TALIBAN BANS POPPIES, BUT STOCKPILES OPIUM

The Taliban Has Eradicated Afghanistan's Opium Crop But The Un Suspects
Dark Motives, Reports Stephen Farrell In Kabul

THE flowers have gone, but the doubts remain. Ten months after
Afghanistan's ruling Taliban barred farmers from growing the poppies that
supplied more than three-quarters of the world's opium, a UN panel has
accused the regime of doing so only to keep prices up.

The UN suspects Afghanistan's fundamentalist rulers of selling their vast
opium stockpiles to pay for the war effort against rebel leader Ahmed Shah
Masood. The order to destroy the poppies -- a vain attempt to gain
international recognition -- was announced last July by Taliban leader
Mohammad Omar. He declared opium-growing un-Islamic, and the ban was
ruthlessly enforced.

In Sarobi, a cluster of mud-brick houses 80km southeast of Kabul, farmers
said this week that their fields should have been crimson with poppies, and
that in August they would have been looking forward to another lucrative
crop -- hashish, extracted from cannabis plants.

Rehmat Ullah, 35, said the local Taliban chief came to their area last
year, informed them of the ban on drug crops and told them to grow wheat,
onions and maize instead. Mr Ullah and his neighbours complied immediately,
if reluctantly. A visit by British, US and other international inspectors
last month confirmed what experts had reported earlier, but many outsiders
found hard to believe -- the regime that grew 3200 tonnes of raw opium last
year has all but eradicated the lethal crop.

The UN Drug Control Program says the ban has created a shortage of heroin,
driving up prices locally from the equivalent of $55 a kilo to about $500.

Taliban leaders are furious at being given no credit for their ban, and at
the tightening of UN sanctions over their refusal to hand over terrorist
suspect Osama bin Laden.

"We have done what needed to be done, putting our people and our farmers
through immense difficulties,'' said the director of the Taliban's High
Commission for Drug Control, Abdol Hamid Akhondzadeh.

"We expected to be rewarded for our actions, but instead were punished with
additional sanctions.''

The five-member UN panel set up to monitor the arms embargo on the Taliban
questioned the motives for the drug ban.

"If Taliban officials were sincere in stopping the production of opium and
heroin, 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.

Instead, the proceeds from 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'', the panel reported.