- Hunched over his walkie-talkie at a dusty command post
near the border with Afghanistan, the Tajik soldier shouted in frustration:
"Where are you? What can you see?"
-
- In reply came a garbled tirade, distorted by static.
"It's no good," said the soldier. "I can't understand a
thing."
-
- Unable to contact their base for reinforcements, the
soldiers soon gave up the chase for a gang of heroin traders crossing the
mountainous frontier from neighbouring Afghanistan.
-
- Hampered by poor resources, border guards in this impoverished
former Soviet state are losing the battle to stem the tide of drugs that
bears most of the heroin reaching Britain's streets across Asia and Europe.
-
- Last week, a UN report revealed that impoverished Central
Asian states are now bearing the brunt of the burgeoning trade in Afghan
narcotics. More than 90 per cent of heroin sold in Britain comes from Afghanistan,
according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
-
- "There is a palpable risk that Afghanistan will
again turn into a failed state, this time in the hands of drugs cartels
and narco-terrorists," said the UN anti-drugs chief Antonio Maria
Costa.
-
- Heroin is pouring through Tajikistan, the poorest country
in the former Soviet Union, because anti-terrorism operations in southern
Afghanistan make it difficult for smugglers to cross into Pakistan and
Iran.
-
- More than 10,000 Russian border guards and 3,500 Tajik
guards are stationed on the porous 800-mile southern border with Afghanistan.
"We are shielding the world from Afghan heroin," said Rustam
Nazarov, a general drafted in to head Tajikistan's UN-backed Drug Control
Agency.
-
- On the ground, however, reality has bitten. "It's
impossible for us to destroy this trade," admitted Col Saidato Merzoev,
who commands a force of about 700 Tajik border guards at Shurobod near
the Afghan frontier.
-
- In one recent operation, his guards pounced on a gang
of drug traffickers in a stony gully near the Pyandzh river, which marks
the frontier with Afghanistan. Acting on a tip-off, a unit of 30 men trekked
into the barren mountains and lay in wait. "We saw the criminals come
up though the valley and stop to light a fire," recalled the colonel,
a brawny man in striped T-shirt and army fatigues. "Then we attacked."
-
- Two Afghans were captured in the ensuing battle; the
rest fled into the night behind a barrage of automatic gunfire. The border
guards found a satchel which had been tossed aside, containing 44 pounds
of pure heroin. While that operation was a success, the contents of the
satchel were a tiny loss for the traffickers. Although in the first nine
months of this year, drug control forces seized 4.4 tons of heroin - more
than double their haul for the same period last year - it is still just
one tenth of the total amount being smuggled, law enforcement officials
believe.
-
- Cultivation of opium poppies, the raw material for heroin,
was banned in Afghanistan by the Taliban, but production has rocketed since
the regime was driven from power. Smuggling is widespread. In one recent
incident, a ministry of health official carrying 12 pounds of heroin injected
into 52 lemons was intercepted trying to fly out of the Tajik capital,
Dushanbe.
-
- Gen Nazarov warned the Afghan president Hamid Karzai
and his international backers not to slacken their efforts to stamp out
the trade in narcotics. "There is a direct link between drugs, extremism
and terrorist organisations such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda," he
told The Sunday Telegraph. "When US forces entered Afghanistan they
saw these problems in isolation. Now we are paying the price."
-
- The smugglers use satellite telephones to co-ordinate
forays across the border from Afghanistan, linking up with criminal gangs
in Tajikistan. Those groups then co-operate with Russian mafia who maintain
the supply to addicts in Europe. Britain has committed £70 million
to eradicating Afghan drug production over the next three years but Bill
Rammell, a Foreign Office minister, admitted this week that the task would
be "a long haul".
-
- Farmers can earn up to 40 times more growing opium than
by growing wheat. Cash from drug production and smuggling is a key source
of income for the warlords who still control large swathes of the country,
and accounts for about half of Afghanistan's GDP, the UNODC warned.
-
- Heroin and methadone are refined from raw opium at laboratories
in the Afghan mountains, then carried into Central Asia via myriad routes
- on foot, on horseback, packed into the tyres of vehicles or smuggled
on trains. It is hardly surprising that the guards struggle to stop the
trafficking.
-
- "They are doing the best they can but they can't
intercept everybody," said one senior British diplomat in Dushanbe.
"You'd need a border post every 50 yards."
-
- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003
-
- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/11/02/
wafgh02.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/11/02/ixworld.html
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