Inhabitants Struggle To Clear Community's Name

Zoning, Civil Planning, Development Guidelines Are Missing In Residents' Daily Lives

BEKAA: Like hundreds of similar Lebanese villages, Brital, in Eastern Bekaa, has very little in the way of a public infrastructure. Despite the cash influx that once resulted from hashish farming, zoning, civil planning and development guidelines are generally missing elements in a daily life that has left residents in a state of permanent despair.

Now, after efforts to promote alternative crop cultivation failed, Brital is still suffering from a reputation as a hashish zone without having the luxury of enjoying any of the benefits that came with the trade.

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Proposed Slogan: 'Plant to Eat, Not to Kill'

'Our decision is firm ...We will not allow the harvesting of poisons'

For the sake of Lebanon and its children, do not plant drugs, Interior Minister Elias Murr advised farmers a few weeks before what could be the start of a new drug planting season.

"We will carry on with our war on drug cultivation, the war between good and evil, and we will not stop nor compromise until what is right wins over what is wrong," Murr said Tuesday, during a workshop held under his patronage at UNESCO on ways to fight drug cultivation.

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Oum Al-Nour Provides Vital Care

Karim, 21, has been sober for 35 days. It is the longest time since his 17th birthday, when Karim started using drugs almost every day.

"A friend gave me a white, hand-rolled cigarette," Karim recalled. "I smoked it alone and that instantly became a daily routine."

Exactly three years later, Karim never got to blow out the candles on his birthday cake. All he remembers is that he invited friends over, they took drugs and he woke up the next day in intensive care with tubes coming out of his body.

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Interior and Municipalities Minister Elias Murr has announced the end of the "illegal crops issue" in the Bekaa, following the destruction of 114 million square meters of cannabis and 9 million square meters of opium.

Speaking during a visit to the area Wednesday, Murr said the destruction operation was carried out by the Internal Security Forces with the army's cooperation and Syria's support.

He added that the government was "serious" in preventing the cultivation of drugs "until we reach the day when no one will think of it anymore."

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An international delegation of anti-drug officers toured Wednesday the Baalbek villages of Boudai, Iaat, Shleefa, and Flaway to inquire about the cannabis eradication campaign, which has targeted over 70,000 dunums in the past two weeks.

According to the National News Agency, US liaison officer B. J. Lawrence praised the security forces' joint efforts, adding that following the tour the delegation would submit a report to Washington and the US Embassy here.

Judicial Police commander Colonel Samir Sobh said destroyed cannabis fields increased to about 71,000 dunums in the Baalbek-Hermel areas and 2,110 dunums in the North. He added that eradication work in the North was completed two days ago.

Some 90,000 dunums will be destroyed by the end of the campaign late this month, particularly after additional fields were discovered in remote mountainous areas. The cost of the campaign has exceeded LL400 million, Sobh said.

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The commander of the Judicial Police, Brigadier Samir Sobh, said Saturday that over 50,000 dunums of hashish fields had been destroyed, as the second phase of cannabis eradication reached its eleventh day.

Members of the Anti-Drug Bureau, the Internal Security Forces and the Lebanese Army joined forces with Syrian security forces in Lebanon to carry out the eradication operation in Baalbek-Hermel fields for the eleventh consecutive day.

Sobh told reporters in a field located in the Shleefa-Iaat area of Baalbek that no security incidents had been reported yet.

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A truck rolled through the middle of a green field in Douris, leaving behind a brown path as 70 centimeter-tall cannabis plants were either smashed or bent to the ground.

After a considerable part of the approximately 150-dunum field was transformed into a mainly brown area, several shabbily clothed peasants were seen working.

Asked if it was the family's land, a young woman worker, her mouth and nose covered by a piece of cloth to protect against the plants' intoxicating effects, said: "No, we're workers." "The government is paying us LL10,000 per day to do that," she said, uprooting a plant with her rough hands.

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Conference Surveys Good And Bad News On Illicit Substances

Success In Fighting Illegal Cultivation Is Tempered By Statistics Showing Increased Use

Lebanon's efforts to fight drug cultivation and production could pull in much-needed international funding for development, although the country faces sobering new statistics about the rise in drug use, particularly among young people.

The good and bad news was heard by participants at a conference on Tuesday, held by the UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP) and the Institute for Development and Applied Care (IDAC).

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Saga Of 10-Year Heroin Habit Is Lesson For All

Growing Grip Of Narcotics Probably A Result Of Economic Difficulty, Family Disintegration And Disempowerment In Postwar Era

It took a 10-year affair with heroin, an overdose that nearly took his life and two years of rehabilitation for Fads* to recognize his feeling of alienation and admit he was an addict.

The saga of this 27-year-old is that of a growing number of young Lebanese who have ended up in the tight grip of narcotics, presumably to alleviate feelings of anxiety from growing economic difficulties, family disintegration and disempowerment which prevail in the country's postwar period.

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But Some Say Message Is Blurred

Dakhilkon Afyoun (I Beg You Opium) is a song by Ghassan Rahbani that plays the length of a four-minute commercial produced by the Interior Ministry as part of a nationwide awareness campaign on the dangers of drug use.

The television ad shows a number of young addicts, including Rahbani, singing about finding refuge in drugs as a way of escaping problems. Rahbani finds himself arrested by the Internal Security Forces and pleads with them in total agony: "I beg you opium, I beg you opium!" when the officer responds that it is against the law and that drugs will degrade him.

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ZAHLE, Lebanon - Lebanese security forces dug up dozens of fields planted with opium poppies in the eastern Bekaa Valley this week and arrested three men during drugs raids in the area, security officials said on Saturday.

In a highly publicised campaign aimed at stamping out a re-emerging drug trade, officials said security forces had destroyed some 420 hectares (1,038 acres) of opium fields in the last four days.

They said more than five tonnes of hashish were confiscated in two raids in the Baalbek-Hermel area.

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Murr Says Campaign Will Safeguard Nation's 'Reputation And Credibility'

Lebanese security forces began an intensive one-week campaign Tuesday aimed at destroying 5 million square meters of poppy fields.

Fighting bad weather, a 100-member team of Internal Security Forces and army personnel equipped with tractors destroyed about 1.2 million square meters of poppy plantations on the first day of the campaign.

Speaking during a news conference at his office in Beirut, Interior Minister Elias Murr said that within a week, all poppy crops nationwide would be razed, with the exception of fields now covered with snow, whose destruction would have to wait until spring.

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A recent survey I conducted upon my last visit concluded that at least 45 percent of the Lebanese population smoked hashish. The same survey also concluded that 90 percent of tourists smoked hashish. What better way to exploit these findings then to "Amsterdamize" Beirut?

The first step is to distinguish between drugs that pose a danger to society (heroin and cocaine), and those that are no more harmful than a drink (hashish and marijuana).

If the government were to issue 10 licenses to growers in the Bekaa, and issue 20 licenses for pub owners in Beirut to supply users with hashish and marijuana in their establishment, then money collected in taxes could be used to aid Lebanon to get out of its debt.

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Interior Minister Elias Murr said Sunday that a "wide-scale" campaign to eradicate drug trafficking had begun, and he threatened anyone involved in growing opium poppies or distributing the drug with prosecution and immediate destruction of their crop. Murr said he gave the army and security forces instructions to bulldoze any patch of land being used to cultivate opium, and warned that authorities would accept no excuses, "of whatever kind," for the continued cultivation of drugs.

Several months ago, Murr opted not to crack down on cannabis cultivation in the Bekaa, saying that a socio-economic plan to help destitute farmers was also needed.

However, on Sunday, the minister, who issued the orders in his capacity as head of the Central Security Council, stressed the damage that drugs caused young people by "destroying their future."

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Lebanon issued a tough warning to poppy growers yesterday, threatening them with life imprisonment if they do not abandon the drug trade. Cultivation of cannabis and opium poppies in the Bekaa valley - a stronghold of Hizbullah - has increased dramatically this year following the failure of efforts to find alternative crops for the farmers.

The acreage of cannabis grown in the valley this season was the highest since the end of Lebanon's 15-year civil war in 1990. Despite government threats to destroy the crops and jail farmers for life, the cannabis crop was successfully harvested, although it has yet to reach the markets.

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The Bekaa Valley Regains Its Outlaw Reputation

Abu Ali is back in business. Wading through a fertile field in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, the 30-year-old farmer squeezes the bud of a seven-foot-high plant and rubs the sticky juices between his fingers. The fragrant, spiky-leafed crop extends for acres in every direction--enough cannabis to make Cheech and Chong weep in envy. From 1993 until last year, Ali (a pseudonym) struggled to make a living growing sugar beets here, abandoning the family's traditional cash crop--marijuana--in exchange for promises of U.N. development money. "Every year they told us this would be the year [the money arrives]," says Ali. "Finally we got tired of waiting." Last April he dusted off some old seeds he'd kept in dry storage, and replanted 15 acres with cannabis--worth $60,000 on the wholesale market. Ali knows the risks: government helicopters recently dropped leaflets across the Bekaa Valley, warning the farmers that they'd be arrested if they harvested the crop. "We hear their threats, but they mean nothing," says Ali, breathing in the sweet aroma from his field of dreams. "We're going to stay and fight."

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BEKAA VALLEY, Lebanon -- For seven years, Abu Mohammed tried to support his wife and five children by growing melons. But there was never enough water, and even when weather conditions were good, no one wanted to buy his produce.

So now he's cultivating a crop sure to sell: Cannabis sativa, the spiky, olive green plant used to produce hashish.

"To us, this is just a crop," Abu Mohammed said as he checked his plot, stretching the length of a football field alongside the main road in this sunburned valley in northeastern Lebanon. "I would rather plant melons, but customers are always ready to buy hashish." The Bekaa Valley is nearly barren of crops; its irrigation channels are dry and filled with debris. But cannabis needs little water to grow, and after years of waiting for government assistance, many farmers here have turned to the illicit harvest.

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BEKAA VALLEY, Lebanon -- For seven years, Abu Mohammed tried to support his wife and five children by growing melons. But there was never enough water, and even when weather conditions were good, no one wanted to buy his produce.

So now he's cultivating a crop sure to sell: Cannabis sativa, the spiky, olive green plant used to produce hashish.

"To us, this is just a crop," Abu Mohammed said as he checked his plot, stretching the length of a football field alongside the main road in this sunburned valley in northeastern Lebanon. "I would rather plant melons, but customers are always ready to buy hashish."

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The debate on the revival of drug cultivation in the impoverished Baalbek-Hermel area has exposed the hypocrisy of all the parties concerned.

There is, first, the hypocrisy of Hizbullah, whose Ammar Musawi deployed splendid duplicity on Tuesday to both defend drug cultivation while also insisting it was a problem. The party has had a mixed record in the Bekaa in the past few years, and does not want to lose its drug-cultivating electorate as it did the followers of Sheikh Sobhi Toufeili.

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The government said Monday that it would soon release a new plan to fight the resurgence of drug cultivation, but what sounds like a good idea will only work if Beirut keeps its word by developing realistic new policies and convincing the international community to honor its commitments. The latter point has been made ad nauseam, but never very effectively, so Beirut needs to trumpet the shameful behavior of the United Nations on this front.

The formula was simple: Beirut agreed to crack down on hashish and opium growers, and the UN promised to provide funding to help the farmers in question plant new crops that would help them escape the cycle of poverty that forced them into illicit cultivation in the first place. With astonishing effectiveness, the Lebanese government has sharply reduced the amount of land being used to grow illegal drug crops. This was no mean feat for a tiny nation whose government was still trying to recover from the anarchy of a long civil war. But with the UN promise in hand, Beirut rightly reasoned that painful steps had to be taken.

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