e-Ariana - Todays Afghan News

e-Ariana - Todays Afghan News:

"Help us or we'll grow opium, say Afghan villagers
Reuters
06/16/2009
By Jonathon Burch
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TALBOZANG - Fifty-year-old Abdul Wadud walked for two hours across Afghanistan's remote northern mountains to hear a police commander give yet more promises of aid for those who turn their backs on growing opium.

Wadud does not grow drugs. But if no money comes soon, he will.

'The government told us several times they would help us and they didn't,' he said, crouching barefoot on the ground in traditional Afghan loose shirt and trousers and explaining he feeds a family of 15 on occasional work as a day laborer.

'If the government or the aid organizations don't help us -- yes we will have to start growing opium,' he said.

'If they build us schools and roads we promise never to grow opium.'

Wadud and around 30 other village elders from the area had gathered on a hillside deep inside the Hindu Kush mountains, to attend a 'shura,' or meeting, organized by provincial authorities to dissuade the men from growing the drug.

Their Badakhshan province in remote northern Afghanistan has been a showcase for government efforts to battle the drugs trade, which accounts for nearly all the world's heroin.

Until 2006 Badakhshan was one of the main opium growing areas in Afghanistan, producing the country's second biggest crop.

But last year its output fell by 95 percent, to a mere 200 hectares under cultivation, close to being declared 'poppy free' by the United Nations, which credited government information campaigns and eradication programs for the success there."