TRAFFICKING FLOURISHES ON AFGHAN DRUG ROUTE

Second of two parts

ON THE PYANDZH RIVER, Tajikistan - As soon as he spied his quarry,
Lieutenant Alexander Zinchenko took off his boots, rolled up his pants, and
plunged into the icy shallow rapids of the Pyandzh, toward the barren flood
plain that forms the border with war-ravaged Afghanistan.

The men on the low island in the distance had clearly crossed over from the
Afghan side.

But were they harmless herders who had strayed into Tajik territory while
searching for firewood? Or were they perhaps drug couriers probing the
border for weak spots in advance of a big shipment along the ancient Great
Silk Road, a route that has become a narcotics superhighway that supplies 72
percent of the world's heroin?

Zinchenko raised his machine gun to fire a warning shot, but the distant
figures on the low island were already dashing across the sharp, slippery
rocks to safety on the Afghan side of the border.

Zinchenko is an officer in a Russian-led border guard force that sees itself
as the first line of defense against drug trafficking from the world's
largest heroin-producing region - the poppy fields of Afghanistan. As the
drug trade wreaks havoc in Tajikistan and all of Central Asia, and
ultimately, Russia and Europe, the unit is charged with stopping it.

But outnumbered, and often outgunned, the troops have managed to halt only a
fraction of the shipments.

Four guards from the unit, of which 90 percent of the enlisted men are
Tajiks, have been killed this year in clashes with the smugglers, some of
whom carry heavy machine guns and rocket launchers. Most encounters with
drug runners end with the smugglers getting away, like the border violators
on Zinchenko's recent patrol.

Once smugglers slip past the border guards, they move toward the mountains
of Tajikistan, where anyone with a mule, a horse, or a helicopter can easily
evade detection.

The Taliban movement that now controls 95 percent of Afghanistan says it has
banned all poppy planting this season, declaring that there will be no fresh
crop next year to supply the drug trade. But few outside of Afghanistan
believe this means the end of this wildly lucrative, illicit trade on the
route smugglers have rechristened "The Great Drug Road."

The Taliban have not prevented smugglers from processing and transporting
the harvest out of Afghanistan earlier this year, which US and Russian
officials say is larger than last year's record crop.

"The narcotics business has been snowballing," said Colonel Alexander
Kostuchenko, who commands the troops on the 80-mile stretch of border along
the Pyandzh where most of the smuggling takes place. "In six years, I
haven't seen it fall off. It has only increased under the Taliban."

The effects of the burgeoning drug trade are everywhere. On the streets of
the Tajik capital of Dushanbe, now bustling three years after a civil war
that claimed at least 30,000 lives, local dealers quote the price of cars
and other luxury items in pounds of heroin, rather than money.

In poorer, mountainous eastern Tajikistan, a matchbox stuffed with hashish
has replaced money as holiday gift. Some officials estimate that up to 30
percent of Tajikistan's gross domestic product is generated by the drug
trade.

As supply has increased, driving prices down, more addictive heroin has
increasingly replaced weaker opium as the drug of choice. Addiction has
become a problem for countries that have never had serious drug problems.
Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan each report 200,000 addicts, with 50,000 more in
Kyrgyzstan. At a sprawling street market in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, dealers slip
buyers small white envelopes containing single doses of heroin, which cost
less than $2.

Medical facilities can't handle the resulting increase in hepatitis and
AIDS. Russian health officials fear that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS,
will spread to 2 million intravenous drug users there by 2002.

This year, Russian police have seized more than 1,500 pounds of heroin,
which police admit is as much a sign of the booming drug trade as of
improvement in law enforcement techniques; a few years ago, total annual
seizures were counted in grams.

US officials estimate that the opium crop in Afghanistan increased by 25
percent in 2000 over 1999, to 3,656 metric tons of opium, enough to make 365
metric tons of heroin. Russian estimates of the crop are nearly twice that
amount. Even if the Taliban are serious about ending the drug trade,
officials fear the supply will not dry up for years.

For many in Tajikistan, the drug trade is the best source of income in a
country that suffered a devastating civil war and now is struggling through
a drought that has left many of its 5.7 million people, in the words of US
Ambassador Robert Finch, "on the verge of starvation."

In Afghanistan, two pounds of heroin is worth $700 to $900. The price goes
up to $1,500 in the Tajik capital, and soars to up to $40,000 in Moscow. In
Europe, the market price is $150,000.

Many observers believe a power-sharing deal that allowed members of
Tajikistan's Islamic opposition to enter government has had the effect of
allowing warlords to legitimize their shares of the drug trade. A recent
crackdown found 140 pounds of heroin in a car belonging to the Tajik
ambassador in Kazakhstan, and another 20 pounds of heroin in the garage of a
Tajik trade representative.

Officials say the drug trade has been used to finance Islamic insurgencies
in Central Asia. Bolot Janukazov, a senior Kyrgyz security official, said
the militant Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, believed to have bases in
Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan and in Tajikistan's mountains,
controls 70 percent of the region's drug trafficking.

Regional governments, joined by the United States, China, and Russia, have
tried to put aside their differences to fight the drug trade. With UN help,
Tajikistan formed a drug enforcement agency to curtail the illicit flow.

But critics say the increased law enforcement effort only pushes the
narco-barons to be more fierce and resourceful. A March report on the
Central Asian drug trade by the Carnegie Foundation estimated that drug
dealers pay off half of the customs officials in Kyrgyzstan. Russian
officers assume the same is true of many of their Tajik colleagues.

The Russian guards say this is why they burn the drugs they confiscate,
rather than turn them over to the Tajiks. Privately, Russian officers say
they fear the drugs would go back on the market.

Tajik officials counter that the Russian forces provide drug traffickers
with planes and helicopters. In 1997, 12 Russian servicemen based in
Dushanbe were caught trying to transport 17 pounds of narcotics to Moscow.

Lieutenant Colonel Pyotr Gordiyenko of the Russian border guard adamantly
denies that his troops are involved, although he says he understands that
many people might wonder. The way he sees it, each shipment of heroin kept
from the market means thousands of Russians saved from addiction - and
that's a big motivation for soldiers who earn less in a month than the price
of a plane ticket to Moscow.

"Foreign journalists often can't understand how our officers can confiscate
thousands of dollars' worth of drugs and not take any," Gordiyenko said.
"They can't understand why an officer would work for the border guards."

That question did come to mind during a recent visit to Lieutenant
Zinchenko's post on the Pyandzh River, where 25 Tajik enlisted men and their
Russian officers patrol a five-mile border stretch where many of the illicit
crossings take place.

The post's lights had not worked for days because there was no fuel. Neither
did the battery-operated surveillance equipment. There was barely enough
diesel for the detachment's battered Russian-made jeeps to make their
rounds.

"The other side has Chevrolet Blazers and Western radios," Zinchenko said.
"We get by on enthusiasm, and on the love of the hunt."