in 2001, focusing on acetic anhydride, a critical chemical ingredient used in the illicit manufacture of heroin. Additionally, Ashgabat had failed to participate in several regional drug control activities aimed at preventing illicit drugs and precursors from being smuggled through Central Asia. "They have now joined Operation Topaz, are submitting information which in the past they didn't, and have participated in a number of regional cooperation activities which was also not the case in the past," the INCB official noted. "However, there are several areas where their compliance is far from being exemplary," she asserted, citing a number of international drug agreements Ashgabat was a signatory to, but had failed to implement. "Their compliance is not fully satisfactory yet, but on the other hand we do see that some progress has been made," she repeated. Earlier, the INCB had been particularly critical of the largely desert, but energy-rich state, something which appears to have been resolved. "There was a major problem, but this major problem has improved a little bit," Hammond said without elaborating. Following a mission to Turkmenistan in December 2003, the INCB, while communicating its findings and recommendations to the Turkmen authorities, expressed its dissatisfaction at the level of compliance being provided by Ashgabat, particularly taking into consideration its strategic geographical location. But the challenge of working with countries like Turkmenistan looks set to continue. According to a recent BBC report, in some countries in the region the trafficking problem was exacerbated - according to Svante Cornell at the Central Asia Caucasus Institute and others - by high-level collusion. "The circumstantial evidence [of this] is simply overwhelming," Cornell reportedly said. In Turkmenistan, a secretive country which had refused to provide any information on drugs to the UN in the past five years, the situation had been unclear. But there had been anecdotal evidence that it had been involved in trafficking at the highest levels, Cornell claimed.