FTD-Serie: Serie Business English
Fehlt Ihnen im Englischen häufiger das treffende Wort? Kommen Sie trotz guter Vorsätze nicht dazu, ein Magazin oder Buch im Original zu lesen? Dann finden Sie hier interessante und vielfältige Lektüre aus der Financial Times - mit einem Glossar, das Ihnen auf die Sprünge hilft.
Business English: An Afghan province where heroin rules
Pashtuns have a monopoly on ‘trade' secrets in Badakhshan, and a monopoly on heavy firearms too.You can buy almost anything in Argu: sequinned dresses, cold remedies, new machine-guns and packets of heroin carefully wrapped in white cotton and plastic and stamped with the legend "555 Afghanistan best quality". Argu is the biggest heroin-processing district in north-eastern Afghanistan, home to at least 14 laboratories run by Pashtun traders from the violent tribal borderlands near Pakistan, where the Taliban are waging an insurgency against US troops which is fuelled by drug money.
The term laboratory makes the process sound sophisticated, but to make morphine, little more is needed than a fire, an oil drum to heat the opium and a bag of fertiliser to break it down. To turn that into heroin, more oil drums, acetic anhydride and electric mixers are used. Electricity must be provided by small generators because there are no power lines in Argu, Badakhshan province, which shares borders with Pakistan, Tajikistan and China. There are no paved roads and no mobile phones either, but there is money, millions of dollars, very little of which flows back into the community.
In spite of a raid on the bazaar last autumn by the country's fledgling counter-narcotics police, when 700 tonnes of opium and heroin were seized, business is booming again. The laboratories have gone underground, operating at night and regularly moving locations. The bazaar teems with traders on satellite phones, their fingers black and sticky with opium, which is weighed out by shopkeepers at the roadside. The mud-filled roads are easier to navigate for the drug dealers, who drive BMW landcruisers, than for the local police in their ancient Russian vehicles.
"What chance do you think we would stand in a car chase?" General Shan Jahan Noori, the provincial police chief of Badakhshan, asks in his office in the neighbouring town of Faizabad. The drug smugglers can buy the latest technology and they can buy the co-operation of local officials, says Gen Noori. "The police here don't have a salary that can keep them in shoe polish, so they see the smugglers with their pockets full of dollars and they let them go. 40 to 50 per cent of the local police here are involved in the drugs trade," he says. Gen Noori earns almost $100 a month but some of his junior officers make less than $10, which does not keep their families fed in this remote mountainous region.
As the winter snows melt, more of the drugs will flow north over the border with Tajikistan. Much of the heroin still goes south to Helmand, from where the Pashtun smuggling mafia hail. Almost 3,000 British troops will be stationed there by May. The dark-haired Pashtun smugglers with their flat-cap Pakol hats and blankets worn like capes stand out in the Argu bazaar where the locals are fairer Uzbeks and Tajiks. Four years since the fall of the Taliban and about a decade since the Pashtun smugglers first appeared in Afghanistan's remote Badakhshan, they still control the trade.
Azizullah Ahfizi, deputy commander of the provincial counter-narcotics police, says they buy off the local police, and protect each mobile laboratory with a dozen guards armed with rocket-propelled grenades. With corruption so rife, raids on drug laboratories usually fail or end in a gun-battles between smugglers and local police.
Mr Ahfizi's boss quit in disgust six months ago because he felt he was fighting a losing battle. "The government doesn't support us. I don't have guns, phones or money but I have to stand up against the most powerful people in the province. Why should I make such powerful enemies?" says Ghulam Myuddin, former head of the counter-narcotics force, sitting with his former colleagues in a storeroom full of the heroin and opium they have seized. The 1,500 litres of acid and several tonnes of opium and heroin represent a fraction of the narcotics that are churned out of neighbouring factories every month.
-
FTD.de, 02.05.2006
© 2006 Financial Times Deutschland,
Suche in der FTD-Personendatenbank
© 1999 - 2012 Financial Times Deutschland
Aktuelle Nachrichten über Wirtschaft, Politik, Finanzen und Börsen
Börsen- und Finanzmarktdaten:
Bereitstellung der Kurs- und Marktinformationen erfolgt durch die Interactive Data Managed Solutions AG. Es wird keine Haftung für die Richtigkeit der Angaben übernommen!
Über FTD.de | Impressum | Datenschutz | Disclaimer | Mediadaten | E-Mail an FTD | Sitemap | Hilfe | Archiv
Mit ICRA gekennzeichnet
VW | Siemens | Apple | Gold | MBA | Business English | IQ-Test | Gehaltsrechner | Festgeld-Vergleich | Erbschaftssteuer
G+J Glossar
Partner-Angebote
Aktuelle Nachrichten über Wirtschaft, Politik, Finanzen und Börsen
Börsen- und Finanzmarktdaten:
Bereitstellung der Kurs- und Marktinformationen erfolgt durch die Interactive Data Managed Solutions AG. Es wird keine Haftung für die Richtigkeit der Angaben übernommen!
Über FTD.de | Impressum | Datenschutz | Disclaimer | Mediadaten | E-Mail an FTD | Sitemap | Hilfe | Archiv
Mit ICRA gekennzeichnet
VW | Siemens | Apple | Gold | MBA | Business English | IQ-Test | Gehaltsrechner | Festgeld-Vergleich | Erbschaftssteuer
G+J Glossar
Partner-Angebote