Opium for the world
by Lutz C. Kleveman
published in DIE ZEIT in November 2002 (excerpts)
Late in the afternoon we arrive in Faizabad, the provinces
largest town. Here, some 50.000 people live in pre-modern buildings,
interspersed with groves of poplars and mulberry trees, on the
shores of the thundering Kokcha river. Old Russian UAS off-roaders
try to plough a way through the medieval chaos of horse-drawn
carts and pack-mules. The women at the bazaar all wear white or
blue burqas. Those who are held in sufficiently high esteem by
their husband ride on a donkey that the men drag through the streets
- in this part of the country which never came under Taliban rule
the power of the mullahs and mujahideen is as unbroken as in Herat.
There is hardly any electrical light at night: the small water-driven
power plant upriver has been broken for years, only a few privately-owned
generators provide power. It seems that no Badakhi warlord has
as yet allowed himself to be disarmed by the government in Kabul
- the fighters openly flaunt their rifles in the streets.
Our first visit is to Said Amin Tareq, the all-powerful governor
of Badakhshan. This is as much a matter of politeness as of caution:
I figure that in a place as lawless as Faizabad it is good idea
to let the man with the biggest gun know that you are around.
Luckily, my travel companion and interpreter Baqi is carrying
a letter of introduction for the governor in his pocket, written
for us by a powerful friend back in Kabul. Medieval as this laisse-passer
might seem, in the absence of formal authority in rural Afghanistan
it all comes down to whom you know and trust. In brief, I hope
that the letter might increase our chances of a tolerant welcome.
Instead, when we are allowed into his office, Governor Tareq pays
barely any attention to the envelope. Nor does he seem to be terribly
happy about the purpose of our visit. Nervously clicking plastic
green worry beads, he grunts at us: You have come a long
way to see us - but you will not find any poppy fields here, except
maybe one or two way up in the mountains.
In fact, the village of Bymalacy lies less than ten kilometres
from the governors splendid residence - directly by the
side of the road to Kabul. In summer, locals tell me, the red
poppy fields were impossible to overlook. As we enter the village,
the male inhabitants, rough-hewn men with weather-beaten faces,
step out of their mud huts to welcome us. They are very friendly.
Three old rugs are spread out on the village square and we are
invited to sit down for a cup of tea. After some polite chit-chat,
my interpreter Baqi gets to the point: opium. Big smiles all around,
nobody seems to feel a need for hush-hushing. One of the farmers
by the name of Kamil By looks over to the bearded elders seated
around him. When they nod, Kamil By reaches under his shalwar
kameez and fishes out a brownish, sticky lump: recently harvested
and dried opium. With circular movements of his index finger,
the haggard man crushes several crumbs in his palm. The resulting
powder fills up his deeply-cracked calluses, making them look
like the branches of a tree. This stuff is good - the dealers
on the bazaar are wild about it, they give me 350 dollars per
kilo, the 65-year-old whispers excitedly. One hectare yields
about 40-45 kilograms of opium, at the going rate worth about
15,000 dollars. It is a mind-boggling sum for any Afghan even
after subtracting the salaries for the many workers who during
the poppy bloom lance the stems before sunrise and collect the
discharged liquid in the evening. The harvest was very good.
The dealers are already paying us advances on next years
crop, Kamil By says wryly. A defiant smile creeps over his
sun-parched face, wrinkled like a walnut shell.
What are we supposed to cultivate instead? There is not
enough rain for wheat or corn, the farmers on the village
square complain. Four years of drought have dried out the earth,
leaving entire regions desolate. Unless irrigated, the soil sustains
nothing but the robust poppy plants. They have long been grown
for medical purposes: in a well-cooked soup the stem has an antibiotic
effect. Anyway, we have no seeds other than poppy. When
the rain did not come many of us died, adds Kamil By. Rather
than starving, five of his sixteen children moved away - Bymalacy
lost half of its inhabitants. In some villages, there are
only scorpions and cobras left. The suffering was terrible,
even though the Afghan civil war largely spared Badakhshan, with
the anti-Taliban warlords led by General Ahmed Shah Massud successfully
defending the province. Both sides used the drug trade to finance
their struggle.
The situation was no different in the 1980s when the Afghan mujahideen
waged the jihad against the Soviet troops. It is an open secret
that back then the CIA clandestinely helped with the cultivation
of opium and its processing to heroin in backyard laboratories,
in the hope that the Russian soldier would fall prey to the stuff.
The calculation worked, thousands of soldiers became addicted.
At the same time, many holy warriors became rich as drug barons:
The donkeys carrying the Stinger missiles and assault rifles,
arranged by the CIA to be smuggled from Pakistan into the country,
rarely returned unladen. Thus, Afghanistan soon surpassed the
golden triangle in South East Asia as the worlds
biggest heroin exporter - in Washingtons view this was a
necessary evil in pursuit of victory in the Cold War. In the 1990s,
the warlords had no desire to give up war as a smokescreen for
their murky business deals. The Taliban and the so-called Northern
Alliance, feted as freedom fighters after 11 September
2001, increased opium production. Badakhshan in particular, the
fiefdom of the former President Burhanuddin Rabbani, degenerated
into one giant poppy field.
And still, though the war is long over, we have to pay
one tenth of our profits to the warlords of the region,
complains the peasant Kamil By. One tenth, that is the ushr which
the Koran obliges every Muslim to pay to the community. Some of
the men in the group look around nervously. Hesitatingly, they
tell me of a farmer in a neighbouring village who had refused
to give money to the local commander. That same day, his
bodyguards took care of the man, for several hours
If a poppy farmer decides to quit growing the crop he is in for
trouble with the warlords. Death threats are not unusual, say
the villagers. After all, the commanders also have to pass on
the ushr to their superiors. The farmers fall into a sombre silence
until Kamil By remarks, glaring at me: In the West, you
are upset about the opium we produce. I ask you: where do the
weapons come from that the warlords use to suppress us here?
On the way back into town I notice an official graffito on a wall
that reads, in English: Production Sale and Use of Opium
is strongly forbidden by Islam.
Strictly speaking, it would be inaccurate to call Hamdullah Daneshie
a warlord. He leads no raucous bunch of guerrilla fighters, nor
does he wear a turban - and yet the slight black-bearded man is
one of the chiefs of Badakhshan. Mr. Daneshie is the top police
chief of the entire province, commanding some 4000 men. In Badakhshan
where there is no formal law to enforce, this equates to enormous
personal power - and very little willingness to tolerate unpleasant
questions in his Faizabad headquarters. That is all rubbish,
propaganda and lies! Nobody takes the ushr from poppy farmers,
Mr. Daneshie, dressed in a field grey uniform, claims in an indignant
voice. The knuckles of his fingers begin to turn white with tension.
Nervously, the police chief rearranges the bouquet of garish plastic
flowers in a vase on his desk. The Koran states very clearly
that opium is haram, i.e. forbidden. No commander in Badakhshan
would try and make money from it.
If opium production is illegal, I ask Mr. Daneshie, what is he
doing against it? Without a thought he blurts out: Nothing!
He had merely informed the population that the government in Kabul
had outlawed poppy growing. The police would leave it up to the
farmers either to obey or ignore the new law. Laconically, Mr.
Daneshie justifies his policy: Laws have to serve the human
being, not the other way around. I will not have poppy fields
burned down and the farmers driven to starvation. The powerful
police chief hails from a village in the Jurm district, some two
hours drive cross-country from Faizabad, which is said to be a
major opium producing area. He knows the peoples concerns
there. During the drought they ate tree bark and human flesh.
At the same time, they gave up the best of their sons to the Jihad
- so we will not desert them now. My objection that it is
not primarily the farmers but the smugglers and mafia dealers
who profit from the drug business leaves Mr. Daneshie unimpressed:
We have set up police checkpoints on the roads to combat
the smuggling. The mafia is helpless against us.
In early 2002, the UN mission in Kabul announced an action plan
to combat the opium problem: Poppy farmers who voluntarily agreed
to their fields being burned would receive 1750 dollars per hectare
in compensation. So-called eradication teams swarmed
out into the provinces, protected by British elite soldiers. But
the plan backfired. When the farmers heard that the UN would
not punish them but instead practically wanted to buy poppy plants
from them, they grew us much as they could, a local NGO
employee tells me. The whole of Badakhshan was covered with
one red poppy carpet, even in gardens and on the roofs of houses.
Although the promised compensation was only a fraction of what
a farmer could earn by selling a hectares worth of opium
but frequently the predominantly Afghan members of the UN teams
were open to bribery. The trick was to collect money twice: a
farmer who had one acre of poppy plants destroyed would claim
damage compensation for four hectares. In return for a juicy share
of the additional compensation, UN workers were prepared to condone
the fraud.
Even teams that took their job seriously caused more harm than
good, as the NGO worker recalls. When the UN people did
not manage to set fire to the green poppy plants on fire they
merely kinked the flower heads - but, of course, that did not
stop the flow of opium juice, and the harvest went on.
For a long time, Badakhis exported only raw opium to the neighbouring
countries where it was processed to heroin. In the late 1980s,
profit-conscious Afghans began to produce the ready-to-use powder
themselves. Again, the Western secret services are said to have
provided the necessary know-how and equipment. Today, a dozen
such backyard laboratories are assumed to be hidden in Badakhshan
where the opium is mixed with limestone and brought to the boil
in old oil drums. Adding the acetic anhydride turns the creamed-off
mass into brownish heroin powder. At this point, the smugglers
enter the game. They carry the stuff to the nearby border with
Tajikistan. The most important transports are planned and prepared
at the bazaar in Faizabad, the provinces commercial centre.
A muddy track which locals call the main road is lined
with squalid wooden stands where traders sell their wares: mountains
of pears, grapes, pomegranates, and fresh figs. Skinned lambs,
slaughtered down by the river at sunrise, dangle from hooks, hundreds
of blood-crazed wasps whizzing around them. The arms dealers ply
their trade with scarce discretion: in backrooms they sell anything
from landmines to rocket-propelled grenades. One dealer even promises
he could get me a functioning T-54 tank for 100.000 dollars. Shipping
time: overnight.
The big bosses in the drug business, however, are rather inconspicuous
gentlemen: the moneychangers. At first sight, their stark offices
near the mosque do not betray any criminal wealth. What is startling,
though, is that the moneychangers are able to cough up a million
dollars overnight. In this bitterly poor region, so much cash
can only come from one source: drug profits. In fact, the moneychangers
have come up with a great way to launder the dirty money: by conducting
currency transfers from abroad. As no functioning bank system
has yet been set up in Afghanistan, foreign aid organisations
in particular rely on what is called the hawala system: in Dubai
or Karachi, the organisation pays a certain amount into an account
owned by a family member of a moneychanger. The two men communicate
by satellite phone upon which the moneychanger pays the same amount,
minus a fee, to the organisations representatives in Faizabad.
That way, it is the humanitarian aid workers of all people who
unwillingly, albeit knowingly, help the drug mafia launder their
dirty profits.
The shop of Qadir M. lies right next to the moneychangers
offices. The question whether the burly, middle-aged man is active
in the drug trade himself is taboo - and superfluous anyway. Few
people on the Faizabad bazaar manage never to keep totally out
of the business. Things are difficult to hide in a
small town. Smuggling is easy: with donkeys or jeeps you
take the stuff to the commanders near the border, says Qadir,
after locking the door. They would then get in touch with their
accomplices on the Tajik side: Russian officers. Both parties
arrange a suitable time and place for an undisturbed exchange
of drugs and money, Qadir reports. He knows of occasional problems
with young Russian officers who are still over-zealous and incorruptible.
But most of them change their mind after some time. Then
only those smugglers who do not officially declare
a transport risk getting caught by the Russian border guards,
Qadir tells me. Usually, the Russians kill those uncooperative
smugglers, as a warning to others.
In Qadirs view, the drug trade is a grave threat to peace
in Afghanistan. The highest political leaders of this country
are behind the heroin business. And they will need more war in
the future to make their deals under the cloak of Islam.
In fact, for some time rumours have been going around that the
warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar has found refuge in Badakhshan. The
radical Islamist who bombed large parts of Kabul to ashes in the
mid-1990s, has called for a jihad against the U.S. forces in the
country. Some people claim that the Pashtun has repeatedly met
up with ex-President Rabbani, the provincial ruler of Badakhshan,
for discussions on how to regain power in Kabul together. Associates
of Juma Namangani, the leader of the militant Islamic Movement
of Uzbekistan (IMU) who was killed during an American air strike
in Afghanistan, are reported to have been present at the meetings.
The lust for power and the drug business bring old enemies
together, believes Qadir. Soon, we could see fighting
in Badakhshan again. Peace is bad for business.
That evening, a man who works at the governors palace sneaks
into the guesthouse where we are staying to deliver an urgent
warning. You are in danger, you must leave the town as soon
as you can - some people in Faizabad are getting very angry with
you. The man whom my interpreter has befriended appears
extremely worried. Do not take a car because they might
have something prepared for you to make it look like an accident.
After the man vanishes into the darkness of the night I ask my
interpreter who is from Kabul how credible this tip-off is. Very,
he says. I can feel the danger. I decide not to take
chances. First thing next morning, we drive to the UN mission
in Faizabad and ask for transport. Luckily, a flight from Islamabad
to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, is scheduled to stop over at the airfield
near Faizabad later that day. Two seats are available, at $220
per person. It is a small price to pay for security and a direct
airlift to what is my next destination anyway.
The headquarters of the Russian border troops in Tajikistan are
located in a white 19th century villa, hidden behind tall chenars
right in the centre of Dushanbe. Above the imposing pillars, hallmarks
of Tsarist colonial architecture in Central Asia, flies the flag
of the Russian Federation. To be sure, the former Soviet republic
of Tajikistan has since 1992 been a nominally independent state
but the influence of the one-time imperial centre Moscow is still
quite palpable. More than 20,000 Russian border guards and regular
army troops are stationed in the mountainous country. As Moscows
largest military force outside the Russian borders, the troops
constitute a counter-weight to the increasing American presence
in Central Asia. Most of them were sent here as CIS peacekeepers
in 1997 after a disastrous five-year civil war had turned Tajikistan
into a failed nation.
More than 50,000 people, mostly civilians, had died in the fighting
between the post-communist government and Islamic factions. Today,
the pro-Moscow government of President Imamali Rakhmanov has made
some progress towards a more stable situation and national reconciliation
but Moscow rejects any idea of withdrawing its troops. The 201st
Motorised Division would stay for at least another 15 years, the
Russian defence minister Sergei Ivanov recently announced. In
fact, the Russians are currently constructing new divisional headquarters
in Dushanbe. The border guards stationed along the 1400-km border
between Tajikistan and Afghanistan are unlikely to pull out any
sooner.
We are protecting the southern flank of the CIS against
Afghan terrorists, arms dealers and, most importantly, drug smugglers,
says Lieutenant Colonel Pjotr Pjotrovic. In a sense we are
the first bulwark of Western Europe where most of the heroin ends
up after all. Mr. Pjotrovic, a short, plump man with cropped
hair, extinguishes his cigarette between his thumb and index finger.
His secretary, a buxom 20-year-old girl in tight jeans and a fairly
minimalist t-shirt, pours more coffee into his cup. The
drug smuggling has got much worse. They must have had a bumper
harvest over there, the officer goes on to say. In the first
six months of 2002 alone, his colleagues have confiscated 1500
kilogram of heroin, compared with 1200 kilogram in all of 2001.
This year, the dealers in Tajikistan pay up to 3000 dollars per
kilogram - a price that later rises dramatically along the transport
routes to the European market. In London, one kilogram of heroin
can fetch up to 100,000 dollars.
In fact, the smuggling routes for Afghan drugs have shifted markedly
in the recent past. Only a few years ago, most of the Afghan heroin
and opium was taken to the other two countries of the Golden
Crescent: Pakistan and Iran. From the Pakistani port of
Karachi the pernicious powder reached Europe by ship, less often
by airoplane. From Iran, lorry drivers in particular smuggled
the narcotics through Turkey and the Balkan countries of Bulgaria,
Albania and the ex-Yugoslav republics to Western Europe. However,
the large-scale heroin traffic led to catastrophic drug problems
in the transit countries of Pakistan and Iran themselves. Millions
of young people have become addicted, tens of thousands die every
year. According to UN statistics, Iran has the highest proportion
of drug-addicts in the world. As a result, the governments in
Islamabad and Tehran have massively stepped up their controls
at their respective borders with Afghanistan.
The smuggling gangs have therefore moved elsewhere: to the so-called
silk routes through the former Soviet Union, starting
in Tajikistan. Feeble state structures, porous borders and underpaid,
corrupt security forces have created ideal conditions for an undisturbed
traffic in drugs. Two routes lead northwards to Russia: either
via Dushanbe and Ubzekistan or via the Pamir highway and the Kyrgyz
city of Osh in the Fergana valley, the reloading point for heroin
in Central Asia. The few Russian security forces along the Pamir
highway do not always take their job seriously. On one journey
on the magnificent 780-km road, I was made to stop at only one
Russian checkpoint where bored soldiers just briefly glanced into
the boot. They did not use any sniffer dogs.
With Kazakhstan getting more serious about combating the drugs
trade, smugglers have begun to take a new detour from Osh via
the western Chinese province of Xingjiang to Russia. Moscow, the
mafia capital, is the main hub from where couriers take the narcotics
by car, train or lorry through Belarus and Ukraine to Western
Europe. In the transit country of Russia itself, the wave of Afghan
drugs has caused a social catastrophe: the number of drug-addicts
has grown from three to five million. In the first half of 2002
alone, the Russian authorities have registered more than 100,000
cases of drug-related crimes - an increase of 19 percent to the
previous year. As many of the impoverished drug-users share their
needles, Russia is also struggling with one of the worlds
highest growth rates in HIV infections.
In the Russian governments view, the root of these problems
lies in Tajikistan. One third of all drug smugglers arrested in
Russia in 2002 were Tajiks. Just the day before yesterday
we detained two kontrabandisti and confiscated 32 kilograms of
heroin, Lieutenant Colonel Pjotrovic tells me. Detained?
The brief news item in the papers had sounded differently. Shrugging
his shoulders, Mr. Pjotrovic replies: Oh, well. There appears
to have been an exchange of fire. In the course of that, the criminals
were killed, I believe. On the wall behind the Russian officer,
several photographs show Afghan prisoners being led away on a
field - shackled and blindfolded. The Russian soldiers guarding
them look terribly indifferent. I ask Mr. Pjotrovic how many smugglers
were shot dead at the border this year? I cannot tell you,
these statistics are not public. Only after much prodding
and the repeated offer of cigarettes, he discloses that the number
exceeded 30 - in the course of 55 illegal border crossings. The
Russians obviously do not play around much. But one border
guard was killed, too, Mr. Pjotrovic is quick to add.
I decide to travel down to the border to get a picture on the
ground. The flight from Dushanbe to the border town of Khorog
in Tajik Badakhshan turns out to be the most hair-raising of my
life. It used to be the only one in the entire Soviet Union where
Aeroflot pilots were entitled to a danger bonus. During some 60
spine-chilling minutes in the air, I can clearly see why: the
small Fokker plane flies through the narrow gorges and right past
the snowy peaks of the Pamir range, the tips of the wings nearly
touching the rocky cliffs. The view over the roof of the
world, as the Pamir is called, is no less magnificent: to
north lie its two highest peaks still bearing their Soviet-era
names: Pik Kommunizma (7495m) and Pik Lenina (7134m). Below us
is the Badakhshan region, divided into an Afghan and a Tajik part.
The artificial border was finally drawn in the early 20th century
as part of a compromise between the British and the Russians to
end the Great Game. As a buffer zone, the diplomats
carved out the eastern extension of Badakhshan, a long narrow
stretch of territory known as the Wakhan Corridor. Today, it also
borders China and Pakistan. For the sake of keeping the two empires
apart, the Badakhis were separated and hence drawn into two very
different orbits. Ironically, only the post-Soviet chaos in both
Tajikistan and Afghanistan has allowed Badakhis on both sides
to reach out to each other again, restoring long-lost kinship
ties. This has contributed to the cross-border flow of drugs.
After the shaky landing on Khorogs airfield even the locals
on the plane seem relieved.
Khorog is a weird place. It lies on a narrow high plateau at
a height of 2000 metres, squeezed between craggy and snow-covered
mountains. Almost all of its 20,000 inhabitants are unemployed
for the infertile alpine wasteland is unsuitable for agriculture.
The only factory in town, a textile plant, was shut down years
ago. The university, however, whose excellent reputation in Soviet
days lured settlers to this bleak spot, is still open. That is
why even bazaar vendors speak several foreign languages and keep
academic diplomas in their pockets. Because so many young men
died during the civil war or moved away in search of jobs, the
gender ratio in Khorog is dramatically tilted: for each man, there
are eight women.
And they are very beautiful, too - this makes life a bit
more tolerable, my driver Ruslan grins ambiguously. The
tall young man is one of the lucky few to have found a part-time
job at a Western aid organisation in town. Asked about the Russian
border guards, however, his face darkens instantly: They
behave like colonial rulers, they want to suppress us Tajiks.
In Ruslans view, the struggle against drugs is but a pretext
for their military presence, because it is a fact that the Russians
themselves are deeply implicated in the drug smuggling. Only a
few weeks previously, a Russian general was arrested in Tajikistan
with 80 kilograms of pure heroin in his bags.
Then Ruslan brings up a tragic incident in June that has occupied
the people of Khorog for the entire summer: the violent death
of five locals at a Russian checkpoint. Border guards shot them
dead in their Lada after they were allegedly caught smuggling
heroin. That was murder, the Tajik says. I grew
up with those guys. They were no drug smugglers, no way. The Russians
are lying. Ruslan believes that the young men, members of
a sports club, returned from a picnic in the mountains. Ruslan
is convinced that the Russian border guards were drunk,
as always. They just killed the guys for fun. The families
of the dead demanded an investigation of the tragedy, but to no
avail. The packs of heroin presented by the Russian authorities
to the public after the shooting were planted in the mens
pockets after they were killed. After all, the Russians have got
plenty of that stuff.
The barracks of the unit responsible for the killing lie an hours
drive south of Khorog, along the thundering Pjanj river marking
the official border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. It is
strewn with enormous boulders, which would make it easy to cross
from one country to the other dry-foot. Bleak mountain slopes
rising on both sides, the narrow valley is dotted only with a
few poplar trees.
At the bases main gate, the Russian soldiers look at me
askance. To enter the premises, an officer informs me, I would
need an official letter of permission from the ministry in Moscow.
I know that already. The problem is that this document is about
as difficult to obtain as a private bedroom audience with the
Pope. The countless faxes I sent to the ministry before my journey
never elicited any response at all. The good news is that Russian
soldiers on the ground, unlike the robot-like Chinese, go by the
book only when they really have to. So it takes a few minutes
of pleading and joking, and I am in.
Walking through the gate, I hear loud orders being barked across
the courtyard. Twenty newly arrived recruits from Russia undergo
the first drill: again and again, an officer orders them to stand
upright and then drop to the ground. They practice disassembling
and reassembling AK-47 assault rifles. Afterwards, the men move
on their bellies across the concrete courtyard, past a new monument
commemorating the barracks existence from 1918 till 2001
- above the dates chiselled into the stone and painted red the
outline of the Soviet empire. It still stretches from Vilnius
to Vladivostok, as if the newly independent republics such as
Tajikistan did not even exist.
Through a window in the officers barrack, Captain Oleg
H. observes the training. The blond man from Moscow whose face
turns scarlet after just a single glass of vodka joined the border
guards eight years ago. For some time now, he has been fed up
with his job. Life in the barracks is rough and the salary is
measly. The 34-year-old wants to go damoi, back to
his Moscow home. For months he has neither seen his wife nor their
daughter, he says.
At the mention of the deadly incident during his patrol in June,
Oleg smirks briefly. It was shortly before midnight when
I received a radio call from a patrol a few kilometres downriver
that they had spotted two Afghan men who carried a rope and a
tractor tyre. This is typical smuggling gear with which
the drugs are transported across the river. On the Tajik side,
accomplices take over the load. They could not be far,
Oleg goes on to say. Suddenly, this white Lada appeared
on the road in front of us. The situation reminded the Russian
of an ambush by Afghan kontrabandisti that he and his comrades
had got into on that same road years earlier. The attackers fired
hundreds of rounds from their AK-47s and fled. When Oleg lifted
his head he saw his eight comrades lying next to him in their
own blood, all dead. Miraculously, he was the only survivor, with
only one bullet stuck in his thigh. Noticing that his gory story
leaves me slightly incredulous, Oleg pulls up his trousers to
show me the scar where the bullet went in.
Back in June, we acted in accordance with the rules: we
asked the passengers of the car twice to get out with their hands
up, Oleg tells me. But then we saw their guns. In
such a situation we shoot to kill. That is the way it is.
His right hand tenderly strokes the dark fur of his Doberman Deutscher.
The dog is his closest friend at the base. It owes its name to
the fact that as a young man Oleg served in an army unit in Magdeburg,
Germany, where he picked up some German phrases. He likes to practice
these on his dog, but for some obscure reason his favourite is
goodbye!.
I ask Oleg about the rumours going around in nearby Khorog that
corrupt Russian officers were in cahoots with Afghan drug smugglers.
For a while the captain remains silent. He lights a cigarette
and exhales the smoke. Of course, a few soldiers here and
there might stuff a few grams into their pockets, one cannot prevent
that. As for officers, though, the KGB makes sure that it does
not happen. We are all being strictly controlled.
Oleg and I walk out to the courtyard. We pass a large plaque
proclaiming: To the heroes of the Soviet Union who gave
their lives in the fulfilment of their internationalist duty.
Many of the black and white photographs with the faces of fallen
Red Army men bear the caption Afghanistan and a date
in the 1980s. We have added a few heroes from Chechnya,
remarks Oleg before climbing up onto a watchtower at the far end
of the base. Up there, a guard behind a machine gun watches the
narrow river valley. On the Afghan side, I make out a man driving
a donkey along a mountain path. A little further, right on the
shore, two men are busy felling a young poplar. With every strike
of the axe yellow leaves drop into the river. Oleg stares across
the river. I want to go home, damoi, he says. This
is not a nice place.