Pubdate: Mon,  8 Jul 2002
Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Copyright: 2002 San Jose Mercury News
Contact:  http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/390
Author: Dexter Filkins, New York Times

DRUG LINK ARISES IN SLAYING PROBE

Assassinated Afghan V.P. Handled Anti-Opium Program

KABUL, Afghanistan - As Afghans around the country mourned the killing of a 
vice president, Afghan officials said Sunday that they were investigating 
the possibility he had been killed by drug lords who had been 
double-crossed during a Western-backed campaign to destroy the country's 
poppy crop.

Haji Abdul Qadir, who was shot and killed Saturday, had been overseeing the 
Western-financed campaign, which began in April, to root out the poppy crop 
in the country. Afghan officials have been paying poppy farmers about $500 
per acre to destroy their plants.

A senior Afghan official said Sunday that Qadir had recently complained 
that the money was not being distributed to the farmers even though they 
were bowing to his demand to uproot their poppies. The Afghan official said 
Qadir's efforts, coupled with the failure to pay certain farmers, might 
have enraged powerful members of the country's opium trade. Those drug 
lords, the Afghan official said, might have decided to take revenge.

"In some instances, there were problems with the flow of the money; there 
were people who didn't get any," the Afghan official said. "That was a 
concern to Qadir. That is why it is now a concern to us."

Qadir, a wealthy businessman from Jalalabad, had long been suspected of 
enriching himself through involvement in the opium trade. Some Afghans 
speculated that Qadir might have made enemies by favoring one drug lord 
over another.

In the weeks before his death, Qadir had complained to others in Kabul 
about his predicament, and he acknowledged his problems in an interview 
after he was sworn in as one of the country's vice presidents late last 
month. At the time, Qadir said an Afghan organization designated to dole 
out the Western money to poppy farmers had kept it instead. But Qadir 
indicated that the problem had been resolved.

The Afghan organization "stole the money," Qadir said. "They stopped 
distributing the money, but now they will distribute it."

Qadir's troubles came to light a day after a pair of gunmen shot and killed 
him in his car as he left his office in downtown Kabul. The killers 
escaped, and the police detained 10 government guards for failing to 
prevent the attack or to chase his assailants.

Karzai was relying on Qadir, an ethnic Pashtun, to coax members of that 
ethnic group, the country's largest, into supporting the government. While 
Karzai is himself an ethnic Pashtun, the government he heads is dominated 
by ethnic Tajiks, who led the resistance against the Taliban.

Qadir's long involvement in the cutthroat world of Afghan politics ensured 
that he had many enemies. He fought against the Taliban, but he belonged to 
a political party that once gave shelter to Osama bin Laden. As he emerged 
as the governor of Nangarhar province after the rout of the Taliban, he 
angered many of his rivals.

The prevailing feeling, among the residents as well as the city's 
protectors, was that Qadir's death was probably more related to Qadir 
himself than to some enemy conspiracy hatched by the likes of the Taliban 
or Al-Qaida.

Any and all of Qadir's faults seemed forgotten Sunday, as Afghans poured 
into the streets of Kabul and Jalalabad, his home, to bid him farewell. The 
funeral began in the morning, when his flag-draped coffin was carried atop 
an artillery piece through the streets of Kabul, accompanied by a line of 
soldiers and a military band. The troops, dressed in wrinkled Soviet-era 
uniforms and carrying ancient bolt-action rifles, goose-stepped for a time 
and then gave up, and the music rose and fell away.

Two of Qadir's Bay Area nephews, Harun Arsalai, 20, of Hayward, and Khushal 
Arsala, 31, of Union City, remembered the slain vice president as a 
courageous man.

"These things have been going on before I was born," Arsalai said. "Two of 
my uncles have disappeared in recent years, it's almost like I'm getting 
used to it."

Qadir was the brother of legendary Afghan commander Abdul Haq, whom the 
Taliban executed last year.

Arsala who last saw his uncle six years ago, said "it is a great loss for 
us personally and for the country."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Alex