Afghans will enforce ban on poppy growing

WORLD: Taliban militants want the U.N. brokered accord to include new jobs
and crops for farmers.

UNITED NATIONS The director of the United Nations antinarcotics
organization said Friday that the militant Islamic movement that controls
most of Afghanistan had agreed to enforce a ban on opium poppy production
and smuggling with the help of international crimefighting organizations.

Under Secretary General Pino Arlacchi said in an interview that the
agreement with the Taliban, who seized power in Kabul in September 1996,
had taken six months to negotiate.

Only last month Arlacchi, an Italian expert on the Mafia who this year
became executive director of the United Nations International Drug Control
Program, described himself as "very worried" that poppy production had
increased since the Taliban took power.

But Friday he described the new agreement as "a major breakthrough," doubly
important because it comes as the next season's crop is about to be sown.

"We are talking about half the heroin in the world," he said.

On Friday Arlacchi said that a memorandum submitted to his office from
Afghanistan this week "opened the door to direct monitoring of the ban" for
the first time. He said that he would go to Afghanistan next month to ask
permission to put a surveillance network into 42 districts where poppies
are grown.

As a result of the agreement, the United Nations, using the BBC's foreign
language services, plans to begin broadcasts next week telling farmers of
the ban. Since the planting season is about to begin, international
monitors should be able to determine within a matter of months whether the
Taliban have indeed begun to eliminate or reduce crops.

The drugcontrol agency has devised a program that would introduce new
crops that would substitute for opium poppies, extend irrigation systems,
build a few factoriesincluding a woolen mill already in planning and pay
for police training and enforcement. The cost would be about $25 million a
year.

Arlacchi is discussing the program with donor nations here and will meet
American officials next week in Washington.

United Nations officials have been struggling for a year to devise policies
for dealing with the Taliban movement, with agencies quarreling over how
much Afghanistan's new rulers should be isolated because of their harsh
interpretation of Islam, particularly their repression of women.

But Arlacchi said Friday that for his agency, this was a political question
beyond its competence. "We are dealing with drugs," he said, "and
Afghanistan is in the central position on our map."

He said that he was prepared to discuss human rights with the Taliban, but
that he was also bearing in mind "the human rights of 8 million drug
addicts in the world."

In September Arlacchi said that opium production in Afghanistan had
increased 25 percent, to 2,800 tons, in the year that the Taliban had
controlled at least twothirds of the country, including 96 percent of its
poppygrowing areas. About half the world's heroin is derived from Afghan
opium, with most of the rest coming from Southeast Asia and Colombia.

The Taliban movement banned the production and consumption of marijuana and
its derivative hashish, as well as heroin, several months ago, but left the
question of poppies clouded. A spokesman for the Taliban said Friday in New
York that this was in part because Islamic law says nothing to prohibit
poppy cultivation.

On the other hand, coffeehouses where hashish was available have been
closed, Afghan and United Nations officials said. Drug use is punishable
with a range of sentences including execution.

In New York, Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, the Taliban's designated representative
at the United Nations, where Afghanistan's seat is still held by the ousted
government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani, said that his government's
cooperation was linked to promises from Arlacchi's agency that there would
be help in creating new jobs and crops for the farmers in areas where poppy
cultivation exists.

Calling poppy cultivation "a very ugly legacy of Communist government in
Afghanistan," Mujahid said poor farmers argued that they were growing
poppies for medicinal use or because there was little else to cultivate
profitably. They had to be persuaded to desist both theologically and
economically, he suggested.

"There is nothing written that poppy cultivation is prohibited," Mujahid
said, "But when changed to drugs, this is a great sin, a great crime to
Islam. There is a saying of Mohammed that everything that is intoxication
is prohibited in Islam. These things are not only harmful to Western
population. This is also harmful to our own people."