Series: Part 2 Of 3: The Enemy Within

IRAN LOSES ITS DRUGS WAR

The Heroin Route From Afghanistan To Europe

Most heroin sold in Europe comes from Afghanistan's poppies. Drugs cross
the permeable border with Iran on their way to Turkey and Europe despite
Iran's desperate efforts, costing many lives, to combat trafficking at the
border. Europe doesn't help Iran with the cost of policing, and does even
less to finance Afghan farmers to plant alternative crops.

Zahedan is the capital of Seistan-Baluchistan province, at the eastern edge
of Iran, bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan. At first sight it seems an
ordinary oriental town, with a lively bazaar, broad avenues jammed with
traffic and poor neighbourhoods on its outskirts. But this is misleading.
Zahedan is a vital staging post for international drug smuggling. In
streets placarded with posters of Ayatollah Khomeini, army trucks and
smugglers' four-by-fours squeeze past each other. As evening falls men in
all-terrain vehicles sell opium and heroin to local buyers. But the real
action goes on in the desolate valleys and hills outside the town.

At night Baluchi smugglers set off for Afghanistan loaded with jerrycans of
petrol, which is worth 10 times more there. They return with illegal
immigrants. After being harassed by the authorities and exploited on
Iranian building sites, some find their way as far as Europe. They
represent a secondary trading line for the smugglers, who are more
interested in drugs. The Pashtun provinces of Helmand, in the south, and
Nangarhar, in the north, are the centres of opium production in
Afghanistan. Some is turned into heroin in rudimentary laboratories in
Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Taking the southern route, after a detour via Pakistan, the drugs enter
Iran along tracks that smugglers have used for centuries, carried by car or
motorbike, on foot, or in convoys of dozens of four-by-fours with escorts
bristling with cell phones, night-vision goggles, Kalashnikovs, rocket
launchers and even United States-made Stinger missiles. The flow of drugs
across the Iranian border is unstoppable. There are even caravans of camels
that know the route so well they no longer need to be led. Each animal can
transport up to seven tonnes of drugs. At traditional celebrations, the
camels are fed opium to make them dance.

Baluchis, who are Sunni, ignore borders and are distributed across Iran,
Afghanistan and Pakistan. Baluchi society is based on clan loyalties and
some groups have been smuggling between the three countries for centuries.
Some have triple nationality. For many drug smuggling has become the only
possible livelihood since drought has affected the area for several years.
A high-ranking Iranian official, involved in the fight against
drug-running, says "they are just ordinary people". Traditional Baluchi
leaders condemn the use of drugs, which is infecting Iranian society (see
The enemy within). They are less concerned about smuggling, a source of
income for local notables. In Baluchistan there is no need to pressure
people to help: clan ties are strong enough. The Afghan brigands who run
opium along the northern route in Khorasan province regularly kidnap local
people.

The smugglers risk the death penalty if they are caught carrying more than
30 grams of heroin or five kilos of opium. In March 2001 five smugglers,
including a woman, were hanged from a crane in a Teheran square early one
morning. In 2000, 900 were killed. Drug-related offences account for more
than 80,000 of Iran's prison population of 170,000. Every year Iranian
police and customs detain thousands of first-time smugglers who attempt to
conceal opium, heroin, hashish or morphine in the soles of their shoes,
furniture, toothpaste tubes, electrical appliances, video cassettes and
bank notes.

Huge Profits

In 1995 a United Nations report said that "annual turnover in the drug
trade could be as high as $500bn" (1). The profits are huge. Afghan growers
sell opium for the equivalent of $30 a kilo in food. Smugglers earn $15-30
a day. In Zahedan a kilo of opium sells for $100, rising to $600 in Teheran
and $2,400 in Turkey. Once refined, using acetic anhydride, it yields 100
grams of heroin. An initial outlay of $100 is enough to set up a
laboratory. In Europe the street price for a gram of heroin, from 20-35%
pure, runs from $25-35. Up to 90% of the heroin consumed in Europe comes
from Afghanistan.

A dispirited Iranian army officer admits: "Unfortunately Iran is on the
shortest route from the producers in Afghanistan to European consumers.

The Central Asian states of the former Soviet Union have split into
separate countries, with many borders to cross. Via Iran, there are only
two." Once the smugglers have crossed into Iran, they stick to the
mountainous areas in the north and south until they reach the Turkish
border. Near Yazd, in central Iran, the Baluchi and Afghan carriers hand
over their cargo to Azeris, Persians and Kurds.

"After the revolution in 1979, Iran, which had cultivated drugs for years,
managed to eradicate growing of opium poppies in a year and a half," says
Antonio Mazzitelli, the Teheran representative of the UN Drug Control
Programme (UNDCP). Since then Iran has done its best to stem the drugs
crossing its territory. The movement for reform, led by President Khatami,
is still in charge of anti-drug policies. In January 2001 the Iranian legal
system, dominated by Supreme Guide Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's conservative
forces, made an unsuccessful bid to take over (2).

Forty-two thousand soldiers, police and militia, a tenth of Iran's armed
forces, are deployed along the eastern border, 1,950 kilometres from
Turkmenistan, in the north, down to the Indian Ocean. The border has more
than 200 observation posts, dozens of walls blocking mountain passes and
hundreds of kilometres of trenches and barbed wire, an investment of $1bn,
plus upkeep. Iran's majlis (parliament) allocated $25m to improve border
fortifications in 2000: 3,140 members of the security forces, including two
generals, have been killed in skirmishes with smugglers since 1979, a rate
of three a day (3).

In October 1999, at Gurnak to the south of Zahedan, 37 soldiers looking for
a band of smugglers led by Mullah Kemal Salah Zehi were encircled and
killed by their quarry.

Ali runs a local radio for Aftab (meaning sun), an Iranian NGO that
specialises in helping addicts. One of his friends, newly married and doing
his national service, was among those killed at Gurnak. He says: "If Iran
let the drugs through, our soldiers wouldn't get killed and less heroin
would stop here. The West, which is the biggest consumer, does little to
help. Probably because it doesn't like us." Many Iranians share this view,
knowing Iran's negative image in the West.

Besides bilateral meetings between the heads of Iranian anti-narcotics
forces and their Asian and European counterparts, international aid is
limited. The European Commission and 14 donor countries contribute to UNDCP
($17m a year), which mounts anti-drug operations with the Iranian
government. France has supplied 10 sniffer dogs and the UK bulletproof
vests. Mazzitelli says: "The UK parliament had to pass a special law to
allow the vests to be exported. Even the vaccine for the sniffer dogs has
to be imported. One of the ingredients could theoretically be used in
chemical weapons" (and so is on the list of banned substances).

President George Bush has now threatened military action against the axis
of evil Iran, Iraq and North Korea. But Washington has seen Iran as a rogue
state (3) for a long time, and more recently as a "state of concern", and
has subjected it to unilateral sanctions (4), which have affected the fight
against drug running. The smugglers are generally better equipped than the
military. Drugs consumed in the United States do not come from Central Asia
but from the Golden Triangle further east, and Latin America. So Washington
has nothing to gain by helping Iran fight trafficking. (Tension between the
US and Iran rose suddenly in January when Israel intercepted a freighter
loaded with arms said to be en route from Iran to Palestinian resistance
groups.)

Too Long A Border

Iranian anti-drug forces seized more than 250 tonnes of narcotics in 2000.
UNDCP estimates that on average states only intercept between 10- 20% of
all drugs. This suggests that some 1,000-2,000 tonnes of narcotics
completed the journey from Afghanistan to Turkey that year. The heads of
anti-narcotics forces in Iran are apologetic. One explains: "The border is
simply too long, with deserts, mountains and marshes. We cannot control it
all." Another says: "We do our best. We've lost 3,000 men proving that."

Shortcomings are apparent at any border post. At Taybad in Khorasan
province, we saw an endless line of Afghan articulated trucks, bumper to
bumper. The drivers were shifting goods from one trailer to another before
entering Iran. Overwhelmed by their number, Northern Alliance soldiers and
Iranian border guards cast an eye over passports, vehicles and loads.
Underpaid officials must sometimes be tempted by the easy money from
trafficking. Official reports do not mention corruption, which seems odd,
as in Teheran's public gardens street dealers pay police patrols $15 a day
to turn a blind eye.

"Only by tackling the root of the problem can we hope to end the traffic,"
says Hossein Ketabdar, the anti-drug chief of Khorasan province.
"Afghanistan is Nothingstan: without opium they would have nothing. We have
to lift this country out of its misery and develop replacement cash crops
for its farmers." US intervention has so far not dealt with this. "I don't
know whether US bombs settled the Taliban problem," adds Ketabdar, "but
they certainly have not solved the opium issue." Mazzitelli is convinced
that it has made things worse, making the opium crop even more important
for the 3.3m Afghans who depend on it for their livelihood.

Mazzitelli explains: "Afghanistan produced 4,600 tonnes of opium in 1999.
Then, in July 2000, the Taliban banned the crop. It is possible that Mullah
Omar took this decision to let smugglers sell off their stocks and push up
the market price. Either way, we observed a drastic reduction in the number
of poppy fields and production dropped to 185 tonnes in 2001." But with no
outside assistance, the growers and their families plunged into poverty.
"As soon as the Taliban regime collapsed, the growers took advantage of the
chaos to replant their fields," adds Mazzitelli. There could be a bumper
crop this June. But it is hard to blame the farmers for trying to survive.
"They have no other alternative," he says, "an opium poppy field is worth
15 times more than a food crop."

In January Hamid Karzai, head of the Afghan interim government, announced
plans to end opium growing. The international community, including Iran,
welcomed this gesture. But there is every reason to doubt the interim
government's ability to control Afghanistan. There is already open conflict
between warlords. As most of the opium is grown in Pashtun provinces, which
are particularly reluctant to take orders from the Tajik-dominated
government, it seems even less likely that measures to root out the crop
will be effective.

Afghanistan was promised $4.5bn in international aid at the Tokyo
conference in January. Iran allocated $560m over a five-year period, $120m
for this year. "For now the international community is not attempting to
fund alternative development projects and replacement crops, but rather to
rebuild Afghanistan's infrastructure," Mazzitelli points out. Given
Afghanistan's extreme poverty, the fight against opium production could be
sidelined.
(1) UN International Drug Control Programme, Drugs and Development:
Discussion prepared for the World Summit for Social Development, June 1994, p1.

(2) See Eric Rouleau, Islam confronts Islam in Iran, Le Monde diplomatique
English edition, June 1999.

(3) See Noam Chomsky, America: the outlaw state, Le Monde diplomatique
English edition, August 2000.

(4) Iran is subjected to unilateral US measures and not an international
embargo. The Iran-Iraq Arms Non-Proliferation Act (23 October 1992)
sanctions any state transferring technical processes or goods that might
contribute to acquiring advanced conventional, chemical, biological or
nuclear weapons. Those who disregard sanctions cannot bid for US public
contracts or obtain export licenses. The US opposes applications for aid
from international funding agencies and suspends defence technology
transfers and sales. A second bill, the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of
1996, or D'Amato bill, targeted foreign companies investing more than $20m
a year in the oil sector in either country. Last July the US Senate
extended it for five years. The Iran Non-Proliferation Act, passed March
2000, aims to prevent nuclear cooperation between Russia and Iran.