FIGHTING TERRORISM PUTS DENT IN DRUGS

Border Seizures Rise As Traffickers Targeted

Dushanbe, Tajikistan --- Expected military strikes against
Afghanistan have sent fears rippling among some of the Bush
administration's declared foes: illegal drug traffickers.

The United Nations said seizures of opium and heroin along the
Afghan-Tajik border have doubled since the Sept. 11 attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That is an indication, it says,
that drug traffickers are trying to empty their stocks before any
fighting in Afghanistan disrupts business.

Matthew Kahane, a senior U.N. official in the Tajik capital, said
drug traffickers fear they will become targets of the
administration's declared war against terrorism and those who fund it.

"They assume the war on terrorism will target the financial bases of
terrorism, and drugs is one of them," Kahane said in an interview.

Afghanistan's ruling Taliban banned the growing of opium poppies last
year as a sin against Islam. The ban helped Afghanistan win $43
million in emergency aid to help it deal with the effects of a
prolonged drought.

Still, enormous amounts of opium and heroin stockpiled before the ban
continue to flow out of the country, most of it through Tajikistan
and Russia on its way to Europe, U.N. and Tajik officials say.

Since Sept. 11, confiscations of heroin in Tajikistan by Tajik and
Russian border guards have doubled from three to six a week, with
each seizure averaging between 110 and 176 pounds, Kahane said. He
and other international narcotics experts think that the seizures
account for roughly 10 percent of the overall trade.

Most of the international attention on Afghanistan's narcotics trade
has focused on the ruling Taliban and a feared merger between drugs
and growing Islamic militancy in neighboring Central Asia. Until the
Taliban's ban on poppy growing, Afghanistan produced three-quarters
of the world's opium, with most of the heroin reaching Europe.

Yet analysts and officials in Tajikistan say the lucrative business
encompasses a wide range of participants, including Tajik officials,
Russian troops and the Afghan rebel coalition whose anti-Taliban
struggle last week received the public endorsement of President Bush.

"Everyone feeds on it," said Muzaffar Olimov, director of the Orient
Public Policy Center in Tajikistan. Both the Taliban and its rivals
occupy territory used to cultivate poppy fields, and each controls
sections of the frontier where processed heroin leaves the country,
Olimov and U.N. officials said.

About 16,000 Russian soldiers and border guards are based in this
former Soviet Central Asian republic. They hold the main
responsibility for monitoring Tajikistan's 1,000-mile border with
neighboring Afghanistan.

For this arid, mountainous country of 6 million people, the
implications for the curtailment of the drug trade are potentially
dire. Olimov and U.N. officials said the trafficking of heroin
accounts for 20 percent to 30 percent of the economy of Tajikistan,
where the per-capita income is less than $1 per day.

Many poor Tajiks are employed as couriers to ferry heroin to Moscow
aboard trains. Authorities in Tajikistan say couriers are paid up to
$200 for each trip, or paid in kind with heroin. Women with children
are particularly coveted as couriers because they are less subject to
inspection and, if caught, routinely serve lighter jail sentences
than men.

Politically, analysts said, the drug trade helps knit together a
fragile coalition government of poorly paid officials and military
officers.

Tajikistan's deputy prime minister earns $25 a month, for example, so
the temptation to enter the illicit business is high. Last year,
Tajikistan's ambassador to Kazakhstan was apprehended with more than
110 pounds of heroin. In a separate incident, Russian authorities
found the narcotic in a diplomatic pouch to Moscow.

For Olimov, the pervasiveness of the drug trade has crippled a
country trying to recover from a devastating civil war in the 1990s
and attempting to affirm its independence 10 years after the collapse
of the Soviet Union.

"Drug trafficking is becoming a national tragedy for Tajikistan," he said.