Afghanistan's new opium boom

[sipila]

From: Barry Stoller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2002 3:25 PM
Subject: Afghanistan's new opium boom
 HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK
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 AP. 25 January 2002.
Poverty Fuels New Afghan Opium Boom.
 
 KANDAHAR -- Afghan officials haven't dropped by Haji
Khudi Noor's dim  nook in Kandahar's bustling opium
market to order a halt to his  business. Foreign aid
workers haven't come to tell him how to feed his
35-member family if he did.
 
 Until one -- or both -- happens, Khudi Noor says, opening
his brown  shawl to reveal a lap piled high with patties of
raw opium, Afghanistan's new opium ban will have little
force against its new opium  boom.
 
 "Everywhere it's growing, everywhere," he said Friday to
emphatic nods. "All the country is in this business."
 
 "I must support my family, but how?" the merchant asks.
"Stop this business, and not do anything?"
 
 The United Nations gave early warning this month of a
resurgence in the opium business in Afghanistan, which
produced three-fourths of the world's supply before Mullah
Mohammad Omar cracked down on poppy-growing with a
typical Taliban vengeance.
 
 Afghan farmers recall the Taliban enforcing Mullah Omar's
ban by sending helicopters to swoop down on poppy fields,
and by hanging their cultivators from time to time. By 2001,
the Taliban had managed to cut the country's opium
production by 95 percent.
 
 With foreign powers and aid donors watching, the interim
government led by Prime Minister Hamid Karzai renewed -
and redoubled -- the ousted Taliban regime's ban on Jan.
16. Karzai's decree forbade not just poppy growing, as the
Taliban did, but production and trafficking in all narcotics.
 
 As yet, though, there is little sign of the fledgling government
enforcing the renewed ban.
 
 There are no figures on the increase in the year's just-planted
opium crop. But those in the business say the tiny green
seedlings are sprouting again in fields across Afghanistan.
 
 In two months or so, they say, Afghan farmers will be harvesting
bright flowers oozing with sticky opium resin, ready for processing
into heroin.
 
 "If we got any aid today, we will gladly destroy all these crops
tomorrow," said farmer Naqeeb Ullah, nurturing a thumb-high
patch of opium poppy seedlings in a field outside Kandahar.
 
 "We would be happy to stop, because it's hard work, and the
pay is not good. But we have no choice to do any other thing,"
the farmer said.
 
Afghanistan supplies about 90 percent of the heroin used in
Europe, according to United Nations narcotics officials.
 
 Touring the villages where opium poppies are grown, it's
easy to see how farmers would be reluctant to renounce
one of their country's few resources. Hamlets are so
remote and so poor that donkeys buck in the streets at
the unfamiliar sound of car engines, and children drag
rags tied to strings for toys.
 
 Many Afghans claim their own people eschew opium.
 
"We know it's not good. It's against humanity. It destroys
the people, makes them crazy, makes them jobless. It
destroys families," said white-bearded Amenullah, another
opium trader in Kandahar's market.
 
 "If the United States, if the United Nations, would bring
money to Afghanistan, give opportunity to work, we would
not work any more in opium," he said.
 
 "But there is no money, there is no work. Everywhere,
there is nothing."
 
[If 'Plan Colombia is such a good idea...]
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  Barry Stoller
 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ProletarianNews