Last November the British government paid £1.12 million grant to Iran to combat the drug trade. This came on top of United Nations Drug Control Programme (UNDCP) promise of $13 million to Iran to combat drug smuggling. On the surface this is commendable.
Some years ago we pointed out that Iran is one of the major conduits of heroin destined for Europe, distilled from Afghani opium plantation [iran bulletin no 14, Winter 1996]. If you had read reports from those days the opium jumped miraculously from Afghanistan into Turkey and the Caucasus, where it was refined into heroin, without apparently touching earth.
Today two thirds of the heroin on British streets comes through a small Baluchi village of Chuttu. This village situated in no-man’s land in the corner of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan [1] had been central to the Afghan drug trade for over two decades. It seemingly remains outside the jurisdiction of neighbouring countries.
The Iranian regime has regularly intercepted smuggled drugs, nearly 200 tons in 1997 alone. In the first six month of the current Iranian year 81 tons of drugs were confiscated across the country [2]. Over the last 13 years Iranian Law Enforcement Forces (LEF) have suffered over 2,600 casualties. Thousands of smugglers, big and small, have been executed - 42 alone in from September 1999 to January 2000. Literally hundreds of thousands have been imprisoned in relation to drug offences. In just six months last year 2,500 were arrested in the holy city of Quom alone – a doubling on the previous years. Yet the trade through Iran continues. And addiction inside the country relentlessly increases. [3] Why this singular lack of success?
What no one has asked is how is it that in a country where even the smallest cell of a counter-revolutionary organisation has a life measured in months so much narcotics can get through without effort? Could it be that elements within the Iranian regime collaborate.
And who better placed than the shadowy gangs within the ministry of information, whose ugly head surfaced during the wave of killings last year [see article this issue]. Ever since a law allowed the ministry to take part in independent economic transactions it has been deeply entangled in smuggling including drug, alcohol and possibly prostitution. Much of this came out in the debates in the Majles after the gang headed by Said Emami were arrested. Emami’s gang had used the legal permit for trade, to be make money through illegal activities, including vice. The mysterious murder of an air stewardess, Parvaneh Gha’em Maghami, was in this context.
But the issue goes beyond intelligent guess work. Over the last twenty years the ministry of information has been involved in activities requiring huge expenditures. Yet search as you will you will be hard pressed to identify a corresponding budget. That indeed was the very reason Majles allowed the ministry to raise money through its own commercial activities.
Who pays for the enormous number of businesses cropping up in London, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Paris, and other major cities, where commercial activity appears to play second fiddle to espionage and creating an international network with likeminded Islamists. Who pays for the numerous mosques mushrooming everywhere, where you can get a free meal almost any time? And for the many “students”, who in particular in recent times, have been shuffled out of the country on various scholarships - out of reach of the “reformists” should the situation turn for the worse.
And who pays for the links with the shadowy Islamist groups that the ministry uses in its international network? And for the backup to the numerous terrorist activities at home and abroad which have taken place and are only now coming into light.
These are expensive operations. The permission to the ministry of information to indulge in commercial activity was a way of paying for these without having to account to busybodies. Smuggling, especially of drugs is the most lucrative source of income, and of dollars. And it also gets drugs into the “decadent” West – two blows in one. A favourite vehicle during the war with Iraq was the lorries carrying donations to the fronts. Lorries carrying drugs and picked up by the LEF at checkpoints in central Iran, were routinely handed over to the information ministry along heir drivers. Yet repeatedly the same lorries, with the same drivers, would mysteriously reappear on the same route.
Thus it is that for twenty years tons and tons of opium and heroin – in convoys carrying loads of a ton or more at a time - (or brought over in 20kg mule-packs) traverse the Iranian plateaux and only a paltry amount gets caught. [4] They get through despite the $500 million border fortifications, and the huge loss of life to the LEF. It goes to feed the huge drug problem inside the country and through Turkey and the Caucasus to Europe and beyond. It all makes money for the security boys, and helps them “secure” the country for the mullahs. It is an inside job.
M Shakhak
February 2000
1. Observer December 12, 1999
2. Seven tons in the central province of Yazd, 1.1 ton in Khuzistan, 17 tons in Kerman, over half a ton in the Gulf port of Bushehr
3. Official reports are over 2 million addicts in Iran. Some estimates put at 3-4 million.
4. The approximately 200 tons seized in 1997, while on the surface impressive, is less than a month’s internal consumption.