An unprecedented amount of narcotics was confiscated in Armenia last week. Chief of Armenian Police Alik Sargsyan said it had been smuggled into Armenia from Turkey.

Given a possible prospect of normalized relations between Turkey and Armenia, a question arises whether the country’s law-enforcement agencies are ready to control transnational crime in the event of the border opening, especially as concerns drug trafficking.

Chief of police Sargsyan said that those who think that the Armenian-Turkish border is now closed are deeply wrong. Attempts to smuggle narcotics from Turkey into Armenia are made even now, but police have enough reserves to keep the situation under control. He also said that the number of crimes committed by foreign citizens, on the whole, rose in 2009. The same is expected in 2010 and police, according to its chief, are ready to deal with this situation.

As is clear from the statements by the police chief, one should fear that Armenia may be used as an alternative route for transporting drugs, especially in the case of open borders with Turkey and Azerbaijan.

The annual report of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says that one of the main routes of drug trafficking to Europe passes via Afghanistan to Iran, from there to Azerbaijan, then via Georgia to Turkey. Turkey has become one of the drug centers of the region. Unprocessed heroin from Afghanistan is mainly processed in Turkey, and pure heroin is re-shipped to Europe. An estimated 93 percent of Europe’s narcotics market is under Turkey’s control.

It is remarkable that a number of main routes of drug trafficking to Europe lie through Azerbaijan. And beginning in the middle of the 1990s Azerbaijan has periodically “reported” to international organizations that drug trafficking was being implemented through Karabakh. In February 2009, coordinator of the South Caucasus Anti-Drug program (SCAD) in Azerbaijan Mazahir Efendiyev said: “Mini-laboratories are operating in the occupied territories of Nagorno-Karabakh where people of Iranian origin prepare heroin of plants being grown there.”

Still in the late 1990s, Baku managed to get information about the alleged growing and dissemination of narcotics in Nagorno-Karabakh to be included in the annual report of the US State Department called the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report. But later, the estimations of the US State Department changed to reservations that information on drug trafficking was submitted by the government of Azerbaijan. Baku accompanied its accusations with claims about monitoring. However, when the Karabakh side set forth a similar demand of monitoring, urging international organizations to come and “check”, Azerbaijan thwarted the monitoring.

Accusations against Nagorno-Karabakh have not appeared in the US State Department’s reports since 2003.