CENTRAL ASIA SLIPPING EVER DEEPER INTO FEAR AND POVERTY

While the war in Afghanistan has been a major cause of concern to the
region's former Soviet states, there are other trouble points as well.

By Angela Charlton ASSOCIATED PRESS

TURDIYEV, Tajikistan - A field of sun-parched brush separates Sayevali
Abdulloyev's land from Afghanistan. He has surveyed this border from his
farm in Tajikistan for 40 years, and has never crossed it. It terrifies him.

War, drugs, religious strife - to Abdulloyev, it all comes from the other
side of the barbed wire. The fighting in Afghanistan this fall has come so
close to his village of Turdiyev that he hears the clap of artillery fire at
night.

But Afghanistan is not the only threat stalking the ex-Soviet states of
Central Asia. Hundreds of miles to the north, armed guerrillas and heroin
traders prowl the mountains above the Fergana Valley, where Uzbekistan,
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan converge, and where Islamic uprisings killed
scores of people the last two summers.

In spite of Russian troops and Western aid, Central Asia appears to be
slipping ever deeper into fear, poverty and frustration. Some even warn that
the 55 million people in these infant states - born just nine years ago by
the Soviet collapse - are on the verge of a tangled, cross-border war.

Mirzo Ziyoyev, who commanded Islamic opposition forces during Tajikistan's
1992-97 civil war, says a Central Asian war would likely start between
Uzbekistan's repressive government and the armed Islamic Movement of
Uzbekistan.

Harking back to old Islamic systems of government, the movement wants to
turn the Fergana Valley into a caliphate, or independent state. It is blamed
for the uprisings in the region and the kidnappings of four American
mountain climbers and four Japanese geologists.

Its activities have provoked a crackdown by Uzbek authorities that has
government agents monitoring mosques and men shaving their beards for fear
they will be labeled Islamic radicals. The movement has been declared a
terrorist organization by the U.S. government, which says it is linked to
suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden, a Saudi exile now believed to be living
in Afghanistan.

Ziyoyev, an imposing man with a belly-length beard, says he knows some IMU
warlords and that they are well-funded, armed and trained at camps in
Afghanistan.

'Ordinary people'

He criticizes their goal of overthrowing the region's presidents - because
he is now part of Tajikistan's coalition government under an unusual,
U.N.-brokered conciliation deal.

But he warns that it is not just militants who would join a Central Asian
war.

"There are people, ordinary people, who are ready for an Islamic state" in
Central Asia, Ziyoyev said.

Those people may be found in impoverished villages such as Zardaly, in the
mountains of southern Kyrgyzstan overlooking the Fergana Valley.

Families in Zardaly are struggling to sustain their apricot and pomegranate
orchards - their main source of income - from a devastating drought.

Avdatli Seitaliyev was laid off from his job at a textile plant after a year
of not getting paid.

Islamic militants came to Zardaly this spring. The "nice ones" bought
blankets and seeds from the villagers, Seitaliyev said. Others stole.

Villagers believe the men were establishing a base in the nearby mountains.
But when police asked questions, most people kept silent.

Little allegiance

First, because even the sale of a blanket to the guerrillas provided welcome
income. And second, because people in isolated southern Kyrgyzstan feel
little allegiance to their government, 270 miles away in the capital
Bishkek, which they say ignores their money problems and favors the more
developed north.

Zardaly people consider themselves Muslim, though they have no mosque (the
communists stamped out religious practice) and the village cannot afford to
build one. Yet Seitaliyev said the tacit collaboration was not driven by
devotion to Islam, but by a hope for change.

"If they make an Islamic state, perhaps that is as it should be. It is clear
that the current system is bad for us," he said.

Some observers say the conflict is not motivated so much by religion as by
the drug trade. Central Asian officials say the IMU's ulterior aim is to
protect drug-trafficking corridors.

Afghanistan is by far the world's largest producer of opium, the raw source
of heroin. Most of it pours through Tajikistan to Russia and Western Europe.
Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan also grow opium poppies.

And trade is on the rise. Officials estimate they catch just 10 percent of
the drugs that cross the Afghan-Tajik border.

Tajikistan's government recently sentenced two men to execution by firing
squad for carrying nearly half a ton of raw opium in their car, apparently
on their way to markets in Russia or beyond.

But harsh punishments have done little to stem smuggling in a region where a
donkey is the only form of transport most people can afford but drug
traffickers drive Mercedes-Benz limousines.

The 25,000 Russian and Tajik servicemen guarding the jagged 750-mile
Tajik-Afghan frontier are worried about more than an influx of drugs. They
fear the Afghan war will spill over.

At the Akmazar checkpoint, a Tajik guard says shooting is heard every night
and is getting closer.

Checkpoints like this dot the border. In some places the Pyandzh River
dividing the countries is wide and easily monitored from lookout towers.
Afghan villagers graze their cows on islands in the river. But the border
grows less well guarded as it moves east into the sparsely populated slopes
and gorges of the Pamir Mountains.

In the Tajik village of Turdiyev, about a mile from the border, Abdulloyev
tends his fields and listens. Despite the proximity of Afghanistan's Taliban
fighters, he knows little about them. He thinks they trade drugs and
weapons, and worries about their reputation for barring women from working.

"What if they close down our clinic? Women work there," he said. He has
diabetes, and a small hospital in a nearby town is his only source of
insulin and herbal remedies.

Some of his neighbors resent the Russians, Tajikistan's one-time colonizers,
who still guard this border. Abdulloyev welcomes them. His government, he
says with a sigh, is too poor and weak to protect itself.

"If the Russians leave," he says, "the Taliban would be on top of us in a
day. No, in an hour."