U.N.: Taliban virtually wipes out o

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The Associated Press
February 16, 2001,

U.N.: Taliban virtually wipes out opium production in Afghanistan; Photos 
ISL102-104

BYLINE: By KATHY GANNON, Associated Press Writer

DATELINE: JALALABAD, Afghanistan


U.N. drug control officers said the Taliban religious militia has
virtually wiped out opium production in Afghanistan - once the
world's largest producer - since banning poppy cultivation in July.

A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent
two weeks searching most of the nation's largest opium-producing
areas and found so few poppies that they do not expect any opium to
come out of Afghanistan this year.

"We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields,"
said Bernard Frahi, regional director for the U.N. program in Afghanistan
and Pakistan. He laid out photographs of vast tracts of land cultivated
with wheat alongside pictures of the same fields taken a year earlier -
a sea of blood-red poppies.

A State Department official said Thursday all the information the
United States has received so far indicates the poppy crop had
decreased, but he did not believe it was eliminated.

Last year, Afghanistan produced nearly 4,000 tons of opium,
about 75  percent of the world's supply, U.N. officials said.
Opium - the milk substance drained from the poppy plant - is
converted into heroin  and sold in Europe and North America.
The 2000 output was a world  record for opium production, the
United Nations said - more than all other countries combined,
including the "Golden Triangle," where the borders of Thailand,
Laos and Myanmar meet.

Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, banned
poppy growing before the November planting season and augmented
it  with a religious edict making it contrary to the tenets of Islam.

The Taliban, which has imposed a strict brand of Islam in the 95
percent of Afghanistan it controls, has set fire to heroin laboratories
and jailed farmers until they agreed to destroy their poppy crops.

The U.N. surveyors, who completed their search this week,
crisscrossed Helmand, Kandahar, Urzgan and Nangarhar
provinces  and parts of two others - areas responsible for 86
percent of the opium produced in Afghanistan last year, Frahi
said in an interview Wednesday.  They covered 80 percent of the
land in those provinces that last year had  been awash in poppies.

This year they found poppies growing on barely an acre here and
there,  Frahi said. The rest - about 175,000 acres - was clean.

"We have to look at the situation with careful optimism," said
Sandro Tucci  of the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime
Prevention  in Vienna, Austria.

He said indications are that no poppies were planted this season
and that,  as a result, there hasn't been any production of opium -
but that officials would keep checking.

The State Department counter narcotics official said the
department  so far suggests there will be a decrease, but how
much is not yet clear, he said, speaking on  condition of anonymity.

"We do not think by any stretch of the imagination that poppy
cultivation in  Afghanistan has been eliminated. But we, like the
rest of the world,  welcome positive news."

The Drug Enforcement Administration declined to comment.

No U.S. government official can enter Afghanistan because of
security  concerns stemming from the presence of suspected
terrorist Osama  bin Laden.

Poppies are harvested in March and April, which is why the survey
was  done now. Tucci said it would have been impossible for the
poppies to  have been harvested already.

The areas searched by the U.N. surveyors are the most fertile lands
under Taliban control. Other areas, though they are somewhat fertile,
have not traditionally been poppy growing areas and farmers are
struggling to raise any crops at all because of severe drought. The
rest of the land held by the Taliban is mountainous or desert, where
poppies could not grow.

Karim Rahimi, the U.N. drug control liaison in Jalalabad, capital of
Nangarhar province, said farmers were growing wheat or onions in
fields where they once grew poppies.

"It is amazing, really, when you see the fields that last year were
filled with poppies and this year there is wheat," he said.

The Taliban enforced the ban by threatening to arrest village elders
and mullahs who allowed poppies to be grown. Taliban soldiers
patrolled in trucks armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
About 1,000 people in Nangarhar who tried to defy the ban were
arrested and jailed until they agreed to destroy their crops.

Signs throughout Nangarhar warn against drug production and use,
some calling it an "illicit phenomenon." Another reads: "Be drug
free, be happy."

Last year, poppies grew on 48,800 acres of land in Nangarhar
province. According to the U.N. survey, poppies were planted on
only 17 acres there this season and all were destroyed by the Taliban.

"The Taliban have done their work very seriously," Frahi said.

But the ban has badly hurt farmers in one of the world's poorest
countries, shattered by two decades of war and devastated by drought.

Ahmed Rehman, who shares less than three acres in Nangarhar with
his three brothers, said the opium he produced last year on part of the
land brought him $1,100.

This year, he says, he will be lucky to get $300 for the onions and
cattle feed he planted on the entire parcel.

"Life is very bad for me this year," he said. "Last year I was able
to buy meat and wheat and now this year there is nothing."

But Rehman said he never considered defying the ban.

"The Taliban were patrolling all the time. Of course I was afraid.
I did not want to go to jail and lose my freedom and my dignity,"
he said, gesturing with dirt-caked hands.

Shams-ul-Haq Sayed, an officer of the Taliban drug control office
in Jalalabad, said farmers need international aid.

"This year was the most important for us because growing
poppies was part of their culture, and the first years are always
the most difficult," he said.

Tucci said discussions are under way on how to help the farmers.

Western diplomats in Pakistan have suggested the Taliban is
simply trying to drive up the price of opium they have stockpiled.
The State Department official also said Afghanistan could do more
by destroying drug stockpiles and heroin labs and arresting producers
and traffickers.

Frahi dismissed that as "nonsense" and said it is drug traffickers
and shopkeepers who have stockpiles. Two pounds of opium worth
$35 last year are now worth as much as $360, he said.

Mullah Amir Mohammed Haqqani, the Taliban's top drug official in
Nangarhar, said the ban would remain regardless of whether the
Taliban received aid or international recognition.

"It is our decree that there will be no poppy cultivation. It is banned
forever in this country," he said. "Whether we get assistance or not,
poppy growing will never be allowed again in our country."