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  Iran's Drug War: Terrorized Villagers
Posted by FoM on June 11, 2001 at 07:21:51 PT
By Matthew McAllester, Newsday 
Source: Seattle Times 

justice The desert was silent as the sun came up in the early morning of April 16. The air was still, and no vehicles plied the road that leads directly to the border with Afghanistan, only 46 miles away. This parched village of 60 families on a desert highway, one of the main conduits for the flood of opium into Iran, seemed to be asleep.

Then, out of nowhere, came the village patrol. They pointed automatic rifles at Ghafoor Bakhti and his friend. The two men were sitting by the roadside, and their being strangers in this place was reason enough for the patrol to search them.

"Stand up, we're going to frisk you," said one of the villagers.

A quick search revealed a small amount of opium, seemingly for personal use. But the strangers could be here for only one reason, the same as other passers-by from whom the armed villagers have confiscated 1-1/2 tons of opium in the past year. So the patrolmen followed Bakhti's footprints to a patch of recently disturbed ground. Below the surface was a sack, and inside it were five plastic packets of dark-brown opium.

"I came to find work as a shepherd here," said Bakhti, who is from a town about 90 miles away. This claim drew laughter from the villagers, who considered the idea of someone seeking employment in impoverished Baghu-Baghu preposterous.

It was a newly confident laugh of a people who have within the past year been given arms by the Iranian government to protect themselves from the violent onslaught of the drug traffickers who have turned huge swathes of eastern Iran into a war zone. Hundreds of villages, so long the targets of kidnappings and murders by the drug smugglers, have now formed local militias.

The battleground:

This is the battleground in Iran's war on drugs, by almost any measure the largest, most successful and most deadly fight against opium and heroin smuggling in the world.

Stuck between Afghanistan, producer of more than half the world's opium, and the southern gateway to Europe, Iran is the unwilling corridor for a crop that peaked at more than 4,500 tons in 1999, according to the U.N. Drug Control Program.

In the past decade, the Islamic Republic has spent hundreds of millions of dollars fighting the small armies of Afghani and Iranian drug smugglers. In the process, more than 3,000 Iranian soldiers have been killed and whole stretches of the mountainous, deserted eastern part of the country have been turned into bandit lands.

With roughly 1.4 million drug abusers out of a population of nearly 70 million, Iran is highly motivated to combat the drug trade, often mercilessly so. Police in Tehran, the capital, recently leveled an entire neighborhood that was the hub of the city's drug dealers. Of all the opium seized in the world, 90 percent is seized in Iran.

But in spite of the 22 mountain passes dammed up with concrete, the 48 miles of barbed wire, the 180 miles of 11-foot-deep, 11-foot-wide trenches, the 434 miles of built-up embankments, the 400 forts and border observation posts, and in spite of the 30,000 troops posted on the frontiers with Afghanistan and Pakistan, about 90 percent of the heroin on the streets of Europe comes from Afghanistan via Iran. Some also ends up in the United States.

European countries have donated more than $13 million to help the Iranian government treat addicts and fight smugglers, but with the total cost so far of Iran's war on drugs estimated at at least $1 billion, the outside money is "a drop in the ocean," said Fariba Soltani, an Iranian specialist on narco-trafficking at the U.N. Drug Control Program in Tehran.

"It's a war up there, it really is," said a Western diplomat in Tehran. "The smugglers are very well funded and they use all the latest technology. They're ruthless. It's a real drug-baron's business. The Iranians outnumber them, but the eastern border is so vast that it's simply not possible to shut it."

Wearing a light-blue prison-issue shirt covered in a pattern of the scales of justice, Mohammad-Azam Teimouri sat in an office just off his cellblock. If he's lucky, he will spend a lot of time wearing that shirt and living in the Central Prison of Mashad. If not, he will be sentenced to death for smuggling 14 kilograms of opium into Iran from Afghanistan.

"I used to be a shepherd, a farmer, making my own living," said Teimouri, 43, a father of six. "Then there was the drought, and I had nothing to feed my family."

Teimouri lived in the heart of the biggest drug-producing zone in the world, a cornerstone of an industry that is second in size only to the oil industry in global terms. But it was poverty, not greed, that drove him, as it does so many Afghans, to start the journey of opium and heroin smuggling from Afghanistan through Iran, and on to the refineries of Turkey to the streets of the West.

Throughout the 1990s the extremist Islamic Taliban government has controlled most of Afghanistan. It has done so at considerable cost, waging a civil war with Afghans opposed to the harsh Islamic regime. Towns have been leveled and agriculture devastated and millions of refugees have fled their homes.

Providing refuge for terrorists, including the Saudi-born Osama bin Laden, has only strengthened the determination of Western countries to maintain sanctions on the Taliban. A terrible drought also has compounded the general poverty of Afghans.

In its isolation, the only way the Taliban saw to generate revenue, experts in and out of Iran say, was to become the world's largest producer of opium. Before long it had overtaken Myanmar.

Under international pressure, the Taliban clamped down on last year's poppy crop, drastically reducing output from the opium fields, according to Iran's drug czar, Mohammad Fallah.

But few expect this year's crop reduction to last.

The 30,000 Iranian soldiers guarding the border continue to have weekly gunbattles with the convoys of professional smugglers that penetrate Iranian territory every day. And Iran's prisons - where 80 percent of all inmates have drug-related convictions, according to officials - continue to overflow with men like Teimouri.

"I'm a Bedouin from an area in Herat province," Teimouri said. "A year ago a man, a rich Talibani, came and told me to take this to Iran. I was hungry, my children were hungry. If only we could grow wheat and barley because this opium is a plague upon us in Afghanistan and a plague here in Iran, too."

Before last year's drought, Teimouri owned more than 200 sheep. His family was among 60 who lived their nomadic lives together in a mountainous region in the north of Afghanistan, living in tents with no electricity. When the family needed money to buy food, Teimouri would sell a sheep for a dollar. By the time the drought had finished with him, he was left with only 30 sheep, five camels and a bag of flour, he said. That's what he left his family last June, when he finally accepted the Talibani man's offer.

As Teimouri told it, he and eight other nomad men, all in similar straits, were each promised a fee of $190 for delivering the drugs just over the border.

The frontier:

They drove in a jeep to the border on a moonless night. Some distance from the frontier, the vehicle stopped and the nine couriers jumped out along with an armed smuggler.

Teimouri carried a gallon of water, a loaf of bread and about 30 pounds of opium. Told to remain silent, the men trudged into the darkened desert hills.

The plan called for a guide to receive them on the other side, and take the couriers to a village where they would unload the opium. But instead, once they had scaled the embankments constructed by the Iranian government, the couriers were met by Iranian soldiers.

The armed leader of the group ran into the night, but the nine couriers froze.

Since that night in June, Teimouri has been living in the huge prison in Mashad, home to 11,531 other inmates. He has not seen his family since he left Afghanistan. He has not been sentenced yet. And he fears the worst.

The prison warden, Mahmoud Amini, thinks Teimouri will escape the death sentence.

No one in villages like Baghu-Baghu has much time for the hard-luck stories of smugglers like Teimouri and Bakhti and the armed drug lords.

"They've got a lot of equipment and weaponry and some of them are rich," said Gholam Hossein Sabeghi, 31, a sheep farmer and head of the local militia. "When you see smugglers like... (Ghafoor Bakhti), they're going to take this opium and make 10 other families addicted. You can't feel sorry for them."

It's the professional smugglers, though, who make life so hard for these people who are already fighting against the elements to survive.

"Before the Basij were armed here, the smugglers would force us to give them bread and tea and threaten us with guns," said Sobhan Ghadiri, 26, a member of the militia and a farmer of barley and wheat. In Baghu-Baghu, there isn't much spare bread or tea to go around.

One evening, a few years ago, there was a knock at Mohammad-Hassan Ghadiri's front door. The farmer opened it to find a group of armed smugglers demanding food and shelter.

Ghadiri said no. The men grabbed him and told him they were taking him to the mountains.

"I started making a lot of noise and that woke my brother up," Ghadiri said. "And then I wrestled myself free as they were taking me and they fired one shot in the air, a second that went through my shirt and a third that passed into my ankle and out the bottom of my foot."

Deciding that they had had enough trouble, the smugglers left the village.

The czar:

Fallah, the drug czar, is the one who gave the order to arm the villages.

"A lot of the time the smugglers come into villages and kidnap the locals," said Fallah, a retired army general who greets visitors in his office at the Drug Control Headquarters in Tehran.

"They will call on relatives of people they've kidnapped and say, `Here's 50 or 100 kilograms (23 to 46 pounds) of opium. Either buy it from us or go and sell it. Then we'll release your relative.' The villages are very spread out, and it's harsh terrain, and they're very exposed and hard to protect. So the military has taken to going to the villages and finding selected people, those with military service, and training them, giving them guns and teaching them how to protect the villages.... But have we solved the problem 100 percent? No, we have not."

And so, for the sake of defending themselves and the small finder's fees that the government pays them for the drugs they seize, the villagers of Baghu-Baghu have waged 26 gunfights with smugglers in and around the arid Marzdaran Mountains.

"The Island"

When the drugs carried by men like Teimouri have made it past the soldiers on the frontier, and past village militias in places like Baghu-Baghu, they usually end up in Tehran, Iran's huge capital city.

And until Feb. 24, when the government-demolition squad came calling, many shipments ended up in a warren-like neighborhood of East Tehran known locally as "The Island" because drug traffickers thought it was safe for them.

There is little left of The Island now: just a few trees, open sewers, the occasional shoe and some freestanding walls covered in a patchwork of wallpaper, paint and tiling. Until Feb. 24, there were 130 houses here, home to thousands of people, many of them drug dealers.

Inspired by a postrevolutionary 1979 mission that leveled an entire area of Tehran that was home to prostitutes, the razing of The Island was the Iranian police's aggressive answer to dealing with the distribution system of drugs inside Iran's capital.

It started at 1 a.m.

The gas and electricity companies shut off their supplies. A force of 1,500 police officers encircled the neighborhood. A bank of floodlights powered by generators burst into life.

First the police rushed in to arrest the major suspects, targets of a two-year investigation. Drug-sniffing dogs unearthed caches of opium and heroin and police officers found large amounts of cash.

By the end of the operation, 12 hours later, the police had arrested 500 people they considered serious criminals and had in a guarded tent city another 1,500 they regarded as lower-level dealers. These latter were passed to the care of social services for rehabilitation and counseling.

An unspecified number of other people who lived in The Island but were not involved in drugs were given new housing, officials said.

Then the bulldozers moved in. Before too long, The Island was just a pile of rubble.

The people who live in East Tehran are happy to see The Island swept away, but some say many of the dealers have just moved a few blocks away and continue their trade.

Bagu-Baghu, Iran

Complete Title: Iran's Drug War: Terrorized Villagers Turn Militiamen in World's Worst Narcotics Corridor

Source: Seattle Times (WA)
Author: Matthew McAllester, Newsday
Published: Monday, June 11, 2001
Copyright: 2001 The Seattle Times Company
Contact: opinion@seatimes.com
Website: http://www.seattletimes.com/

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Comment #2 posted by Sudaca on June 11, 2001 at 11:30:53 PT
Model commuities, model laws
No mention of the $43 million sent by Bush to the Talibans in appreciation of their model efforts at winning the war on drugs.

ah, Mr. Drug Czar, Attorney Gral and DEA heads: It would be so much better if a theocratic dictatorship was in place instead of this mess called democracy.

Then you could raze the neighborhoods (extreme broken windows crime fighting) just destroy the city, and the criminals will leave. Better yet, execute everyone and then there'll be no criminals!

These guys are loving it eh?


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Comment #1 posted by Ethan Russo, MD on June 11, 2001 at 09:12:09 PT:

Disgusting By-Product of the War on Drugs
Doesn't it make you proud that Amerikan driven drug policy is making life miserable for these people?

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