Death at 30 Cents

The living dead can be found right in the centre of Kabul. Whilst all around them the city is slowly being reborn, they are just as slowly being wiped out. Nobody notices them there, between the walls of an enormous building that was abandoned long ago, crumbling as a result of 30 years of strafing and shooting, even though it is just a short distance from the university. Once it was the Soviet Cultural Centre; today it is a pile of rubble.

The living dead who occupy the building number approximately 2,000: they are in the last stages of drug addiction, and have gathered here over the years in the darkness of this lugubrious citadel, wasting away their lives injecting or smoking heroin, spending the night awaiting the dawn with a roof – or something approximating one – over their heads, as they lie on a floor strewn with syringes, needles, garbage and their own excrement.

“Unfortunately drugs are an integral part of the Afghan economy,” Haroon Rashid Sherzad, director of strategic communications at the anti-narcotics ministry told me in Kabul. “Worse than that, it is one of its fundamental pillars.” The figures speak all too clearly: in Afghanistan since 2003, opium production has increased to more than 5,000 tons per year. For the first time in Afghan history, poppies are cultivated in all 34 provinces, with 2.3 million Afghans, 14 per cent of the rural population, involved in their cultivation. A labourer working in a field of poppies earns five times the average wage. And the turnover generated from opium is estimated to be around $3 billion, almost one quarter of the Gross Domestic Product of approximately $13 billion.

Speaking about the aims of the reconstruction, Major Marco Amoriello, public information officer of the Italian Armed Forces based at the Isaf Mission in Herat, said: “Recently we have begun seeing signs of success with the local peasants, nearly all of whom were forced to cultivate opium by the warlords or the Taliban. For example, we have succeeded in convincing a few, despite fears of retaliation, to convert their fields to growing saffron, which is sold in Europe for a higher profit than they can make from opium. But this means we have to defend them and protect them – therefore in order to keep the peace, we must also wage war. And this is just a drop in the ocean.”

The detox programme lasts one month, and doesn’t include social reintegration: the limited budget won’t allow it. The doctors are limited to administering methadone and other drugs, while a Mullah recruited from a Pakistani madrasah gives daily lessons in Muslim doctrine, explaining how drug use is severely condemned in the Koran.

But as Doctor Ullah told me, and as was confirmed to me by one of the squatters in the Soviet Cultural Centre, as soon as the programme finishes, with nowhere else to go, many return simply to smoke heroin among the living dead. 

For a full version of this article, see NOX39.