Opium Fuels Violence Against Afghan Aid Workers

DARA NOOR, Afghanistan — A relief worker dies in an ambush on a blind curve up a steep mountain road. Around the bend is a poppy field, a prime suspect in a murder spree that's bogging down Afghanistan's rebuilding while its drug trade blooms.

Aid groups are fleeing in terror. They blame much of their exodus from the southern third of the country on its drug crop, worth an estimated $1.6 billion Cdn, which purportedly finances Islamic extremist violence, ethnic blood feuds, warlord war chests, provincial property disputes and competing political movements.

The agencies that monitor the pulse of conflict zones point to a rise in ambushes and execution-style slayings that coincide with the southeast's autumn harvest of the opium-producing flora, nature's gift to the world's heroin junkies.

"It's absolutely true that security is worse in places where people are growing poppies," said Diane Johnston, country director for Mercy Corps, which indefinitely suspended operations in the country last week. A member of the Omaha, Neb.-based group was killed Aug. 7.

"Narcoterrorism" has become an increasingly entrenched factor in the violence that's meant to keep southern and eastern Afghanistan — the world's poppy belt — off-limits to outside assistance, said Paul Barker, country director for the charity CARE.

"The revenue from the poppy trade in Afghanistan is more than all the humanitarian aid combined," he said.

Countries have committed roughly $675 million to rebuild this central Asian country of dusty, gasp-inducing deserts and monolithic mountains. Poppy revenues brought in $1.6 billion last year, according to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan.

There are about 90 international relief groups operating in Afghanistan, but most have curtailed or avoided drilling wells, vaccinating children, and rebuilding school systems in the deadly southeast.

The September edition of CARE's policy brief — which other relief groups follow closely — said armed attacks on aid workers jumped from one a month to one every two days since September 2002.

Half the country's 32 provinces — most in the south — are too risky to enter. "There are all sorts of movements to keep Afghanistan unstable," Barker said.

Local authorities generally blame all violence on the extremist Taliban movement toppled from power by a U.S.-led force two years ago, but a confounding array of agendas are in play.

"It's impossible to separate out what's factional fighting, what's Taliban activity and what's drug trafficking," said Johnston. "We haven't seen this type of targeting [of aid workers] in the 16 years we've been here."

In March, at the height of the poppy season's spring harvest, gunmen attacked a three-vehicle convoy at a blind curve in a rocky mountain road near Dara Noor, a village 100 kilometres north of Kandahar and a prime poppy region. The attackers killed Ricardo Munguia, a 39-year-old water engineer from El Salvador working for the Red Cross. He was the first foreign aid worker to die in Afghanistan since the Taliban's ouster.

Around a bend is a large poppy field, where men, women and children this week happily harvested the autumn crop of the opiate-soaked bulbs that emerge after the plants burst into a gorgeous array of flowers. They greeted two reporters as potential customers.

Moments later, a taxi driver scolded the reporters for lingering in an area in which a Taliban convoy had passed in recent days.

Last weekend, assailants ambushed a pickup truck in southern Afghanistan and shot to death seven bodyguards of the governor of Helmand province, in the Mir Mundo area 50 kilometres northwest of Kandahar.

The violence has grown with the poppy production in Afghanistan, which produced 12 per cent of the world's opium in 2001 and 76 per cent last year.

The fact that drug trafficking revenues have soared since the U.S. push into Afghanistan has put the U.S. administration on the defensive.

"You ask what we're going to do and the answer is, I don't really know," Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said recently.

A U.S.-led force toppled the Taliban for harbouring the al-Qaida extremist group that engineered the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. A NATO force has focused on maintaining security in Kabul, the capital. Humanitarian agencies want to see the force spread into the violent south and east.

A Moscow-backed government ruled Afghanistan for a decade before Soviet troops withdrew, leaving warlords to fight for power. The Taliban won control of most of the country to put an end to the factional bloodletting but then imposed a harsh form of Islamic rule.

The impact the extremist militia had on opium production is in dispute. Though the Taliban stopped many farmers from growing the crop — some of whom were later killed by their financiers — there were numerous reports that no action was taken against people who bought, sold or stockpiled opium, said Mohammed Amirkhizi, the Afghan representative of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

Some skeptics argue the Taliban cut production to drive up heroin prices worldwide. However, at the time the UN drug control office in neighbouring Pakistan said there was no evidence of stockpiling by the Taliban movement, though some commanders might be doing it.

Amirkhizi said the country's transitional government mounted what it said was a successful attempt to eradicate opium production last year, but there's been no independent confirmation of results. Afghan officials in general play down the role of opium production in the country. But the Northern Alliance that fought the Taliban was known to have financed its forces with drug money.

Anti-Taliban warlords in the south, with the tacit approval of the U.S.-backed central government, last weekend sent a 220-man special operations force on an open-ended mission to go after Taliban command posts in Afghanistan.

The fact that such militias frequently travel in civilian vehicles and wear robes over their camouflage fatigues has made the situation more dangerous for civilians working for humanitarian development agencies, CARE's Barker said.

Since the war, the protective western military presence in Kabul has doubled the population of the city to three million, said Maki Shinohara of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. And thousands have begun returning to homes in the relatively secure north. But few will venture to the south or east. "There is just no law and order," she said. "It's the rule of the gun."