KABUL BANS OPIUM POPPY GROWING, TRAFFICKING

KABUL, - Afghanistan, one of the world's main
sources of opium, on Wednesday banned the cultivation of opium poppy
and the trafficking in opium and its derivatives, including heroin.

The decree, announced days before Kabul's interim administration meets
major aid donors in Tokyo, renewed a ban issued by the Taliban in 2000
which effectively lapsed with the collapse of the Muslim
fundamentalist movement last November.

"All countrymen, especially peasants and farmers, are informed that
from now on, the cultivation, manufacturing, processing, impermissible
use, smuggling and trafficking of opium poppy and all its derivatives
is declared illegal," said the statement read to journalists by a U.N.
official in Kabul.

"Violators will be dealt with severely," it added.

It said Afghanistan would seek help from donors to fund crop
substitution programmes to wean farmers off growing poppy, a popular
cash crop in this drought-stricken country.

Bernard Frahi, the Afghanistan and Pakistan representative of the U.N.
Drug Control Programme, read the Afghan statement after holding talks
with the government.

"We are more than satisfied, it is a remarkable declaration," he said,
adding that Afghanistan provided 90 percent of the heroin sold in Europe.

Heroin is refined from opium, mostly in illegal laboratories in
Afghanistan or neighbouring Pakistan and Iran.

The decree said provincial governors and law enforcement agencies had
been instructed to enforce the ban.

WORLD'S BIGGEST PURE HEROIN HAUL

With its isolated mountain valleys, defiant warlords and impoverished
farmers, Afghanistan has all the natural and human ingredients to be a
major opium producer.

Production soared during the 1980s Soviet war, as Muslim rebels used
opium to help finance their jihad (holy war) against Moscow, and then
zoomed to new heights under the Taliban, reaching a record 4,500
tonnes in 1999.

After the Taliban banned opium cultivation and destroyed poppy fields
under their control two years ago, the harvest slipped to 3,276 tonnes
in 2000 and a mere 185 tonnes in 2001.

But as soon as U.S. bombing began last October, restless Pashtun
tribes ignored the Taliban and started sowing poppy.

The bumper crops of recent years meant Afghanistan had huge stocks of
opium and heroin which were now starting to emerge following the end
of Taliban rule, Frahi said.

"We know that traffickers are worried about keeping processed heroin
inside Afghanistan as it will be destroyed," he said.

Pakistani police seized the world's largest haul of pure heroin -- 630
kg (1,390 pounds) -- from a camel caravan near the Iranian border last
week, and a further 125 kg (275 pounds) this week. Frahi said he
expected further huge hauls in future as dealers ran down their stocks.

To illustrate the size of the biggest haul, Frahi said Britain's
largest seizure of pure heroin last year was 80 kg.

Despite the 2000 ban on poppy cultivation, the Taliban never took
steps against drug traffickers, destroyed opium stockpiles or
dismantled labora tories producing heroin from opium, he said.

Frahi said 50 percent of opium production before the Taliban ban came
from the southern province of Helmand, with Nangarhar in the east in
second place with 20 percent.