Jabberwocky
Frumious Bandersnatch
- Joined
- Nov 3, 1999
- Messages
- 84,998
THE Pearl River Delta in southern China is a place with a beautiful name and a deadly reputation. Most of the world’s methamphetamine is produced here and Australia pays the highest prices for meth anywhere. We are the crime syndicates’ favourite market.
This week, Justice Minister Michael Keenan paid a visit to his counterpart in Beijing’s Ministry of Public Security before heading south to talk to anti-narcotics police who are working in alliance with Australian Federal Police to limit the flood of meth, or ice, being shipped and mailed to Australia.
The trip marked the one-year anniversary of Taskforce Blaze, an unprecedented intelligence-sharing operation between Australia and China that has so far prevented six tonnes of drugs from hitting the streets of both countries.
Blaze has in the last 12 months seen 1.7 tonnes of ice and ephedrine seized within Australia, and another 4.3 tonnes of meth, liquid meth, ecstasy, precursor chemicals and ephedrine stopped at its source in China. “It’s literally worth billions,” says Keenan.
It’s an outstanding result that’s come out of an understanding that has seen the notoriously private Chinese police allow the Australian Federal Police to operate in its country, and share its intelligence.
“We are the only western police force that has this arrangement,” says Keenan, who is clearly proud that China holds Australian police in sufficient regard to grant them access to its anti-narco operations.
Justice Minister Michael Keenan has arranged unusual levels of co-operation with Chinese authorities
“We’re friendly countries, but traditionally we haven’t worked as closely or as cooperatively (with China as we have with) some other countries. And that’s why this is a significant breakthrough that other countries are looking at and saying, ‘We want that’.”
In Beijing, Keenan attended formal meetings that resulted in a commitment to keep Blaze going, but it is further south in the Guangdong province, home to the giant cargo cities of Guangzhou (formerly Canton) and Shenzhen, where the work is being done.
Both cities are located on the Pearl River, just north of the autonomous province of Hong Kong. In Guangzhou, the southern region’s anti-narcotics joint taskforce boss Deng Jian-Wei welcomed Keenan by clearing the streets so his delegation could travel at speed — an honour usually reserved for heads of state.
“Call me Blaze brother,” said Deng, also proud of the alliance with Australia. “Australia is a consumer market for the drugs, and Guangdong province is a supplier. By working together, we will be able to dismantle the syndicates.”
That is ambitious. They never will dismantle the syndicates — but China, which at official level is prickly about the drug-manufacturing free-for-all that occurs in the Pearl River Delta, is nonetheless trying to do something about it.
The benefit of Taskforce Blaze is that Deng’s cops and the AFP no longer need to waste time negotiating at the political level for access to each other’s operations.
China already cooperates with a handful of other nations on one-off operations, but under the Blaze agreement, Beijing has cleared all obstacles so that no time is wasted and the two countries can work on operations together, in real-time.
The Justice Minister Michael Keenan met with China's Minister for Public Security, Mr Guo Shengkunduring his visit.
In Guangzhou, Deng laid out a display for Keenan. It was a huge stockpile of seized meth, worth hundreds of millions of dollars (no one could put an exact figure on it).
But Deng points out that Taskforce Blaze is not just about Australia: he estimates in his province there are 600,000 meth addicts.
“What’s in it for the Chinese is that they’ve got a drug problem, too,” says Keenan. “They want to break the distribution networks peddling it. Their goal isn’t any different from ours. They are police and they want to do their job of cracking these gangs.”
Part of the Australian government’s strategy has been to send the AFP agents into the world, to set up missions to build partnerships to get inside terror and drug networks. They have had little trouble placing agents in the Middle East or North America or parts of South-East Asia.
“But for us to get a joint taskforce with the Chinese is a whole other step,” says Keenan.
Triads is these days an outdated term. Right now, Chinese and Australian police are targeting West Africans — namely Nigerians — who in the last three years have positioned themselves to become the main group pushing meth into Australia.
There are 300,000 West Africans living legally in Guangzhou and another 100,000 living there illegally.
It seems a strange thing that highly visible Africans could use southern China as such a staging ground for meth distribution. But cities such as Guangzhou and Shenzhen are major trade intersections, home to hundreds of thousands of world citizens, legal and otherwise. They are there to capitalise on the China boom, and drugs are an easy survival income.
West Africans source the meth from factories in the Pearl River Delta, and distribute via ordinary mail or cargo ships — or they first move it across the region, to Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia and Malaysia, giving themselves multiple points to try and ram the drugs into Australia.
Even small operations “the size of a dunny” can churn out millions of dollars in illegal drugs. Picture: Gary RamageSource:News Corp Australia
They will sell in any market, but it’s Australia they want. The Nigerians are masters of identity fraud who have embedded themselves deeply in Australia, where they provide “shore parties” who await shipments of meth by ship or mail.
“We know that west African distribution networks are active in Australia as they are in other parts of the world,” says Keenan. “[Australia] is the world’s most lucrative drug market. It’s a honey pot and it’s pulling them in.”
As we motor south in convoy from Guangzhou to Shenzhen, it becomes apparent how difficult it will be to ever make a serious dent in the drug trade.
This place is the new cradle of civilisation, the one that makes the United States tremble. The growth is explosive. On the 180km freeway drive between the two cities on the Pearl River, all that can be seen out of either window is a seamless barrage of modern accommodation towers and choking factories.
This is the place we all hear about but can never quite fathom until you see it. Here, talk of “the Asian century” suddenly makes sense. Our cities seem small and slightly quaint in comparison to this region which is on an unstoppable march forward to a destination with no arrival point.
There’s no rust-belt here, and no room for stragglers. Communism exists as a tool of control at the highest levels but is not visible in the highly commercialised cities.
Running roughly parallel to the freeway south is the Pearl River, a major artery for cargo that has 200 government-run and private ports. Stopping illegal cargo — or even thinking it can be stopped — requires a great deal of imagination and optimism.
The opportunities to conduct quick-money covert drug-cooking activities in this region — you can get unimaginably wealthy with clapped out equipment that occupies the space of a — in a place half-buried beneath the pressing smog, are too numerous to imagine.
The drug manufacturers look like any other company, and operate just like any business. A kilo of meth sells for US$5000 in the Pearl River Delta and when it lands at the Australian border for collection by criminals it has increased to between A$80,000 to $100,000. Once cut up and sold on the streets, its value is up to A$700,000.
Seventy per cent of the drugs that enter Australia are sourced from the delta. Taskforce Blaze won’t all be clean sailing. Since the Bali Nine, the AFP can no longer pass information to another country that will lead to Australians facing the death penalty.
The AFP — we are assured — will not exchange information with China that would be as specific as: “Tomorrow, we know an Australian citizen will collect 10kg of meth in Shenzhen and ship it to Australia.” Anything over 50 grams attracts the death penalty in China.
The information Australia provides, therefore, is a pretty clear outline — such as phone numbers, names — that will give the Chinese authorities enough information to do the last stage of the legwork and affect arrests.
The Australians are excited that China is now providing information that will allow them to target suspects in Australia. They never imagined that 12 months after Taskforce Blaze kicked off they’d be able to say they’d helped stop six tonnes hitting the market.
Source: http://www.news.com.au/world/asia/i...e/news-story/c30d17f27ee697fa9739e47a3b7b301d
This week, Justice Minister Michael Keenan paid a visit to his counterpart in Beijing’s Ministry of Public Security before heading south to talk to anti-narcotics police who are working in alliance with Australian Federal Police to limit the flood of meth, or ice, being shipped and mailed to Australia.
The trip marked the one-year anniversary of Taskforce Blaze, an unprecedented intelligence-sharing operation between Australia and China that has so far prevented six tonnes of drugs from hitting the streets of both countries.
Blaze has in the last 12 months seen 1.7 tonnes of ice and ephedrine seized within Australia, and another 4.3 tonnes of meth, liquid meth, ecstasy, precursor chemicals and ephedrine stopped at its source in China. “It’s literally worth billions,” says Keenan.
It’s an outstanding result that’s come out of an understanding that has seen the notoriously private Chinese police allow the Australian Federal Police to operate in its country, and share its intelligence.
“We are the only western police force that has this arrangement,” says Keenan, who is clearly proud that China holds Australian police in sufficient regard to grant them access to its anti-narco operations.
Justice Minister Michael Keenan has arranged unusual levels of co-operation with Chinese authorities
“We’re friendly countries, but traditionally we haven’t worked as closely or as cooperatively (with China as we have with) some other countries. And that’s why this is a significant breakthrough that other countries are looking at and saying, ‘We want that’.”
In Beijing, Keenan attended formal meetings that resulted in a commitment to keep Blaze going, but it is further south in the Guangdong province, home to the giant cargo cities of Guangzhou (formerly Canton) and Shenzhen, where the work is being done.
Both cities are located on the Pearl River, just north of the autonomous province of Hong Kong. In Guangzhou, the southern region’s anti-narcotics joint taskforce boss Deng Jian-Wei welcomed Keenan by clearing the streets so his delegation could travel at speed — an honour usually reserved for heads of state.
“Call me Blaze brother,” said Deng, also proud of the alliance with Australia. “Australia is a consumer market for the drugs, and Guangdong province is a supplier. By working together, we will be able to dismantle the syndicates.”
That is ambitious. They never will dismantle the syndicates — but China, which at official level is prickly about the drug-manufacturing free-for-all that occurs in the Pearl River Delta, is nonetheless trying to do something about it.
The benefit of Taskforce Blaze is that Deng’s cops and the AFP no longer need to waste time negotiating at the political level for access to each other’s operations.
China already cooperates with a handful of other nations on one-off operations, but under the Blaze agreement, Beijing has cleared all obstacles so that no time is wasted and the two countries can work on operations together, in real-time.
The Justice Minister Michael Keenan met with China's Minister for Public Security, Mr Guo Shengkunduring his visit.
In Guangzhou, Deng laid out a display for Keenan. It was a huge stockpile of seized meth, worth hundreds of millions of dollars (no one could put an exact figure on it).
But Deng points out that Taskforce Blaze is not just about Australia: he estimates in his province there are 600,000 meth addicts.
“What’s in it for the Chinese is that they’ve got a drug problem, too,” says Keenan. “They want to break the distribution networks peddling it. Their goal isn’t any different from ours. They are police and they want to do their job of cracking these gangs.”
Part of the Australian government’s strategy has been to send the AFP agents into the world, to set up missions to build partnerships to get inside terror and drug networks. They have had little trouble placing agents in the Middle East or North America or parts of South-East Asia.
“But for us to get a joint taskforce with the Chinese is a whole other step,” says Keenan.
Triads is these days an outdated term. Right now, Chinese and Australian police are targeting West Africans — namely Nigerians — who in the last three years have positioned themselves to become the main group pushing meth into Australia.
There are 300,000 West Africans living legally in Guangzhou and another 100,000 living there illegally.
It seems a strange thing that highly visible Africans could use southern China as such a staging ground for meth distribution. But cities such as Guangzhou and Shenzhen are major trade intersections, home to hundreds of thousands of world citizens, legal and otherwise. They are there to capitalise on the China boom, and drugs are an easy survival income.
West Africans source the meth from factories in the Pearl River Delta, and distribute via ordinary mail or cargo ships — or they first move it across the region, to Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia and Malaysia, giving themselves multiple points to try and ram the drugs into Australia.
Even small operations “the size of a dunny” can churn out millions of dollars in illegal drugs. Picture: Gary RamageSource:News Corp Australia
They will sell in any market, but it’s Australia they want. The Nigerians are masters of identity fraud who have embedded themselves deeply in Australia, where they provide “shore parties” who await shipments of meth by ship or mail.
“We know that west African distribution networks are active in Australia as they are in other parts of the world,” says Keenan. “[Australia] is the world’s most lucrative drug market. It’s a honey pot and it’s pulling them in.”
As we motor south in convoy from Guangzhou to Shenzhen, it becomes apparent how difficult it will be to ever make a serious dent in the drug trade.
This place is the new cradle of civilisation, the one that makes the United States tremble. The growth is explosive. On the 180km freeway drive between the two cities on the Pearl River, all that can be seen out of either window is a seamless barrage of modern accommodation towers and choking factories.
This is the place we all hear about but can never quite fathom until you see it. Here, talk of “the Asian century” suddenly makes sense. Our cities seem small and slightly quaint in comparison to this region which is on an unstoppable march forward to a destination with no arrival point.
There’s no rust-belt here, and no room for stragglers. Communism exists as a tool of control at the highest levels but is not visible in the highly commercialised cities.
Running roughly parallel to the freeway south is the Pearl River, a major artery for cargo that has 200 government-run and private ports. Stopping illegal cargo — or even thinking it can be stopped — requires a great deal of imagination and optimism.
The opportunities to conduct quick-money covert drug-cooking activities in this region — you can get unimaginably wealthy with clapped out equipment that occupies the space of a — in a place half-buried beneath the pressing smog, are too numerous to imagine.
The drug manufacturers look like any other company, and operate just like any business. A kilo of meth sells for US$5000 in the Pearl River Delta and when it lands at the Australian border for collection by criminals it has increased to between A$80,000 to $100,000. Once cut up and sold on the streets, its value is up to A$700,000.
Seventy per cent of the drugs that enter Australia are sourced from the delta. Taskforce Blaze won’t all be clean sailing. Since the Bali Nine, the AFP can no longer pass information to another country that will lead to Australians facing the death penalty.
The AFP — we are assured — will not exchange information with China that would be as specific as: “Tomorrow, we know an Australian citizen will collect 10kg of meth in Shenzhen and ship it to Australia.” Anything over 50 grams attracts the death penalty in China.
The information Australia provides, therefore, is a pretty clear outline — such as phone numbers, names — that will give the Chinese authorities enough information to do the last stage of the legwork and affect arrests.
The Australians are excited that China is now providing information that will allow them to target suspects in Australia. They never imagined that 12 months after Taskforce Blaze kicked off they’d be able to say they’d helped stop six tonnes hitting the market.
Source: http://www.news.com.au/world/asia/i...e/news-story/c30d17f27ee697fa9739e47a3b7b301d
