Taliban Agree to Enforce World Ban on Opium Trade
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
October 25, 1997
The director of the United Nations anti-narcotics organization said today that the militant Islamic movement that controls most of Afghanistan had agreed to enforce a ban on opium poppy production and smuggling with the help of international crime-fighting organizations.
The official, Under Secretary General Pino Arlacchi, said in an interview that the agreement with the Taliban, who seized power in Kabul in September 1996, had taken six months to negotiate.
Only last month Mr. Arlacchi, an Italian expert on the Mafia who this year became executive director of the United Nations International Drug Control Program, described himself as ''very worried'' that poppy production had increased since the Taliban took power.
But today he described the new agreement as ''a major breakthrough,'' doubly important because it comes as the next season's crop is about to be sown. ''We are talking about half the heroin in the world,'' he said.
Mr. Arlacchi, who is in charge of all United Nations crime-fighting operations based in Vienna, said that a memorandum submitted to his office in Kabul from Afghanistan this week ''opened the door to direct monitoring of the ban'' for the first time. He said that he would go to Afghanistan next month to ask for permission to put a surveillance network into 42 districts where poppies are grown.
The United Nations, using the BBC's foreign language services, plans to begin broadcasts in Pushto next week telling farmers of the ban. International monitors should be able to know within a matter of months whether the Taliban have indeed begun to eliminate or reduce crops.
The drug-control agency has devised a program that would introduce new crops that could substitute for opium poppies, extend irrigation systems, build a few factories -- including a woolen mill already in planning -- and pay for police training and enforcement. The cost would be about $25 million a year over 5 to 10 years
Mr. Arlacchi is discussing the program with donor nations here and New York and will meet American officials next week in Washington.
United Nations officials have been struggling for a year to devise policies for dealing with the Taliban movement, with agencies quarreling over how much Afghanistan's new rulers should be isolated because of their harsh Islamic strictures, particularly their repression of women.
But Mr. Arlacchi said today that for his agency, this was a political question beyond its competence. ''We are dealing with drugs,'' he said, ''and Afghanistan is in the central position on our map.''
He said that he was prepared to discuss human rights with the Taliban, but that he was also bearing in mind ''the human rights of eight million drug addicts in the world.''
In September Mr. Arlacchi said that opium production in Afghanistan had increased 25 percent, to 2,800 tons, in the year that the Taliban had controlled at least two-thirds of the country, including 96 percent of its poppy-growing areas. About half the world's heroin is derived from Afghan opium, with most of the rest coming from Southeast Asia and Colombia.
The Taliban movement banned the production and consumption of marijuana and its derivative hashish, as well as heroin, several months ago, but left the question of poppies clouded. A spokesman for the Taliban said today in New York that this was in part because Islamic law says nothing to prohibit poppy cultivation.
On the other hand, coffeehouses where hashish was available have been closed, Afghan and United Nations officials said. Drug use is punishable with a range of sentences including execution.
In New York, Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, the Taliban's designated representative at the United Nations, where Afghanistan's seat is still held by the ousted government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani, said that his Government's cooperation was linked to promises from Mr. Arlacchi's agency that there would be help in creating new jobs and crops for the farmers in areas where poppy cultivation exists.
Calling poppy cultivation ''a very ugly legacy of Communist government in Afghanistan,'' Mr. Mujahid said poor farmers argued that they were growing poppies for medicinal use or because there was little else to cultivate profitably. They had to be persuaded to desist both theologically and economically, he suggested.
''There is nothing written that poppy cultivation is prohibited,'' Mr. Mujahid said, ''But when changed to drugs, this is a great sin, a great crime to Islam. There is a saying of Mohammed that everything that is intoxication is prohibited in Islam. These things are not only harmful to Western population. This is also harmful to our own people.''
The memorandum from the Taliban to Mr. Arlacchi's agency, a copy of which was provided to The New York Times, asks that heroin laboratories in neighboring Pakistan, where Afghan opium is refined, also be shut down.