ANTI-POPPY DRIVE ENDS AFTER TWO KILLED

KABUL (Agencies): The drive to destroy the opium poppy crop in
Afghanistan's biggest growing region has been halted just days after it
started by land mines that killed two government workers, a local commander
said on Friday.Maulvi Abdul Samad said the two workers were killed in the
southern province of Helmand when their tractors, used to uproot poppies
nearly ready for harvest, ran over land mines.

He said the eradication program, backed by foreign aid donors who want to
stem the flow of heroin, had been halted across arid Helmand, where farmers
say poppy is the only profitable crop, and he did not know when it would be
restarted.

Samad accused farmers, who have protested violently against the eradication
program in Helmand and around the eastern city of Jalalabad, of planting
the mines to protect their crops.

Afghanistan, after 23 years of war, is littered with land mines.

Poppy farmers, who extract the opium from which heroin is derived, want
better compensation than the $250 an acre the government has offered.

"They say this is not enough. Farmers are willing to go for $1,000 per
hectare," Samad said.

Afghanistan once produced 70 percent of the world's opium and is still a
major supplier.

At least eight people were reported killed in Helmand on Sunday when
security men fired on farmers protesting against the eradication program
backed by the United Nations Drug Control Program.

Officials in Jalalabad, where protesting poppy farmers blocked the main
road to Pakistan and halted the flow of returning refugees for nearly two
days, said they had raised the compensation offer to $350.

On Monday, the day the interim government was due to send tractors into
fields to tear up the poppies of farmers refusing compensation, Defense
Minister Mohammad Fahim survived an assassination attempt.

There has been no word who was behind the remote-controlled bomb that
killed five people but missed Fahim, an ethnic Tajik on his first visit to
Jalalabad, largely populated by ethnic Pashtuns, who dominated the former
ruling Taliban movement.

But officials have not ruled out the possibility of a drug connection to
the attempt.