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THE FAR West DruG MeTAGROUP DruGs, MANAGED VIOLENCE AND THE RUSSIAN 9/11 MetAGROUP THE FAR WEST DRUG Drucs, MANAGED VIOLENCE AND THE RUSSIAN 9/11 The international illegal drug trade serves not only the political and economic objectives of the drug traffic but the state itself, including powerful interests in the USA and Russia. Part 1 of 2 Violence and the Political Requirements of the Global Drug Traffic n the last three decades, three important facts have emerged about the international drug traffic. The first is that it is both huge and growing. Narcotics are estimated to be worth between [US]$500 billion and $1 trillion a year, an amount, according to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in remarks to a United Nations General Assembly session in June 2003, that is greater than the global oil and gas industry, and twice as large as the overall automobile industry.' The second is that it is both worldwide and, above all, "highly integrated"? At global drug summits, such as the one in Armenia in 1993, representatives of the Sicilian Mafia, the Brighton Beach Organizatsiya and Colombian drug lords have worked out a common modus operandi, with the laundering of dirty money entrusted chiefly to the lawless Russian banks.* The third important fact, undeniable since the 1980 US intervention in Afghanistan, is that governments with global pretensions will avail themselves, in pursuit of their own political ends, of the resources, both financial and political, of the drug traffic. It was striking in the 1980s that the CIA, in its choice of Afghan mujahedin leaders to back against the Soviet Union, passed over those with indigenous support in favour of those— notably, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—who dominated the heroin trade. The result was to enhance Hekmatyar's power until he became a leading heroin trafficker, not just in Afghanistan but in the world.* Three more important features of the global drug traffic have been less noticed; thus, although I regard them as facts, I shall refer to them not as facts but as propositions to be tested against evidence. The first proposition is that the highly integrated drug traffic industry, in addition to serving the political ends of world powers, has its own political as well as economic objectives. It requires that in major growing areas there must be limited state control—a condition most easily reached by fostering regional rebellion and warfare, often fought by its own private armies. This is the ongoing situation of designed violence in every major growing area from Lebanon to Myanmar, Colombia to Afghanistan. All of these countries have been labelled "failing states", or (the term preferred by political scientists) "anocracies".* Once the local power of drug armies was enough in itself to neutralise the imposition of state authority. But today there are increasing signs that those at the highest level of the drug traffic will plot with the leaders of major states to ensure, or even to stage, violence that serves the power of the state and the industry alike. Thanks to extensive research in Russia, we now have initial evidence of a second and even more significant proposition: that there exists on the global level a drug meta-group, able to manipulate the resources of the drug traffic for its own political and business ends without being at risk for actual trafficking. These ends include the creation of designed violence to serve the purposes of cabals in political power—most conspicuously in the case of the Yeltsin "family" in the Kremlin, but allegedly, according to Russian sources, also for those currently in power in the United States. One piece of evidence for this consists in a meeting which took place in July 1999 in southern France near Nice, at the villa in Beaulieu of arms merchant Adnan Khashoggi, once called "the richest man in the world". Those at the meeting included a member of the Yeltsin cabal in the Kremlin and four representatives from the meta-group, with by Peter Dale Scott, PhD © October 2005 - January 2006 Website: http://www. peterdalescott.net JUNE — JULY 2006 NEXUS #25 www.nexusmagazine.com