IRAN BENDS ITS WAYS TO FIGHT DRUGS

Britain Helps With Night-vision Goggles, By Easing A Ban On Military Equipment.

TEHRAN, IRAN -- The unsuspecting Iranian airline passenger sends his
luggage through an X-ray machine at the Tehran airport, only to have a
drug-sniffing Alsatian wrestle his briefcase to the floor on the other side.

"C'mon, we're Muslims," the man complains with disgust, as the dog slobbers
excitedly over the leather case. "Look what this dog is doing to my bag!"

Iran sits on a major throughway between what is now the world's No. 1
opium-producing nation, Afghanistan, and the markets of Europe. Iranian
security forces clashed with narcotics smugglers nearly 1,500 times this
past year. And the new use of drug-sniffing dogs, which are considered
unclean by Muslims, is an indication of how seriously officials here take
the drug war.

Iran's ruling clerics recently took the unprecedented step of issuing a
fatwa, a religious edict, approving the use of dogs.

"Do you want to see the fatwa?" the uniformed dog handler asks the
unsettled passenger. The man grabs his brief case and leaves. But several
bags later, Hans, one of five dogs donated by the French government late
last year, pounces on another bag. The face of its owner droops, as guards
pull him aside and find a stash of opium.

The fatwa on dogs is one of several surprising steps taken by Iran - and
matched by European donors, who have also provided bullet-proof vests - to
stop the flow of drugs from Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, which last year
doubled its poppy crop.

That, in turn, has made Iran the world leader in drug seizures, with the
confiscation of 253 tons of narcotics last year. The 6 tons of heroin
seized alone is equal to the entire annual street consumption of Britain
and Italy.

Iran has demonstrated its commitment to stopping the flow - in both cash
spent and lives of law-enforcement officers lost.

"Iran is extremely serious, but the extent of the problem is overwhelming
them," says Neil Crompton, the deputy head of the British Embassy in Tehran.

So far, Britain has donated $2.5 million to Iran's drug-enforcement
program, most of it through the UN Drug Control Program (UNDCP). The funds
have been spent on, among other things, 1,000 bullet-proof vests and 170
sets of night-vision goggles, which - because of prohibitions on selling
military equipment to Iran - required approval from the British Parliament.

"There has been a tangible change in the last six months, as people saw how
serious the problem was," says Mr. Crompton. "These are not skirmishes -
the [Iranians] are up against better armed forces, so we have asked other
donors to keep an open mind about their needs.

"It's a big step for the Iranians too," he adds. "They have not cooperated
with the outside world that much."

Some analysts suggest that if the US wanted to "break the ice" after its
two-decade estrangement with Tehran - despite US accusations that Iran is a
state-sponsor of terrorism - it could support the antidrug effort.

Though Iran is not known to produce narcotics itself, officials justify the
$200 million annual budget of the drug-control programs by noting that
there are as many as 1.5 million addicts in Iran, by UN estimates.

"We are convinced that we shouldn't allow this menace to go to other
countries - our Islamic religion does not allow us to ignore the flow of
drugs," says Esmaeil Afshari, head of the international-relations office of
Iran's drug control headquarters. "But we have problems - how can we
justify the cost to our people?"

Outside his offices, that cost is evident. There are a series of fading
pictures of uniformed "martyrs," among 36 border guards killed in a battle
last November.

The unit was cut off by 100 drug traffickers who were armed with heavy
machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars. Their slaughter -
bringing Iran's total death toll in the drug wars to nearly 3,000 since
1979 - shocked the country.

"People ask: 'Why are you sacrificing our families and sons, for the
Europeans?' " Mr. Afshari says. Security forces last year were engaged in
1,445 armed confrontations, with up to seven battles in a day.

While praising the UN and European donors, others could do more. "The US
government is doing a lot for other countries, such as giving billions to
Colombia," says Afshari. "They shouldn't ignore Afghan production."

During the reign of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran was a major producer
of drugs, and opium was openly available in pharmacies. Opium production in
Iran was halted in 1979, after the Islamic Revolution.

The 1997 election victory of reform-minded President Mohamad Khatami
ushered in a new era of transparency that helped expose Iran's domestic
drug-abuse problem. "The drug issue is one that the government has pushed
as hard as possible" says Tehran. It's seen as a way to build bridges with
the international community.

Foreign governments must tread a fine line in helping a nation widely
identified in the West as a sponso of terrorism. But few here question
Iran's readiness, and point to the fatwa permitting Muslims to handle dogs
as a sign of an interpretive, modern agility when it comes to Islamic
strictures.

"They don't have a pet culture, and this is a country where for 2,000
years, the dog was supposed to be impure," says a senior European diplomat.
"But here the dog is being used for a religious purpose, and in the Shiite
Muslim tradition, there is a hierarchy of religious rules. They haven't
said that it's OK to touch dogs, but ruled that it is more important to
fight drugs."