Rense.com



Flood Tide Of Heroin
Pours Into Europe
Drugs From Afghanistan Are Pouring Through Central
Asia On Their Way To Britain, The UN Said Last Week

By Tom Parfitt
The Telegraph - UK
11-2-3

Hunched over his walkie-talkie at a dusty command post near the border with Afghanistan, the Tajik soldier shouted in frustration: "Where are you? What can you see?"
 
In reply came a garbled tirade, distorted by static. "It's no good," said the soldier. "I can't understand a thing."
 
Unable to contact their base for reinforcements, the soldiers soon gave up the chase for a gang of heroin traders crossing the mountainous frontier from neighbouring Afghanistan.
 
Hampered by poor resources, border guards in this impoverished former Soviet state are losing the battle to stem the tide of drugs that bears most of the heroin reaching Britain's streets across Asia and Europe.
 
Last week, a UN report revealed that impoverished Central Asian states are now bearing the brunt of the burgeoning trade in Afghan narcotics. More than 90 per cent of heroin sold in Britain comes from Afghanistan, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
 
"There is a palpable risk that Afghanistan will again turn into a failed state, this time in the hands of drugs cartels and narco-terrorists," said the UN anti-drugs chief Antonio Maria Costa.
 
Heroin is pouring through Tajikistan, the poorest country in the former Soviet Union, because anti-terrorism operations in southern Afghanistan make it difficult for smugglers to cross into Pakistan and Iran.
 
More than 10,000 Russian border guards and 3,500 Tajik guards are stationed on the porous 800-mile southern border with Afghanistan. "We are shielding the world from Afghan heroin," said Rustam Nazarov, a general drafted in to head Tajikistan's UN-backed Drug Control Agency.
 
On the ground, however, reality has bitten. "It's impossible for us to destroy this trade," admitted Col Saidato Merzoev, who commands a force of about 700 Tajik border guards at Shurobod near the Afghan frontier.
 
In one recent operation, his guards pounced on a gang of drug traffickers in a stony gully near the Pyandzh river, which marks the frontier with Afghanistan. Acting on a tip-off, a unit of 30 men trekked into the barren mountains and lay in wait. "We saw the criminals come up though the valley and stop to light a fire," recalled the colonel, a brawny man in striped T-shirt and army fatigues. "Then we attacked."
 
Two Afghans were captured in the ensuing battle; the rest fled into the night behind a barrage of automatic gunfire. The border guards found a satchel which had been tossed aside, containing 44 pounds of pure heroin. While that operation was a success, the contents of the satchel were a tiny loss for the traffickers. Although in the first nine months of this year, drug control forces seized 4.4 tons of heroin - more than double their haul for the same period last year - it is still just one tenth of the total amount being smuggled, law enforcement officials believe.
 
Cultivation of opium poppies, the raw material for heroin, was banned in Afghanistan by the Taliban, but production has rocketed since the regime was driven from power. Smuggling is widespread. In one recent incident, a ministry of health official carrying 12 pounds of heroin injected into 52 lemons was intercepted trying to fly out of the Tajik capital, Dushanbe.
 
Gen Nazarov warned the Afghan president Hamid Karzai and his international backers not to slacken their efforts to stamp out the trade in narcotics. "There is a direct link between drugs, extremism and terrorist organisations such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda," he told The Sunday Telegraph. "When US forces entered Afghanistan they saw these problems in isolation. Now we are paying the price."
 
The smugglers use satellite telephones to co-ordinate forays across the border from Afghanistan, linking up with criminal gangs in Tajikistan. Those groups then co-operate with Russian mafia who maintain the supply to addicts in Europe. Britain has committed £70 million to eradicating Afghan drug production over the next three years but Bill Rammell, a Foreign Office minister, admitted this week that the task would be "a long haul".
 
Farmers can earn up to 40 times more growing opium than by growing wheat. Cash from drug production and smuggling is a key source of income for the warlords who still control large swathes of the country, and accounts for about half of Afghanistan's GDP, the UNODC warned.
 
Heroin and methadone are refined from raw opium at laboratories in the Afghan mountains, then carried into Central Asia via myriad routes - on foot, on horseback, packed into the tyres of vehicles or smuggled on trains. It is hardly surprising that the guards struggle to stop the trafficking.
 
"They are doing the best they can but they can't intercept everybody," said one senior British diplomat in Dushanbe. "You'd need a border post every 50 yards."
 
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003
 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/11/02/
wafgh02.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/11/02/ixworld.html


Disclaimer



MainPage
http://www.rense.com

This Site Served by TheHostPros