HEROIN'S NEW KILLING FIELDS

The Taliban falls and the opium poppy rises. SHAWN BLORE visits the
Tajik-Afghan border, where the fierce Russian anti-drug squad this week
made its biggest seizure yet

In the southern marshes of Tajikistan, the hills roll down to the
Afghan border covered in a lush carpet of grass, dotted with bright
red poppies. Across the river Pyanch in Afghanistan, the hills and
grass look much the same, but the poppies mostly sprout up purple,
with seedpods that when carefully nicked yield a viscous teardrop of
fluid. Collected by nimble fingers and processed into opium and
heroin, those teardrops are responsible for much of the money and a
good deal of the violence in the country where about 6,000 Canadians now
serve as peacekeepers.

The drug trade once suppressed by the Taliban is burgeoning once
again. International experts have warned that this year is likely to
yield a bumper crop, much of which finds its way across this stretch
of border. The flow has become so great that the Afghan traffickers are
virtually at war with the Russian troops recruited to stop them.

This week, a shootout between the two sides ended when 10 smugglers
fled back into Afghanistan, leaving the border guards to seize their
biggest prize yet -- more than a quarter-tonne of heroin, as well as a
Kalashnikov automatic rifle and three loaded magazines.

Just a day before, officials in Moscow had complained that cheap
heroin is flooding Russia and causing "an acute problem." To address
the situation, President Vladimir Putin has set up a special
committee. Last month, just after it set to work, the authorities
announced Russia's largest-ever drug bust: 417 kilos of heroin found in a
truck stopped just outside Moscow.

A visit to the remote border town of Pyanch makes it abundantly clear
how drugs get from source to marketplace. The region is a smuggler's
dream -- the river is broad, easily swum, and even more easily crossed
by raft. There are sandbars and small islands of indeterminate
nationality on which to rest and hide. The shoreline and banks are
covered in reeds and brush. Beyond that, hundreds of goat tracks lead
back into Tajikistan. And this portion of the frontier is the easiest for
the Russian Border Service to control.

The headquarters of the border patrol is located in the Tajik capital
of Dushanbe, a three-hour trip north for those with a car and driver,
and otherwise a nine-hour journey in a wheezing Soviet-era bus with a
score of old men, six bales of cotton, two rugs, a bed frame and three
nursing mothers for company.

In a small, salmon-coloured mansion on a quiet, tree-lined boulevard, the
force's Ukrainian commander, Colonel Pyotr Gordienko, is a 50-plus
career soldier with iron-grey hair and watery blue eyes. He opens by
saying that in the 10 years his 11,000-man force has been guarding the
Tajik border, 159 have been killed and 320 injured in battles with
armed Afghans, mostly drug traffickers. That works out to an average of
one soldier injured every 10 days, and one soldier killed a month.

Over the past two years, the rates of trafficking and violence have
essentially doubled, Col. Gordienko continues. Pulling a three-ring
binder from a dingy shelf, he flips to a typed report and begins
reeling off statistics: In all of 2001, the border force seized four
tonnes of narcotics, including 2.3 tonnes of heroin. In the first four
months of this year, they already had seized 2.1 tonnes of drugs,
including 1.4 tonnes of heroin. This, he adds, was in winter, when snow
in the passes normally brings trafficking to a standstill.

Col. Gordienko won't say explicitly that the increase in trafficking
is the result of the regime change in Afghanistan. Instead, he moves
to a map on the wall and traces out the entire 1,300-kilometre length
of the Tajik-Afghan border. From China, his hand moves through the
8,000-metre peaks of the Pamirs, over the verdant lowlands of the
Rivers Pyanch and Amu Daria to the border with Turkmenistan.

Three years ago, most trafficking activity was either through the
Pamir mountains or in this segment, he says, indicating the border
from Pyanch to Kalaikhom, which sits opposite the Northern Alliance's
long-time Afghan stronghold. From Pyanch to the Turkmen border -- the
region long controlled by the Taliban -- used to be fairly quiet. Now it
accounts for about 60 per cent of border seizures.

United Nations figures confirm the colonel's assertions. According to
Global Illicit Drug Trends 2003, the UN's annual bible of drug
statistics, opium poppy production in Afghanistan shot up from an
all-time low of 7,606 hectares in 2001 to a near-record high 74,100 in
2002. Opium manufacture increased nearly 20-fold, from 185 tonnes to
3,400. Afghanistan is once again the world's opium breadbasket,
responsible for about 70 per cent of the global supply.

To control this traffic -- and the northward flow of Islamic
nationalism -- in 1993 the Russians and Tajikistan signed a 10-year
treaty (since extended by five years), establishing what is officially
known as the Russian Federal Border Service in the Republic of
Tajikistan. Operationally, the 11,000-member force is deployed in
detachments of about 400, each of which is responsible for about 50
kilometres of border. Each has its own barracks, blockhouses and
watchtowers, communications lines, artillery and barbed wire.

The cash-starved Russians can't afford the kind of high-tech
surveillance gear used on the U.S.-Canadian border, so they make do
with low-tech substitutes. "We use dogs a lot," Col. Gordienko says
simply. Anyone within a kilometre of the border is subject to
challenge and detention. In 2002, the colonel's forces intercepted 37
attempts to cross the border. Forty-one presumed traffickers were
killed. Or rather, Col. Gordienko corrects himself with
characteristically Slavic bombast, annihilated.

He flips to another page in his worn binder. In addition to the drugs,
his troops seized 6,300 rounds of large-calibre ammunition, 1,250
grenade throwers, 510 mines and 150 hand-held rockets. The armaments
make it sound less like an anti-smuggling operation and more like a
small-scale war.

"That's exactly what we are fighting -- a war," Col. Gordienko says.

What the colonel doesn't say is that it's a war he's mostly losing.
According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), enforcement
operations such as the Russian border service typically apprehend only 5 to
15 per cent of trafficked narcotics.

The colonel looks hurt when this statistic is mentioned. Azerbaijan
seized only seven kilograms of heroin last year, he protests.
Turkmenistan, just to the west of Tajikistan, recently decided to stop
collecting and publishing drug-seizure statistics, which in the
colonel's view is likely because they haven't made any. "Maybe if you
average their zero with our record, the result is only 15 per cent, but
we're getting more than that."

How much more? "About 50 per cent," he says. But he admits the figure
is based on nothing more than gut feeling and 11 years of experience.
He digs through a stack of incident reports and comes up with one
recently faxed in from the field: One man swam the river near Pyanch,
was intercepted by border forces and tried to hide in the reeds. He was
killed. Annihilated. The border guards retrieved a machine gun and 19
rounds of ammunition, six kilos of heroin, three parcels of "chang" (a
semi-processed heroin precursor) and a radio transmitter.

This sort of incident happens all the time, Col. Gordienko says. It's the
new tactic, sending over a shipment in small pieces. That way, all
that's at risk is a few kilograms of product and a single courier, both
fairly easy to come by. Here the colonel grins and starts humming
a familiar guitar riff. "It is what that rock band called -- what was it?
- -- a dirty deed done dirt cheap."

In fact, financing is a bit of a sore point. Russia and Tajikistan are
supposed to contribute equally to the border service's $30-million
yearly budget. In practice, the cash-starved Tajiks contribute only
about 3 per cent. Russia makes up the difference, mostly from a sense
of self-preservation. More than 2 per cent of the adult population in
Russian is addicted to heroin, according to the UNODC. Reliable
figures for Tajikistan are harder to come by, but the problem is
certainly growing.

Contrary to the Soviet-satellite stereotype, Dushanbe is a graceful
city of tree-lined boulevards and neo-classical architecture. The
economy, however, never really recovered from the collapse of the
Soviet Union. An ensuing five-year civil war didn't help. More than
one million Tajiks now live and work abroad. The savings they remit
home do much to keep the country afloat. Foreign aid from governments
and non-governmental organizations makes up another huge portion of the
domestic economy, up to a third by most estimates. Unemployment in
many parts of the county exceeds 50 per cent. Small wonder that crime
appears as an attractive alternative.

The centrepiece of the city is a new monument -- replacing the old
statue of Lenin -- featuring a single golden arch and a tall statue of
an eighth-century Tajik king. The militiamen who guard this national
shrine do a brisk business extorting bribes for private tours or
access to the best photo spots. A little farther up the street is a
small compound that houses the local office of the UNODC, the UN drug
mission to Tajikistan.

The program co-ordinator, Sergey Bozhko, has some enlightening figures
on Tajik crime levels. More than 4,000 drug-related offenders are
currently serving time in Tajik prisons, he says. They include a
number of soldiers and one or two officers of the Russian border
service, convicted of aiding and abetting trafficking networks. He
estimates that there are now about 43,000 Tajik heroin addicts, about 0.8
per cent of the population.

The mechanism behind this surge in crime is simple, Mr. Bozhko
continues. Some 20 to 40 tonnes of heroin pass through Tajikistan
every year, assuming the seizure rate is about 10 per cent. When I
tell him Col. Gordienko thinks he's getting 50 per cent, he snorts in
disbelief, but even using that figure means that two to four tonnes
are crossing through the country each year. The Tajiks who facilitate
this traffic get paid in kind, heroin that they convert to dollars by
peddling it to the locals.

The UN office is one of the measures recently put in place to deal
with Tajikistan's domestic drug problem. Much of its work is focused
on raising awareness and building up the legal system. In addition,
the Tajikistan government has also created a U.S.-style drug czar, a
single office reporting directly to the president. Its focus has been
almost exclusively on enforcement. Tajikistan has extremely stringent
drug laws, including long sentences for traffickers and users alike.
Almost nothing is being done in terms of abuse prevention or harm
reduction.

A few blocks north of the presidential palace, at an outdoor cafe, I
meet up with a Tajikistani who tried to introduce European-style harm
reduction to the country. Well-travelled and fluent in English, he went
to work for an NGO with Soros Foundation funding to help set up a needle
exchange for injection-drug users in the capital. The first day
a number of addicts showed up -- and so did the police, who promptly
tossed the users in jail. The program has continued sporadically, as have
the police raids.

Public drug use in Dushanbe seems next to non-existent, so I ask my
NGO contact to introduce me to some local users. He takes me to the
city's main park, where a pavilion that in Soviet times was a palace
of culture has since been privatized into a disco. Inside is a
smattering of the city's more cosmopolitan youth, plus a large
contingent of French peacekeeping troops, some of them getting noisily
drunk, others swapping spit with local Tajik prostitutes.

One of the women comes over to introduce herself to me. She already
knows my companion, from the needle exchange. She has lovely huge eyes
and the underweight look of a fashion model. She answers a few
questions, but when it becomes clear we're not customers, she begins to
move off.

I learn that she is Russian, 27, and a drug user for about four years.
Before she goes, I ask whether it's tough for her to make enough money to
cover her habit. She laughs. Heroin in Dushanbe now costs about one
U.S. dollar a gram, she says. Sometimes it goes as low as 50 cents. It's
the cheapest price she has seen in years.

Shawn Blore is a Toronto-based freelance writer.