Pubdate: Sun, 02 Jan 2005
Source: Winnipeg Free Press (CN MB)
Copyright: 2005 Winnipeg Free Press
Contact:  http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/502
Author: Carlotta Gall, New York Times News Service
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

AFGHANISTAN A HAVEN FOR DRUG TRADE

Threatens To Turn Country Into A Narco-Mafia State

ZARANJ, Afghanistan -- Seen from the air, the Margo desert, which
sprawls across the far southwestern corner of Afghanistan toward the
borders with Iran and Pakistan, is traced with white car tracks.

With its forbidding reputation as the "desert of death," it deters
most travellers but is the favoured route of drug traffickers taking
opium, heroin and hashish produced in Afghanistan to Iran for
smuggling to Turkey and Europe. They cross in armed convoys of 10 to
20 pickup trucks, at such high speed that police officials say they
cannot catch them.

"The smugglers know the desert very well," said the police chief of
Nimruz Province, who goes by one name, Asadullah. "They have very
powerful cars, Landcruisers that go at 250 kilometres an hour," he
said. The 480-kilometre border that Nimruz Province shares with
Pakistan and Iran is wide open for smugglers, Asadullah added.

The desert crossing is part of a lucrative drug trade that threatens
to turn Afghanistan into a narco-mafia state, United Nations and
Afghan officials warn. Afghanistan, the biggest producer of opium in
the world, is now the source of 90 per cent of the heroin on Europe's
street, the UN anti-drug agency says.

Although farmers all over Afghanistan have been turning to poppy
cultivation -- causing such farming to increase by 60 per cent in 2004
- -- they often remain impoverished, while big profits are being made by
the dealers and traffickers, they say.

There are three main routes for drugs out of Afghanistan: from the northeast
into Tajikistan and on to Russia; into Pakistan and its ports, and westward
across the desert into Iran. Of the three, this corner of Afghanistan, where
Baluch tribesmen have survived by banditry and smuggling for centuries and
tend not to recognize national boundaries, is perhaps the most notorious.

The profits from trafficking are easy to see here in this dust-blown,
arid town on the border with Iran. Farmers have been ruined by a
seven-year drought, and townspeople have to fetch their drinking water
in plastic containers from public taps, but lavish villas, decorated
with coloured tiles and mirrored glass, are being built.

But however well-known the big drug bosses are, the police have little
hope of proving it.

"Without proof we cannot arrest anyone," Asadullah said. "If we do, we
will be punished."
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MAP posted-by: Derek