Aid groups flee drug violence

ON A steep mountain road ahead of a blind curve, a Red Cross worker dies at the hands of an unknown attacker.

Just around the bend lies the possible reason: an opium poppy field.

Afghanistan's $1.2 billion drug trade is blooming, bringing violence that is driving away aid groups as Islamic extremists and warlords allegedly profit.

The agencies that monitor the pulse of conflict zones point to a rise in ambushes and execution-style slayings that coincide with the southeast's autumn harvest of the opium-producing flora, the source of heroin.

"Security is worse in places where people are growing poppies," said Diane Johnson, Afghanistan programme director for Mercy Corps. She said the Portland, Oregon, organisation suspended operations indefinitely in the country last week, but Margaret Larson, a spokeswoman in Portland, said that was not the case. A member of the group was killed on August 7.

Narcoterrorism has become an increasingly entrenched factor in the violence that's meant to keep southern and eastern Afghanistan the world's poppy belt off-limits to outside assistance, said Paul Barker, country director for the charity CARE.

"The revenue from the poppy trade in Afghanistan is more than all the humanitarian aid combined," he said.

Nations have committed roughly $500 million to rebuild this central Asian nation of dusty, gasp-inducing deserts and monolithic mountains. Poppy revenues brought in $1.2 billion last year, according to the UN Office of Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan.

About 90 international relief groups operate in Afghanistan, but most have curtailed or avoided drilling wells, vaccinating children and rebuilding school systems in the deadly southeast.

The September edition of CARE's policy brief which other relief groups follow closely said armed attacks on aid workers has jumped from one a month to one every two days since September 2002.

Half the country's 32 provinces most in the south are too risky to enter. "There are all sorts of movements to keep Afghanistan unstable," Mr Barker said.