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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...] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barry Stoller http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ProletarianNews --------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: [email protected] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9WB2D Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
