Drug Smugglers Eye New Bridge

Smuggling drugs from northern Afghanistan to Tajikistan, the gateway to Central Asia and Russia, is cold, wet and dangerous work. As night falls, dark figures balanced on inflated truck-tyre inner tubes paddle across the river Amu Darya.

But now the traffickers are hoping their job will get easier. The two countries, with United States funding, have begun building a bridge connecting the town of Shir Khan in Afghanistan’s northern Kunduz province with Panj in Tajikistan, crossing the Amu Darya which serves as the border.

Afghan and Tajik leaders say the bridge will benefit the whole region in terms of trade and transport.

The traffickers of raw opium and processed heroin hope it will ease their trade too.

Explaining how it is done today, one smuggler told IWPR, “I put 10 to 15 kilos of opium in bags and tie them around my waist, cross the river by tube and get to Tajikistan in 20 minutes. I do this twice a month.”

The man, who declined to give his name, said he had been operating this way since the fall of the Taleban regime in 2001.

To handle larger quantities and avoid the risk of sinking or losing his cargo, he sometimes conceals his contraband among legitimate goods being shipped out of the country.

“This is the best way of doing business because I buy a kilo of opium for 100 [US] dollars from local farmers or shopkeepers and sell it for 200 dollars in Tajikistan," he said, adding that this kind of profit "does not exist in any [other] part of the world”.

No one is looking forward to the scheduled 2007 completion of the 29 million dollar, 672-metre-long bridge more than this trafficker and his fellow drug smugglers.

Nor is he worried by officials’ promises that border security will be tightened when the bridge opens.

“We’re not concerned about security because the police are our friends,” he laughed.

"It’s impossible to smuggle opium without the cooperation of the police. Any time I smuggle opium to Tajikistan, I pay 300 to 400 dollars to the border guards."

Another smuggler, who also asked not to be named, told IWPR, “There are still a lot of police in the border areas, but we don’t have any problems with them because we pay them money. The establishment of the bridge will benefit the police too, because our relations with them will expand and they will get more money from us.”

Afghan police deny that they are involved in the drugs trade. Colonel Juma Gul Yardam, a border police commander in the region, said shipments being transported by boat across the river are routinely searched.

Yardam, however, acknowledged that the length of the border made it difficult to police. He said he believed the new bridge would make stopping smugglers easier.

Local farmers who grow poppies take the opposite view.

"If there is a permanent way of smuggling the opium to foreign countries, it will have a lot of advantages for our business,” said Ezatullah, a farmer in Balkh who has already sold his opium crop for this year.

“I have cultivated my three acres of land with opium and I earn my living off the land, but if the bridge is established and our opium is shipped to foreign countries, the price of opium will increase and then I can even save some of the money and my life will get better day by day.”

Ezatullah believe that the bridge will make the region so attractive for drug traffickers that they will relocate from other parts of the country and bid up the price of the local opium crop.

“I sold all of my opium for 50 dollars a kilogramme, but it has already gone up to 100 dollars a kilo,” he told IWPR.

Balkh district is already one of the country's major drug dealing markets and a magnet for drug smugglers who come to buy opium from other provinces in Afghanistan.

One Balkh shopkeeper, who deals in narcotics, told IWPR he agrees with Ezatullah’s logic, “If there are more ways for smugglers to get their opium to foreign countries, the price of the opium will increase much more.”

Qayoum Babak, a political analyst in Mazar-e-Sharif, had a similar view of the bridge. “The new bridge in Kunduz province… could become a very good route for smuggling opium to Central Asia.”

The only way to stop the drug trade in the country, he said, was to prohibit poppy cultivation, although he did not offer any opinion on how this could be achieved.

General Mohammad Daud, the deputy interior minister of Afghanistan, said the main drug smugglers had been identified by the government "but there are still some problems in bringing them to court".

Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi is an IWPR reporter in Mazar-e-Sharif.