Pubdate: Thu, 13 Apr 2006
Source: Financial Times (UK)
Copyright: The Financial Times Limited 2006
Contact:  http://www.ft.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/154
Author: Rachel Morariee
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

AN AFGHAN PROVINCE WHERE HEROIN RULES AND POLICE LOOK THE OTHER WAY

You can buy almost anything in Argu: sequinned dresses, cold 
remedies, new machineguns and packets of heroin carefully wrapped in 
white cotton and plastic and stamped with the legend "555 Afghanistan 
best quality".

Argu is the biggest heroin-processing district in north-eastern 
Afghanistan, home to at least 14 laboratories run by Pashtun traders 
from the violent tribal borderlands near Pakistan, where the Taliban 
are waging an insurgency against US troops which is fuelled by drug money.

The term laboratory makes the process sound sophisticated, but to 
make morphine, little more is needed than a fire, an oil drum to heat 
the opium and a bag of fertiliser to break it down. To turn that into 
heroin, more oil drums, acetic anhydride and electric mixers are used.

Electricity must be provided by small generators because there are no 
power lines in Argu, Badakhshan province, which shares borders with 
Pakistan, Tajikistan and China. There are no paved roads and no 
mobile phones either, but there is money, millions of dollars, very 
little of which flows back into the community.

In spite of a raid on the bazaar last autumn by the country's 
fledgling counter-narcotics police, when 700 tonnes of opium and 
heroin were seized, business is booming again. The laboratories have 
gone underground, operating at night and regularly moving locations.

The bazaar teems with traders on satellite phones, their fingers 
black and sticky with opium, which is weighed out by shopkeepers at 
the roadside.

The mud-filled roads are easier to navigate for the drug dealers, who 
drive BMW and Lexus landcruisers, than for the local police in their 
ancient Russian vehicles.

"What chance do you think we would stand in a car chase?" General 
Shan Jahan Noori, the provincial police chief of Badakhshan, asks in 
his office in the neighbouring town of Faizabad.

The drug smugglers can buy the latest technology and they can buy the 
co-operation of local officials, says Gen Noori.

"The police here don't have a salary that can keep them in shoe 
polish, so they see the smugglers with their pockets full of dollars 
and they let them go.

"Forty to 50 per cent of the local police here are involved in the 
drugs trade," he says.

Gen Noori earns almost $100 (82, 57) a month but some of his junior 
officers make less than $10, which does not keep their families fed 
in this remote mountainous region where transport costs have pushed 
the price of food to almost double that in the capital Kabul.

As the winter snows melt, more of the drugs will flow north over the 
border with Tajikistan.

Russia withdrew its border guards last summer, and the salaries of 
the local Tajik guards dropped from $400 to $20 a month, making it 
easier for drugs to move through the country and on into Russia and Europe.

Much of the heroin also still goes south to Helmand, from where the 
Pashtun smuggling mafia hail. Almost 3,000 British troops will be 
stationed there by May.

The dark-haired Pashtun smugglers with their flat-cap Pakol hats and 
blankets worn like capes stand out in the Argu bazaar where the 
locals are fairer Uzbeks and Tajiks. Four years since the fall of the 
Taliban and about a decade since the Pashtun smugglers first appeared 
in Afghanistan's remote Badakhshan, they still control the trade.

Azizullah Ahfizi, deputy commander of the provincial 
counter-narcotics police, says they buy off the local police, and 
protect each mobile laboratory with a dozen guards armed with 
rocket-propelled grenades.

With corruption so rife, raids on drug laboratories usually fail or, 
on one memorable occasion last autumn, end in a gunbattle between 
smugglers and local police - the police stayed too long inside the 
laboratory trying to divide the spoils among themselves, and the 
smugglers returned with re-inforcements.

Mr Ahfizi's boss quit in disgust six months ago because he felt he 
was fighting a losing battle.

"The government doesn't support us. I don't have guns, phones or 
money but I have to stand up against the most powerful people in the 
province. Why should I make such powerful enemies?" says Ghulam 
Myuddin, former head of the counter-narcotics force, sitting with his 
former colleagues in a storeroom full of the heroin and opium they 
have seized. The 1,500 litres of acid and several tonnes of opium and 
heroin represent a fraction of the narcotics that are churned out of 
neighbouring factories every month.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman