A B.C. LAWYER WHO NEEDS BODYGUARDS

KANDAHAR CITY, Afghanistan - She strides into a dingy hotel
restaurant, a diminutive Canadian lawyer with hired guns following
behind. One of her men is a burly Australian who packs an automatic rifle.

He installs himself at the hotel's entrance, his weapon hidden but at
the ready.

It's not unusual for civilians in this dangerous city to protect
themselves with private security. But rarely does a woman move about
in such a manner -- commanding an armed guard and eschewing a burka,
or even a shawl, for male Afghan clothes.

Norine Mac Donald is anything but typical. The 50-year-old
Saskatchewan native and Vancouver resident is among the few Western
relief workers left in Kandahar, and the only one not affiliated in
some way with NATO and Afghan coalition forces.

Ms. MacDonald is founder and president of the Senlis Council, a
controversial think-tank. For the past two years, Ms. MacDonald has
lived in Kandahar and in neighbouring Helmand province, conducting
drug-policy research and writing lengthy, contentious reports that
advocate the legalization and regulation of poppy farming in Afghanistan.

Her reports also condemn American-led efforts to eradicate poppy
crops, claiming this merely drives desperate farmers into the arms
- --and control--of Taliban extremists. (Afghanistan is among the
world's largest poppy-growing countries, and produces up to 90% of
its opium, much of which is refined into heroin and then peddled in
Europe, Russia, and North America.)

In the process, Ms. MacDonald has annoyed Afghanistan's Interior
Minister. In October, his department wrote the Senlis Council a
letter, demanding it not engage in activities deemed "contrary to the
constitution of Afghanistan."

She has also infuriated members of the Canadian military, especially
those stationed here. Ms. MacDonald is sharply critical of how the
Canadian military mission in Afghanistan is being conducted.

"I'm all for the military going after the bad guys," she told CanWest
News Service. "I'm not for what we're doing to ordinary Afghans.
Canadian troops are calling in [American] bombers, and villages are
being destroyed. Civilians are buried in rubble. When did we have the
conversation in Canada that this is an acceptable strategy?"

One high-ranking Canadian officer, posted at Kandahar Air Field,
dismisses Ms. MacDonald as "a nutty dilettante" who "should just get
out of here."

She has come under fire from some Conservative MPs back in Canada.

In October, following a presentation she gave to the Standing
Committee on National Defence, Ms. MacDonald was grilled by Tory
members. Her sincerity and the source of her funding were called into question.

In one remarkable exchange, Conservative MP Cheryl Gallant quizzed
how the Senlis Council is funded, and then asked Ms. Mac- Donald
whether she was familiar with current "anti-money laundering rules"
and potential exemptions for lawyers. Ms. Gallant was promptly cut
off by the committee chairman; her curious line of questioning was
never explained.

But it upset Ms. MacDonald. "There was an insinuation that I was
involved in something inappropriate, involved in illegal activities,"
she told CanWest News Service during an interview here. "I was
attacked and so was my organization. It was unacceptable. It was mudslinging."

Ms. MacDonald says the Senlis Council receives all of its funding
from a Swiss philanthropist named Stephan Schmidheiny.

Described by Forbes magazine as the world's 221st richest person,
with a personal fortune of US$3.1-billion, Mr. Schmidheiny was an
early investor in the trendy Swiss watchmaker Swatch. In 2003, he
donated US$1-billion to support various "sustainable development" programs.

Ms. MacDonald will not disclose her council's annual budget, but it
must be considerable. The Senlis Council has well-staffed offices in
London, Paris, Brussels and Kabul, where it employs 50 Afghans. The
council plans to open a fifth office, in Ottawa. It also operates
smaller "field offices" in four Afghan provinces, including Kandahar
and Helmand.

A litigation and tax lawyer who practised in Vancouver, Ms. MacDonald
still keeps an apartment next to Stanley Park. She established the
Senlis Council in 2002, after meeting Mr. Schmidheiny.

Two years later, she arrived in Afghanistan, "to do something on
counter-narcotics and security issues."

Ms. MacDonald insists that legalizing and regulating the harvest of
poppies would allow Afghan farmers a badly need source of income, and
would prevent their sons of fighting age from joining Taliban
militias. She argues that opium produced in Afghanistan could then be
used to manufacture legal narcotics and painkillers. Such notions are
completely at odds with current policies in Afghanistan. The national
government under President Harmid Karzai wants the cultivation of
opium-producing poppies to stop; so do Pres. Karzai's Western allies.

Among NATO coalition allies, the United States has taken the most
aggressive anti-poppy stance; its soldiers have begun a crop
eradication campaign in some Afghan provinces. Canada, on the other
hand, has taken a more passive approach, preferring to let the Afghan
government direct all anti-poppy initiatives in Kandahar, where 2500
Canadian troops are based.

But this doesn't placate Ms. MacDonald.

She accuses the Canadian military of participating in a widescale
slaughter of innocent Afghans, and of ignoring the pleas of survivors
and others displaced by NATO-led bombing campaigns.

In the latest Senlis Council report, released in mid-December, Ms.
MacDonald alleges that as many as 80,000 Afghans have been left
homeless thanks to the war against the Taliban. She claims that a
number of large refugee camps have appeared in Kandahar and Helmand
provinces. She says that most people in the camps have never seen a
single Canadian or NATO soldier offering aid.

"The situation in southern Afghanistan is an unparalleled
humanitarian crisis," she writes.

Canadian military sources counter that Ms. MacDonald exaggerates the
situation in southern Afghanistan. One official accused her of
"making it all up."

This week, CanWest News Service visited one of the refugee camps
described by Ms. Mac- Donald in her December report, and found her
account of conditions there to be mostly accurate.

The Boldak Ada camp lies just south of Kandahar city limits. It is,
as Ms. MacDonald writes, a miserable place, where children dressed in
rags crawl on the ground and their mothers huddle inside ramshackle
mud huts, trying to keep warm.

The camp is filled with hundreds of people who fled their homes
because their villages had become zones of combat.

CanWest spoke to a man named Daud. He owned a stove/ heater shop in
Panjwaii District, where most of the fighting involving Canadian
soldiers this year has taken place.

Two months ago, Daud's shop was destroyed in a NATO bombing raid.

"There were Taliban in the area and everything got destroyed," he
said. Fortunately, his family survived.

"Every night there were bombs," Daud continued. "That's why we came
here. We have almost nothing to eat and we need water."

But contrary to Ms. MacDonald's claims, the camp has received
material assistance from NATO troops. Indeed, Western soldiers have
delivered food to the Boldak Ada camp twice in recent months.

"The foreigners were very good, very friendly," said Daud. "They
provided cooking oil, rice, bread, tea, and matches. We are still
using these things."

The Taliban are not recruiting inside the camp, he added. "We don't
need them. We're poor people and we just think about our stomachs."

NATO sources say the Taliban do recruit in refugee camps.

Ms. MacDonald insists she doesn't exaggerate. So bad is the poverty
situation in southern Afghanistan, she told CanWest, that she now
devotes most of her time delivering food to the refugee camps. It is
difficult work, and dangerous. She dresses as a male Afghan to help
blend in. Wearing a burka would make her less accessible. She always
travels with her armed security guards.

"I never know where we're going to go, and I never know what we're
going to run into," she said. "People are hungry and they aggressive."

She will not abandon the effort, even if coalition soldiers would
like her to leave. "It's a sad situation when this little Canadian is
leading food distribution for the entire area," she said. "There are
no [non-government organizations] doing it. Basically, they have all
left. There's just me."