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116 ~ TALIBANcibly stopped from doing so. They banned Labour Day on 1 May for beinga communist holiday, for a time they also banned Ashura, the ShiaIslamic month of mourning and even restricted any show of festivity atEid, the principle Muslim clelebration of the year.Most Afghans felt demoralized by the fact that the Islamic worlddeclined to take up the task of condemning the Taliban's extremism.Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states have never issued asingle statement on the need for women's education or human rights inAfghanistan. Nor did they ever question the Taliban's interpretation ofSharia. Asian Muslim countries were also silent. Surprisingly, Iran issuedthe toughest defence of women's rights under Islam. 'Through their fossilizedpolicies the Taliban stop girls from attending school, stop womenworking out of their homes and all that in the name of Islam. Whatcould be worse than committing violence, narrow-mindedess and limitingwomen's rights and defaming Islam,' said Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, asearly as 1996. 20 Iranian criticism of Taliban policies escalated dramaticallyafter the deaths of their diplomats in Mazar in 1998.In Mazar stands the Tomb of Rabia Balkhi, a beautiful, tragic medievalpoetess. She was the first woman of her time to write love poetry inPersian and died tragically after her brother slashed her wrists as punishmentfor sleeping with a slave lover. She wrote her last poem in her ownblood as she lay dying. For centuries young Uzbek girls and boys treatedher tomb with saint-like devotion and would pray there for success intheir love affairs. After the Taliban captured Mazar, they placed her tombout of bounds. Love, even for a medieval saint, was now out of bounds.9HIGH ON HEROIN:DRUGS AND THETALIBAN ECONOMYJust two miles from Kandahar's city centre poppy fields stretch as far asthe horizon. In the spring of 1997, farmers were carefully tending theyoung, green, lettuce-like leaves of the plants which had been planteda few weeks earlier. They meticulously hoed the soil to uproot weeds,sprinkled fertilizer and repaired irrigation ditches destroyed by the Sovietarmy in the 1980s to provide water to the fields. In a few weeks the leaveswould sprout a bright red flower which would bloom until its petals fellaway to reveal a hardened capsule.Four months after sowing the poppy seeds, the capsules would be readyto be lanced with thin, home-made blades for their liquid gold. Thefarmer would squeeze each capsule with his fingers until a milky-whitegooey substance oozed out. By the next day the opium would solidify intoa brown gum which would be scraped off with a trowel. This operationwould be repeated every few days until the plant stopped yielding anygum. The raw opium would be collected, slapped together in a cake andkept wet in plastic bags until the dealers arrived. The best quality opium,generally obtained from well-irrigated land, has a dark brown colour andsticky texture. It is called tor, the substance which lubricates the financesof all the Afghan warlords, but particularly the Taliban. 1'We cannot be more grateful to the Taliban,' said Wali Jan, a toothless,elderly farmer as he weeded his fields. 'The Taliban have brought us securityso we can grow our poppy in peace. I need the poppy crop to supportmy 14 family members,' he added. The Taliban objective of reestablishingpeace and security in the countryside has proved to be animmense boon to opium farming. On his small plot of land Wali Janproduces 45 kilograms of raw opium every year and earns about