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Opium Trade Not Easily Uprooted, Afghanistan Finds
Mohammed Asef, a farmer in a northern Afghani village, protected his poppy harvest by diverting police to fields tended by farmers from a nearby village.
(By N.C. Aizenman -- The Washington Post)
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"At first when the police came to destroy my field, I accepted it," recalled Mohammed Alam. "I felt that Afghanistan has peace and law now, and this is the price of that."
The farmers said they learned several days later that neighboring villagers had paid bribes to avoid losing their poppy crops.
"I feel so angry in my heart now," Alam said. "What kind of a government is this that we have?"
Sherjan Durrani, spokesman for the Afghan police in Balkh province, bristled at the allegations.
"I completely reject this," he said in his cramped office in Mazar-e Sharif. "The police destroyed [the accusers'] lands, so now they are trying to get back by saying, 'The police took money from me.' "
Durrani said the police force was committed to safeguarding peace and law in the province despite low salaries and the lack of vehicles and manpower. He said provincial police, working with a special eradication force from the national police, had succeeded in destroying 7,900 acres of poppy in Balkh.
If so, that would amount to more land than was cultivated for all crops in the province in 2004, according to U.N. statistics.
Gen. Abdul Razaq Amiri, head of the central poppy eradication force, gave a slightly more conservative estimate, saying the unit had destroyed 3,500 acres in Balkh -- equivalent to more than 60 percent of last year's planting. But American and U.N. sources said the true eradication figure was likely to be far lower.
"Percentage-wise, eradication in Balkh and across the country was extremely limited," said Hakan Demirbuken, a regional expert for the U.N. drug office. The U.S. official said the eradication force had destroyed only 313 acres in Balkh province over a nine-day period, and only 533 acres nationwide.
One point on which there is widespread agreement is that, with drug cultivation and trafficking now providing 60 percent of the nation's income, more extensive eradication next year would be counterproductive, even destabilizing, if it is carried out without providing farmers with alternative means of support.
"The aid right now is not sufficient," Amiri said.
Demirbuken noted that international donors had just over three months before the start of the next planting season to get enough assistance to farmers to persuade them not to sow poppies. Many farmers in Balkh have made up their minds already.
"Of course I will plant poppy!" said Alam, one of the villagers in Sayed Abad who said his crop was destroyed this spring. "And if our neighbors give bribes to the police again, then we'll just give bribes that are three times as high. We understand the system now."
