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Taliban's heroin 'double-cross'
By Julian West and Philip Sherwell
(Filed: 18/02/2001)
THE poppy fields of Afghanistan's Golden Crescent, normally the source of three-quarters of the world's heroin, have been transformed this year, according to United Nations drugs officials.
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Cash crop: Afghanistan was the source last year for 75 per cent of the world supply
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After a detailed two-week tour, they say that few of the 175,000 acres formerly covered by the deadly opium crop are still in bloom. The fundamentalist Taliban regime ordered the country's farmers to stop growing poppies following an edict by Mullah Omar, the supreme religious leader, that opium cultivation is un-Islamic.
The move, however, has little to do with a new religious stance from the Islamic fundamentalist movement, which has been happy to bolster its coffers with the proceeds of the drugs trade. Rather, it is a cynical effort to win UN recognition and with it the lifting of sanctions and the restoration of foreign aid.
Western diplomats believe that if the tactic fails, poppy production will soon resume. In the meantime, the regime is believed to be taking advantage of soaring heroin prices - up four-fold in a year - to release controlled supplies from their large stockpiles of the roughly refined drug on to the market through middlemen.
The biggest financial losers of the cutback in poppy-growing are the country's already impoverished farmers. Their replacement crops of wheat and vegetables are much less lucrative, meaning that some families have even been forced to sell their young daughters into marriage to pay off debts.
American officials confirm that there has been a substantial drop in Afghan poppy cultivation but believe that the team from the UN Drug Control Programme is being "overly optimistic" by saying that the crop has been wiped out.
The new Bush administration will block any moves to rehabilitate the Taliban diplomatically while Osama bin Laden, the fugitive Saudi terrorist, remains in Afghanistan. Four of his alleged followers are on trial in New York, accused of taking part in the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
Officials at the Drug Enforcement Agency believe that the Taliban thinks it is holding an unbeatable hand. An agent told The Sunday Telegraph: "In the short-term, while they cut back production and try to win recognition, they can use their existing stockpiles to take advantage of higher prices. If they don't get recognition and aid, they'll resume production. They have not cracked down on traffickers and there have been no big closures of labs and refineries."
Afghanistan was the source last year of almost 4,000 tons of opium, or 75 per cent of the world supply. The UNDCP said it has seen no sign that production in the traditional poppy-growing regions of neighbouring Pakistan, for instance, has been stepped up in response to the shortfall.
A 20-member UNDCP team last week returned from a two-week tour of Afghanistan's four main opium-growing provinces. As a measure of how cowed people are by five years of the Taliban's iron rule and two decades of war, they found that almost all the farmers had replaced opium poppies with other crops, even though the substitutes fetch barely a third of the opium price and are far more prone to the drought that has ravaged large parts of the country.
Taliban soldiers are enforcing the opium ban by threatening to arrest village elders and mullahs. Farmers who defy the edict are being arrested by Taliban soldiers and their fields uprooted and destroyed.
More than 30,000 farmers in one opium-growing province, Helmand, have fled their fields, joining the country's 80,000 existing internal refugees; and many farmers in Nangrahar province, near the Pakistan border, have joined the 170,000 Afghans who have fled to Pakistan.
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