JALALABAD, Afghanistan, 6 April 2004 — Up to 2,000 opium farmers protested in eastern Afghanistan yesterday, vowing to fight President Hamid Karzai’s plans to destroy their crop. Chanting anti-government slogans, the farmers said they would resist moves to destroy their poppy fields, which produce opium that is refined into heroin and exported to the West.
“We will fight,” said a demonstrator on the outskirts of the eastern city of Jalalabad. “They will either destroy our harvests or kill us. We will not let them do this even if they send planes and tanks.” Nangarhar province, of which Jalalabad is the capital, is one of the major drug producing areas in Afghanistan, which produces most of the world’s opium. The lucrative business covers all of the province’s 22 districts and the harvest is expected to be collected in less than a week’s time, farmers said.
The central government, with the help of foreign technical and financial aid, mostly from Britain, plans to start its eradication drive in province in a couple of days, they said. As part of the campaign, authorities have already managed to destroy some poppy crops in the southern province of Helmand, another key drug producing region.
The farmers, who took their protest to the office of the chief of their district of Kama, said they were poor and relied on drug production as a quarter of a century of war had destroyed the infrastructure needed for other crops. They said they would stop growing the opium poppies if the central government provided assistance to rebuild their roads, schools and hospitals.
