The Times Taleban poppy purge wins few allies
FROM STEPHEN FARRELL IN SAROBI, AFGHANISTAN

THE flowers have gone, but the doubts remain. Ten months after the ruling Taleban banned Afghan farmers from growing the poppies that supplied more than three quarters of the world’s opium, a United Nations panel has accused it of doing so only to stop prices tumbling after a recent glut.

The UN also suspects the fundamentalist regime of selling its vast stockpiles to pay for the war effort against Ahmed Shah Masood.

The edict — an apparent but vain attempt to gain international recognition — was announced last July by Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taleban’s reclusive leader. He declared opium growing to be un-Islamic and the ban was enforced with ruthless efficiency.

In Sarobi, a cluster of mud-brick houses 50 miles south east of Kabul, farmers said yesterday that their fields should recently have been crimson with poppies and that in August they would have been looking forward to another lucrative crop — hashish.

Rehmat Ullah, 35, said that the local Taleban commissioner came to their area last year, informed them of the ban and told them to grow wheat, onions and maize. Mr Ullah and his neighbours complied immediately, if reluctantly.

A visit by British, American and other international inspectors last month confirmed that the regime that last year grew 3,200 tonnes of raw opium has all but eradicated the lethal crop.

The UN Drug Control Programme says that the ban has created a shortage of heroin, driving up prices locally from £22 a kilo to about £200. However, intelligence experts in Britain say that it is too early to detect any impact on heroin prices in Europe.

The Taleban is furious at being given no credit and at the recent tightening of UN sanctions for its refusal to hand over the terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden.

“We have done what needed to be done, putting our people and our farmers through immense difficulties,” Abdol Hamid Akhondzadeh, director of the Taleban’s High Commission for Drug Control, said. “We expected to be rewarded for our actions, but instead were punished with additional sanctions.”

The five-member UN panel set up to recommend ways of monitoring an arms embargo on the Taleban questioned the motives.

“If Taleban officials were sincere in stopping the production of opium and heroin, then one would expect them to order the destruction of all stocks existing in areas under their control,” the panel said in its report to the UN Security Council.

The panel also said that the proceeds of the sale of stockpiled opium were being used to buy arms and “finance the training of terrorists and support the operations of extremists in neighbouring countries and beyond”.

Whatever the doubts, there is no question that large swaths of the country that were once aflame with poppies now have none. Bernard Frahi, head of the UN’s drug-control programme in Islamabad, said: “Opium poppy cultivation has effectively been eliminated in Taleban-controlled areas.”

Copyright 2001

-- Anonymous, May 29, 2001