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Taliban Reject UN Charges of Stockpiling Opium
Afghanistan's Taliban militia has rejected the UN report accusing them of stockpiling a big quantity of opium to continue war against their opponents through opium selling, according to a report reaching Islamabad on Sunday.
A five-member UN delegation in its report to the Security Council has questioned the sincerity of last year decree by the Taliban supreme leader banning poppy cultivation. It says that the presence of large-scale opium stockpiles in Afghanistan shows that Taliban have reduced opium production in a bid that the price registers increase.
Rejecting this claim, the spokesman of the Taliban Foreign Ministry, Faiz Ahmed Faiz said in Kabul that it is their national obligation to eradicate narcotics from Afghanistan.
But the UN report says that if Taliban were sincere in checking opium and heroin production, they would have destroyed all the stockpiles in their controlled areas. On the basis of UN Drugs Control Program and UN Crimes Control Agency, the reports says that three thousand and twenty tones of opium were produced in Afghanistan last year.
The estimated production in 1999 was four thousand and six hundred tones and five thousand tones a year ago. The experts committee says that it seems that these figures substantiate the reports that Taliban have stocked considerable quantity of opium and heroin and have stopped further production in a bid that its price would go up.
They say that the price of one kilogram of opium in Afghanistan last year was twenty-eight dollars but the price shot up to two hundred and eighty dollars in February this year.
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