Pubdate: Sun, 30 Sep 2001 Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution (GA) Copyright: 2001 Cox Interactive Media. Contact: http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/28 Author: Craig Nelson Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?203 (Terrorism) FIGHTING TERRORISM PUTS DENT IN DRUGS Border Seizures Rise As Traffickers Targeted Dushanbe, Tajikistan --- Expected military strikes against Afghanistan have sent fears rippling among some of the Bush administration's declared foes: illegal drug traffickers. The United Nations said seizures of opium and heroin along the Afghan-Tajik border have doubled since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That is an indication, it says, that drug traffickers are trying to empty their stocks before any fighting in Afghanistan disrupts business. Matthew Kahane, a senior U.N. official in the Tajik capital, said drug traffickers fear they will become targets of the administration's declared war against terrorism and those who fund it. "They assume the war on terrorism will target the financial bases of terrorism, and drugs is one of them," Kahane said in an interview. Afghanistan's ruling Taliban banned the growing of opium poppies last year as a sin against Islam. The ban helped Afghanistan win $43 million in emergency aid to help it deal with the effects of a prolonged drought. Still, enormous amounts of opium and heroin stockpiled before the ban continue to flow out of the country, most of it through Tajikistan and Russia on its way to Europe, U.N. and Tajik officials say. Since Sept. 11, confiscations of heroin in Tajikistan by Tajik and Russian border guards have doubled from three to six a week, with each seizure averaging between 110 and 176 pounds, Kahane said. He and other international narcotics experts think that the seizures account for roughly 10 percent of the overall trade. Most of the international attention on Afghanistan's narcotics trade has focused on the ruling Taliban and a feared merger between drugs and growing Islamic militancy in neighboring Central Asia. Until the Taliban's ban on poppy growing, Afghanistan produced three-quarters of the world's opium, with most of the heroin reaching Europe. Yet analysts and officials in Tajikistan say the lucrative business encompasses a wide range of participants, including Tajik officials, Russian troops and the Afghan rebel coalition whose anti-Taliban struggle last week received the public endorsement of President Bush. "Everyone feeds on it," said Muzaffar Olimov, director of the Orient Public Policy Center in Tajikistan. Both the Taliban and its rivals occupy territory used to cultivate poppy fields, and each controls sections of the frontier where processed heroin leaves the country, Olimov and U.N. officials said. About 16,000 Russian soldiers and border guards are based in this former Soviet Central Asian republic. They hold the main responsibility for monitoring Tajikistan's 1,000-mile border with neighboring Afghanistan. For this arid, mountainous country of 6 million people, the implications for the curtailment of the drug trade are potentially dire. Olimov and U.N. officials said the trafficking of heroin accounts for 20 percent to 30 percent of the economy of Tajikistan, where the per-capita income is less than $1 per day. Many poor Tajiks are employed as couriers to ferry heroin to Moscow aboard trains. Authorities in Tajikistan say couriers are paid up to $200 for each trip, or paid in kind with heroin. Women with children are particularly coveted as couriers because they are less subject to inspection and, if caught, routinely serve lighter jail sentences than men. Politically, analysts said, the drug trade helps knit together a fragile coalition government of poorly paid officials and military officers. Tajikistan's deputy prime minister earns $25 a month, for example, so the temptation to enter the illicit business is high. Last year, Tajikistan's ambassador to Kazakhstan was apprehended with more than 110 pounds of heroin. In a separate incident, Russian authorities found the narcotic in a diplomatic pouch to Moscow. For Olimov, the pervasiveness of the drug trade has crippled a country trying to recover from a devastating civil war in the 1990s and attempting to affirm its independence 10 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. "Drug trafficking is becoming a national tragedy for Tajikistan," he said. - --- MAP posted-by: Josh