TAJIKS CAUGHT BETWEEN DRUG TRADE AND POVERTY

DASHTIDZHUM He was a threadbare child of 12 when he set out from his
village for the city, a small, serious boy with a big mission: to sell 1
kilogram of Afghan opium in the Tajik capital to help his parents feed his
11 brothers and sisters.

But in the venal, cutthroat underworld of Dushanbe, it is easy to cheat a
village boy. The dealer who promised to pay him the following week simply
disappeared.

So Oiyatula Rakhimov returned home empty-handed.

One August night several months later, more than 10 gunmen from just across
the border in Afghanistan swept silently down the verdant slope behind his
house and seized the boy as a hostage for the family's drug debt to them.

Nearly two years later he remains a prisoner, and the price for his life --
$1,000 -- is so far beyond his father's reach that, at mention of the sum,
the old man just bows his head and weeps.

The remote valley where the Panj River divides northern Afghanistan from
southern Tajikistan seems a place of rugged, calm majesty. But the peace
has been sold for drugs, revenge and human sorrow. The wild, red mountain
tulips are watered by the tears of women and old men whose loved ones are
stolen from border villages and spirited across the river, killed or
working as drug couriers to pay off debts.

Afghanistan is a major opium producer: In 2000 it accounted for 72 percent
of the world crop. Neighboring Central Asian nations have been sucked into
its vortex. Tajikistan, the poorest of these former Soviet republics, in
particular has become a pipeline for Afghan drugs on their way to Moscow
and then to Western Europe.

While the UN Drug Control Program reports that Afghanistan's ruling Taliban
wiped out the opium poppy crop this last year, Tajik authorities insist
that increased quantities still are flowing across the border. Stockpiles
may account for part of the increase, while in northern areas of
Afghanistan not under Taliban control, drug production reportedly continues
unabated.

Heroin, or gera in Tajik slang, is smuggled across the border in coarse,
poorly sewn white cotton bags sometimes even bearing the names and even the
addresses of manufacturers.

The border, heavily fortified in Soviet times, is sometimes just a maze of
mountain passes.

For Tajik villagers, driven by poverty or opportunism, it is often tempting
to put themselves in debt to the Afghan drug lords. With no cash to pay up
front, the villagers take opium or heroin on credit. Some are robbed or
tricked.

In recent years, the Afghans' patience has worn thin. Twenty-six hostages
from Tajikistan are being held in Afghanistan. Last year, 23 hostages from
the Kulyab region were released, and five have been freed this year,
according to the Tajikistan Security Ministry.

The Afghan gunmen come on foot at night.

They came again and again to the home of Imam Rakhimov, who could not pay
the ransom for his son Oiyatula.

"They took everything they could find. They took the horses, the sheep.
They took all the rugs, my daughter's dowry. They left me with nothing,"
Rakhimov said.

His face is like gray stone, etched with grief.

Eyes downcast, the old man said the mistake that cost him his son was
impelled by poverty. In mountain villages like this, there are no jobs.
Pensions -- $2 or $3 a month -- are delayed for many months.

"It's getting worse now because now the Afghans are starting to kill
people. Everyone's afraid. People try to stay indoors," Rakhimov said.

Zuratmo Ilyosova was one of the luckier ones. She was able to come home
again, and described her ordeal as a hostage.

The rap on the window that changed her life came at about 1 a.m. on May 28
three years ago, rousing women from their sleep. There were no men that
night to help defend the house in the village of Noachun, 10 kilometers
from the Afghan border.

The women ran in panic from one hiding place to another. But for Ilyosova
in particular, a chance overnight visit at her aunt's house turned into a
nightmare. She had left her 3-year-old daughter, Zulfiya, 24 kilometers
away with her parents.

Afghan gunmen marched into her aunt's house that night, seized her and took
her across the river. The debtors, Ilyosova says, were her aunt's
neighbors. Their house was empty, so the gunmen simply raided the place
next door.

She was kept prisoner for nearly three years. At first she was kept mainly
in a dark room and forced to wear a full-length shroud with a black net
hiding her eyes. The area was controlled by anti-Taliban forces.

One of the local commanders, named Abdullah Masobir, decided to take her
for his second wife and warned her to give up hope of escape.

"I grieved that my life turned out that way. But I never gave up hope.
Three times I tried to run away at night when everyone was asleep. They
would wake up next morning, see I was gone and come for me," she said.

In January, Ilyosova finally won her freedom after Masobir left both her
and his other wife -- and, ironically, moved to Tajikistan.

She returned home with a second child, Najibula, age 2, who is Masobir's
son, and lives once more with her parents. Her first husband long ago
disappeared in Chechnya. Her father does odd jobs, and the family subsists
largely on flat, brown bread.

The drug pipeline often goes through Moscow on its way to Western Europe.
So when a flight from Dushanbe lands in Moscow, the Russian customs
officers have their dogs ready.

A long line of Dushanbe passengers snaked through the airport one recent
day, while customs officers searched the luggage with bored hostility.
Risko, a German shepherd trained to sniff drugs, hurled himself at the
cheap bags and handmade wooden crates.

Customs officers were looking not only for drugs but also for antacids -- a
possible clue to drug couriers who swallowed heroin tied into the fingers
of rubber gloves and wrapped in plastic.

Forty-nine drug smugglers were caught on the Dushanbe-Moscow flights last
year, and 15 in the first five months of 2001.

Occasionally a courier with a burst packet flies in and has to be hospitalized.

Couriers receive between $300 and $700 for the journey -- enough to live
for a year in Tajikistan.

But the head of the customs shift, Lieutenant Colonel Viktor Bylinkin, has
little sympathy. "They're forced by poverty to become drug couriers. But I
wouldn't have any problem if all the drug packages in all their bodies
leaked. I feel no pity. They poison the nation," he said.