SENLIS COUNCIL HAS 'NOTHING TO HIDE'

The NGO's Afghan country director says those who believe the Senlis
Council has ulterior motives are toeing the U.S. line on drugs, and
invites debate on the group's licensing proposals.

Ask officials from some departments working in Afghanistan about the
Senlis Council and you will hear grumblings.

Some will wonder whether the group has ties to large pharmaceutical
companies. Others will wonder whether the group has garnered instant
credibility-at least from the mainstream media-because it is one of
the Canadian government's loudest critics on Afghanistan.

Canadian officials aren't the only ones who aren't happy with the
group. During a trip to Ottawa on Feb. 27, Christopher Alexander, the
UN deputy special representative of the secretary-general for
Afghanistan, said the non-government organization had been "extremely
effective in taking their message to Afghan farmers," which was
creating tensions between the population, the Afghan government and
NATO forces.

"You start to wonder which side they're on," he said. "I'm not
pleading for the Senlis Council to give up its role as a strong,
independent voice of civil society, but we do need to get our act
together to rally around a single policy of counter-narcotics."

Edward McCormick, the organization's Afghanistan country director,
says the Senlis Council has nothing to hide and is merely the subject
of skepticism because it is pushing an idea that goes against the
American line on drugs.

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over
again and expecting a different result," Mr. McCormick said in an
interview last week. "What we're saying is let's try something
different. And just because we want to try something different,
everybody is saying 'What are you up to?'"

NGO Backed by Swiss Billionaire

The Taliban made poppy farming illegal under their rule. But with the
group's removal from power in late 2001, farmers in Afghanistan
returned to the crop as a lucrative source of income within the
war-torn country.

In 2002, future Senlis Council president Norine MacDonald, a Canadian
lawyer who had worked for several other organizations, decided to
head to Afghanistan with the express purpose of determining whether
licensing opium would be a viable alternative to eradication and help
bring stability to the country, as it had in India and Turkey, Mr.
McCormick said.

"It was obvious almost right away," Mr. McCormick said of the
potential for licensing poppy.

Behind Ms. MacDonald were a large number of financial backers
interested in drug policy, including the Network of European
Foundations, a group of charitable funds that pay for different
projects aimed at bettering Europe as a whole. The network includes
the King Baudouin Foundation (named after the former Belgian king),
the Michigan-based Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and the Gabriel
Foundation, of which Ms. MacDonald was part.

"It's a group of foundations throughout Europe that are very well
endowed and they're doing very good work," Mr. McCormick said. "And
within that group are some concerned people who don't like what's
happening in terms of international narcotics trade."

One of those is a Swiss industrialist named Stephan Schmidheiny, who
Forbes magazine ranked as the world's 221st richest person last year.

"He is a very active, thoughtful man who has the wherewithal and the
generosity to look at an issue in a new way," Mr. McCormick said of
the Swiss billionaire.

The Network of European Foundations founded the Senlis Council in May
2002 with its Drug Policy Fund, which itself was founded only two
years earlier.

Four months later, a group of former European politicians,
ambassadors, academics, civil society leaders and judges, including a
former Portuguese president and a former British ambassador to
Colombia, met in Arrabida, Portugal as the Network of European
Foundations' Comite des Sages.

The group issued a statement on Sept. 20, 2002 that called for a
radical change to international drug policies.

"Policies based solely on criminal sanctions have failed to
demonstrate effectiveness," the statement reads.

"There is therefore an urgent need for a multidimensional and
integrated approach, which aims at reducing both supply and demand,
and which also integrates harm reduction strategies designed to
protect the health of the individual drug-user as well as the
wellbeing of society as a whole."

With such backers, the Senlis Council quickly established offices in
Kabul, London, Paris, Brussels, and-just last year-Ottawa, with the
expressed purpose of reforming global drug policies, though Mr.
McCormick says there isn't anything unusual about the way it operates.

"All we are is a slightly better organized group of people that
believe in an issue and are standing up for it, just like many people
do when they stand on Parliament Hill and disagree with something and
say so," he says.

The organization, Mr. McCormick said, is also extremely active in
Brazil, though it doesn't have an office there.

It has published several reports on both subjects, and expanded its
mandate last year to include security and development in the country.
It has worked with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red
Crescent Societies, and the Italian Red Cross.

The group has three offices in Afghanistan, in Kabul, Kandahar and
Lashkar Gah, with 50 Afghans working for it and a number of
foreigners. Mr. McCormick, a former paramedic in British Columbia who
worked on health care reform, was hired in January and manages the
Afghanistan team, which includes researchers and film and media teams.

'Eradication Didn't Work': Official

Mr. McCormick strongly dismissed allegations the organization is
funded by pharmaceutical companies, saying the Senlis Council's
recommendations are that harvesting and processing of opiates take
place within villages so local Afghans reap the maximum benefits.

"We actually have nothing to gain by whether it succeeds or fails
except that if we succeed," he said, "we have the satisfaction of
knowing we changed history, we stood up to the likes of the United
States, which believes it's got the only answers and can push around
countries like Canada and the EU and everybody else even though it
continues to fail and fail and fail in South America."

The organization's efforts have started to yield results in Europe,
where the idea is being publicly debated, especially in the United
Kingdom, Mr. McCormick says. Liberal Leader Stephane Dion has also
publicly backed the group's recommendations.

At the same time, its proposals are continually evolving as evidence
is put forward that certain ideas won't work and the issues are to be
rethought, he added.

"We need to have people say to us that our argument is flawed for the
following reasons," he said. "We don't have some stone tablets from
on high that say this is the way to go. What we do know is
eradication didn't work."

Barnett Rubin, who served as special advisor to Mr. Alexander's
predecessor, Lakhdar Brahimi, during the negotiations that produced
the Bonn Agreement and advised the UN on the drafting of the Afghan
constitution, defended the Senlis Council last week.

"The Senlis Council has carried out valuable research on various
aspects for the situation in Afghanistan and particularly on the
damaging effects of the way counter-narcotics policy is implemented
there," he wrote in an email. "I have yet to be convinced by their
proposals for licensing of opium, but they are constantly developing
and modifying these proposals in the light of discussions and new information.

"I wish that the Senlis Council's critics would devote as much energy
to trying to find innovative solutions to the narcotics problem in
Afghanistan as they do to criticizing the Senlis Council's proposals."

Mr. McCormick invited skepticism in examining the Senlis Council's
proposals for licensing.

"We want debate," he said. "And a huge measure of success for us has
been moving the debate internationally away from this unilateral
belief that eradication is the way to go, to the consideration of
alternatives."