Pubdate: Tue, 26 Apr 2005
Source: Oklahoman, The (OK)
Copyright: 2005 The Oklahoma Publishing Co.
Contact:  http://www.oklahoman.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/318
Author: Associated Press
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/afghanistan

AFGHAN FARMERS DEFY U.S. OPIUM CLAMPDOWN

MAYWAND, Afghanistan -- Afghan farmers have begun harvesting this
year's opium crop, exposing the limits of a U.S.-sponsored crackdown on the
world's largest narcotics industry despite claims Tuesday by President Hamid
Karzai that drug cultivation was down sharply.

The sobering harvest news came a day after the arrest in the United
States of an Afghan accused of being one of the world's biggest heroin
traffickers and of close ties to the ousted Taliban regime.

On Tuesday morning, farmers could be seen gathering resin from opium
poppies near the main road through the southern province of Kandahar,
a key growing region belatedly targeted by American-trained
eradication teams.

"Now, even if we do our best, we cannot eradicate it all," in
Kandahar, Gen. Mohammed Daoud, deputy interior minister for
counter-narcotics, told The Associated Press. "It is a bad example for
the other provinces and will make our job much harder."

Production of opium, the raw material for heroin, has boomed since the
fall of the Taliban in 2001. Last year, cultivation reached a record
323,700 acres, yielding nearly 80 percent of world supply and buoying
the economy.

Karzai last year called for a "holy war" on a trade he says could make
Afghanistan an international pariah. Farmers in some areas have
switched to wheat, partly for fear of eradication, and Karzai said
Tuesday that U.N. and British government surveys showed cultivation
was down by 30 to 40 percent.

But U.N. drug experts have cautioned that cultivation is shifting to
more remote areas and rebounding opium prices could encourage a
revival in planting next year.

Countries, including the United States and Britain, are pouring
hundreds of millions of dollars into the anti-drug campaign. The cash
is being used to train police units to destroy laboratories, arrest
smugglers and destroy opium crops, as well as to fund irrigation
systems and other agricultural projects to help farmers grow legal
crops.

The U.S. military has promised to provide intelligence on targets and
police have raided a string of laboratories in the north and east,
smashing equipment and seizing drug stocks.

But Afghan authorities have yet to make a high-profile arrest to match
the one announced Monday in New York, when Bashir Noorzai, an infamous
Afghan drug baron, was charged with trying to smuggle more than $50
million worth of heroin into the United States.

A U.S. prosecutor said Noorzai, 44, was arrested in New York, but
didn't elaborate.

Daoud said Bashir had moved between Pakistan and Dubai, though Maj.
Gen. Nadeem Ahmed, chief of Pakistan's Anti-Narcotics Force, said
intelligence reports earlier this year placed him in Afghanistan.

Both officials denied he had been detained in their territory.

Bashir was a "very big fish" still intimately involved in drug
smuggling and financing Taliban militants, Daoud said.

"The arrest was very good, but it was made abroad, and what we need is
for Afghan authorities to get active and make arrests," Daoud said.

He blamed the slow pace on sluggish legal reforms and said late
funding and reluctant governors had held up the eradication campaign.

Farmers complain they have seen little of the aid supposed to soften
the blow of stopping the lucrative drug trade, raising the prospect of
an anti-government backlash ahead of September parliamentary elections.

"Afghans are very hopeful for their future and confident about the
country, that it is going toward reconstruction," Karzai told
reporters in Kabul. "But the international community has great
responsibility (to help farmers), otherwise they have to return to
their old life."

On Tuesday, wide expanses of poppy were in full bloom along the main
road west out of Kandahar, and farmers were quietly gathering the
opium, which will likely end up as heroin sold on the streets in
countries such as Britain or Russia.

Mohammed Nahim, a 40-year-old working in the fields dotted with red
and white flowers near the town of Maywand, said he had cultivated
about 2 1/2 acres of land with poppy because no assistance had
materialized.

"A lot of money is coming for our farmers. But we didn't get a penny,
not one sack of wheat," Nahim told an AP reporter, clutching a black
plastic bag filled with thick opium paste from his poppy crop.

He said returns from opium were 10 times higher than from wheat and
were the only way to cover the cost of hired tractors and diesel to
pump water into his fields.

Nahim and his neighbors said they were very nervous about losing their
crops to the eradication teams so close to harvest time - a factor
that has contributed to violent clashes with farmers in Kandahar and
other provinces in recent weeks.

"Now I am very relieved," Nahim said. "This poppy is my gold."
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MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin