Afghanistan's plan to end drug production by paying farmers not to grow poppies got off to a violent start when local residents said today that security forces killed eight farmers and wounded 35 who opposed the plan.
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Mohammad Fahim
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There was also an assassination attempt against Defence Minister Mr Mohammad Fahim during a visit to the eastern city of Jalalabad today as part of the poppy eradication programme.
Four people were killed and 18 wounded when a bomb exploded behind the minister's convoy, a Defence Ministry official said.
The official said the minister was unhurt.
Mr Fahim and senior military commanders were in Jalalabad partly to persuade farmers to accept the interim government's offer of cash for not planting opium poppies from which heroin is derived.
In the south-eastern province of Helmand last night, security forces involved in the programme fired into a crowd of farmers protesting at the plans to give them money not to plant poppies.
The area's poppy production makes Afghanistan, which once produced 70 percent of the world's opium, still a major supplier.
The protesters said the offer of $250 an acre was not enough.
The residents said the protest erupted yesterday in Kajaki district in the south-western province of Helmand, Afghanistan's biggest poppy growing area, a day before officials were due to pay out promised compensation for not growing the plant.
Afghan security men were ordered to fire on the protesters and 12 of the injured were in critical condition at a local hospital, they said.
The United Nations Drug Control Programme (UNDCP) has said poppy cultivation has swelled since the ultra-Islamic Taliban, which had banned poppy growing in the war-torn country, was ousted in December.
UNDCP wants to pay cash to farmers in compensation for not growing so-called white gold.
But thousands of poppy farmers in eastern Afghanistan have vowed to continue with their illegal trade, saying they would rather die than accept what the government is offering them.
If they give us 3,000 or 3,500 that would be sufficient, poppy farmer Mr Abdul Gharfoor said near Jalalabad in Nangarhar Province.