Taliban seeks world help to eradicate opium cultivation

"The international community must rise to help Afghanistan for just and humanitarian cause by helping financially," Afghan Consul General Moulvi Rehmatullah Kakazadeh told reporters in Karachi.

"We have stopped cultivation of poppy completely this year and there is not a single poppy plant can be seen in our part of Afghanistan," he said. Afghanistan produced over 4,500 tons of opium last year, 77 per cent of global opium production. The country has destroyed heroin manufacturing factories and brought poppy cultivation to zero this year.

"The world attitude to our efforts is not positive. We seek their support in eradicating the drug menace from our country that will help drug control efforts globally," Kakazadeh said.

Afghanistan's Taliban regime faces opposition from the United States and other western countries and which accuse it of being a fundamentalist Moslem country that allegedly supports terrorism. The charges have been denied by Taliban.

War-torn Afghanistan also faces U.S. -ed sanctions, which are aggravating the hardship of common Afghans, who have also been hit by drought.

"We need 200 million dollars to pay to the growers for not cultivating poppy to support this effort. The amount is very small if compared to what world has been spending on narcotic control programmes," Kakazadeh said.

NARC International, a non-government organisation helping the Afghan government in the programme, said this should be made a pilot project for the eradication of poppy cultivation and heroin production in the country. This could later be tried in other heroin producing countries.

"We have named the project 'poppy purchase plan', and would be presented before the international community and organisation working for drug control globally soon," chairman NARC International Zulqarnain Irshad said.

(la/news.ch)