TAJIKISTAN MIRED IN POVERTY, HUNGER

Long List Of Woes: Drought, Fighting Across Afghanistan Border, Drug Trade
Threaten Nation

MOSKOVSKY, Tajikistan -- The plowed earth waits for seeds and fertilizer
that never arrive. Soviet-built irrigation aqueducts are crumbled and
useless. Abandoned factories rust behind signs in bold red Russian.
Able-bodied men spend their days in chilly bazaars, squatting beside used
clothing and tools they hope to sell for pennies.

This forlorn and wintry country in Central Asia is trapped in time. Its 6
million people are struggling to emerge from the physical and ideological
ruins of the Soviet Union, which controlled Tajikistan for six decades, and
to heal the wounds of a five-year civil war between ideological and ethnic
factions that followed the 1991 Soviet collapse.

But the newly independent country is ill-equipped to meet the competitive
demands of its fledgling semi-free economy and nascent democracy. Teachers'
salaries have fallen to $5 a month, 80 percent of the populace lives in
poverty and a severe regional drought has halved the national wheat harvest.

'Only Bread And Tea'

"We are eating only bread and tea. Sometimes we find carrots and onions,
but it is never enough,'' said Rajabgul Holnazarov, 62, a wrinkled woman in
a flowered head scarf waiting in line for a sack of flour from the U.N.
World Food Program in the southern town of Qabodian.

Holnazarov toiled for 48 years on a Soviet collective farm but hasn't
received her pension in more than a year. She bore seven children and was
awarded three "Mother Hero'' medals by Soviet authorities for producing
such a large family. Now her children are grown and jobless. ``I lost the
medals long ago,'' she said.

As if the whims of history and nature weren't punishment enough, Tajikistan
is also a victim of geography. It shares a 1,000-mile border with
Afghanistan, a country in even worse straits that is racked by drought and
a civil war between the ruling Taliban Islamic militia and opposition
forces based near the border.

Afghans Trying To Flee

Although the Tajik side is heavily patrolled by Russian border forces under
an agreement with the Tajik government, Afghanistan's problems are pressing
hard against it. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans have been trying to flee
their country, but Tajik authorities won't let them cross the border,
saying many are drug smugglers and gunmen, and that ailing Tajikistan
cannot withstand a refugee onslaught.

Since September, about 12,000 Afghan refugees have been stranded on two
snow-covered islands in a marshy riverbed winding between the two
countries. Shooting and shelling erupt sporadically from both sides.

During the 1992-97 Tajik civil war, Afghanistan welcomed thousands of
Tajiks, but now Tajikistan has turned a cold shoulder to its desperate
neighbors. Tajikistan also plays host to the Afghan opposition government
and its armed forces, led by an ethnic Tajik commander, whose war with the
Taliban keeps the refugee crisis boiling.

Tajikistan is also trying to fend off the influence of Islamic extremism,
which clashes with its tradition of Muslim moderation and with the secular
lifestyle that developed under the Soviets.

The most worrisome cross-border export is drugs. Afghanistan's poppy crop
produces 70 percent of the world's heroin. Although most drugs leave
Afghanistan via Pakistan, U.N. officials estimate that one-third of the
output passes through Tajikistan, where corruption and poverty provide
fertile soil for trafficking.

New organized crime groups have proved too powerful for the country's weak
civic and political institutions. Money from extortion and drugs reportedly
financed a string of chic new restaurants and bars in Dushanbe. Local
officials said many desperate Tajiks are easily persuaded to become drug
couriers, earning up to $100 -- an enormous sum in Tajikistan -- to carry a
kilogram of heroin from the Afghan border to Dushanbe.

In October the Tajik government formed a national Drug Control Agency, and
officials in border areas are trying to educate residents about the risks
of trafficking: addiction, heavy criminal sentences if they are caught, and
retribution from Afghan suppliers if they fail to pay for shipments.

In one border village, Sairob, BMWs parked next to horse-drawn carts on
streets lined with heatless huts suggests that drugs have already dug
deeply into the economy. The local clinic has treated several cases of
heroin withdrawal, a problem not seen before 1997.

For most Tajiks, the struggle is more basic: how to survive honestly on
little or no money, and how to adapt to the bewildering shift from a
welfare state to an unfamiliar system in which they are expected to sell
their own crops and choose their own leaders.