MAZAR-E-SHARIF, Afghanistan, 27 April 2006 — Hundreds of high school students and state employees yesterday joined Afghan police in destroying poppy fields in northern Afghanistan, officials said. Around 1,500 people, mostly students and government employees, gathered in Mazar-e-Sharif, capital of Balkh, after local authorities said they lacked sufficient manpower to carry the eradication campaign across the province.
“We do not have enough funds, machinery and personnel but we have the firm support of people to help us manually in poppy eradication,” provincial governor Attah Mohammad Noor told the volunteers. “For the prosperity of our country and to banish the bad name drugs bring to Afghanistan, we volunteer to come every week and participate in poppy eradication,” high school student Mohammad Amin said.
But poppy farmer Ghulam Nabi, whose crop was destroyed by stick-wielding volunteers who descended on his fields, said growers should be compensated for the loss of one crop and given assistance to plant alternatives. “If they wanted to eradicated our poppy fields they should have warned us earlier when it was the cultivation season. Now we have worked for months, have spent money, and they come and destroy at the harvest time. This is not fair,” he said.
Meanwhile, militants firing rockets at a police station in northern Afghanistan to protest opium poppy eradication campaigns missed their target, hitting a non-governmental organization and a house instead, a government official said yesterday. No casualties were caused. Two rockets were fired 10 minutes apart late Tuesday in the Badakhshan provincial capital of Faizabad, said Mohammed Deen, spokesman for the provincial governor.
Deen said Afghan authorities have started large-scale poppy eradication in the province’s Kesham district, destroying about 60 hectares (150 acres) of poppy fields. “This shows that the people who have fired these rockets are linked to opium smugglers and are not happy with process the police have launched to eradicate poppies,” Deen said. The rockets hit an NGO office and a house, shattering windows but harming no one.
In another development, up to half a million Afghan refugees in Iran are expected to begin returning home at the end of this month, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office in Tehran said yesterday. The immigration office of Iran’s Interior Ministry and the UNHCR will resume the voluntary repatriation operation from Iran to Afghanistan on Saturday and up to 500,000 refugees are expected to return to their homeland.
