UN donates money for anti-drugs drive

To support an ongoing effort to curb drug trafficking via Tajikistan, the UN Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) has granted the country US $10 million. "Tajikistan is the most affected country in Central Asia by opiates flow from neighbouring Afghanistan. This is increasingly becoming a heroin trade, so it needs more assistance to deal with the problem," Antonella Deledda, UNODC's regional representative for Central Asia, told IRIN from the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, on Wednesday. Signed by the Tajik deputy prime minister, Saidamir Zuhurov, and the deputy head of the UNODC, Sumuru Noyan, the new initiatives would broadly focus on border control by supporting the Tajik law-enforcement agency and the Russian military manning the 1,200-km eastern border with Afghanistan. Deledda said the funding would serve to strengthen the Tajik Drug Control Agency (DCA), which was established in 1999 and has performed a major role by seizing large quantities of drugs. Increasingly, these projects will bring the country to a very advanced model of drug control, which is an integrated model where all the agencies are strongly coordinating their actions," she said. UNODC activities in Tajikistan have been mainly focused on training, providing equipment and other technical assistance, and building the capacities of the law-enforcement agencies for effective drug control. While being the major northern route for the poppy and heroin produced in Afghanistan, Tajikistan also has the fourth-highest interdiction rates, having seized about eight mt of drugs, including about four mt of heroin, in 2001. In 2002, it was down to six mt, but in the first five months of this year, the DCA seized five mt of drugs, including 3.1 mt of heroin. Although the country accounts for some 85 percent of all drugs seizures in Central Asia, aid workers maintain that they remain concerned, because the northern route through Tajikistan is becoming increasingly important to drug smugglers compared to the southern and eastern routes through Pakistan and Iran. Deledda maintained that although UNODC was not initiating any ground-breaking projects, the situation had matured sufficiently over the past three years to allow the agency to expand its assistance to the country. "These projects would build on what has already been done, and is not a beginning, but very much the continuation and strengthening of our activities," she said. The trafficking in the deadly substance through Tajikistan has its costs. Aid workers estimate that addiction rates across Central Asia are increasing. They estimate the number of Tajik drug addicts to be between 45,000 and 55,000 in a population of 6.2 million. The vast majority of drug addicts are intravenous heroin users. It is estimated that up to 80 percent of the new HIV-positive cases occur among injecting drug users.