Pubdate: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 Source: Daily Telegraph (UK) Copyright: 2014 Telegraph Media Group Limited Contact: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/114 Author: Ruth Sherlock, in the Bekaa Valley CANNABIS, GROWTH INDUSTRY OF THE SYRIAN WAR In Lebanon, Where All Eyes Are on a Neighbouring Country Tearing Itself Apart, a Multi-Million-Dollar Drug Trade Is Flourishing Like Never Before LEBANON'S drug kingpin watched his workers sink spades into the piles of marijuana that banked the walls of his factory, throwing the chopped plants on to machines that sifted out the top-quality hash bound for Britain's streets. The secret processing plant outwardly an unremarkable cow barn stands on a hillside overlooking the fertile plains of the Bekaa Valley, where cannabis is once again a multi-million-dollar drug trade. For years, Ali Nasri Shamas and other Lebanese farmers saw their illegal crops burnt by the government. But in the past two summers, with the army focused on the violent fallout of the war in neighbouring Syria, their plants have flourished. Security forces have refrained from destroying the industry of the hash growers who, already armed to the teeth, could be useful partners in keeping order should the instability become full-blown conflict. The farmers too have grown in confidence: they have stockpiled AK-47s, ammunition, machineguns and rocket propelled grenades and rallied around Mr Shamas, who has become the unofficial representative defending their trade. "We are selling hashish, and if anyone from the government tries to come close to it, we'll kill them," said Mr Shamas, his heavily armed bodyguards standing beside the doors of two black four-wheeldrive vehicles, their windows blacked out, the licence plates removed. "This year we had a good year." Subsistence farmers across the region have switched from beet crops to growing cannabis, leaving tracts of agricultural land, miles wides, covered in the plants. As well as paying his own growers, Mr Shamas has bought up the produce of the smaller farmers, creating an empire whose economy now has hundreds of dependants. Inside the processing plant, hashish particles clouded the air, dancing in the rays of sunlight that streamed through the open door. A small army of Syrian workers, cloths wrapped round their mouths to stop them breathing in the fumes, separated the stems and outer leaves from the buds. In a corner of the barn, partitioned by a plastic tarpaulin, two women carefully resifted the refined product, creating a fine dust-like substance that was crushed by machine to make the hash lumps to be exported all over the world. The valley has become so full of the crop that prices have plummeted through oversupply. Two years ago, for one kilo of hashish, farmers would pocket $1,200 (UKP767). Now the price is only a quarter of that $350, Mr Shamas said. But still it remains a lucrative trade, and Mr Shamas's business alone brings in millions of dollars. Most of the hashish goes to countries in the region, including Syria and Egypt. But some also reaches Europe. Lebanon's hash helps to stock cafes in Holland, where the drug is legal, and some of it has found its way to Britain, according to the farmers. "All of my main growers made at least half a million dollars this year," said Mr Shamas. Mr Shamas, formerly a small-time dealer of cocaine and other drugs in the south of the country, has grown in power in the Bekaa Valley, from where his family hails, by promoting himself as a modern-day Robin Hood: a man battling a corrupt government to redistribute money to a region that has been left underdeveloped for centuries. His employees call him "the friend of the poor". "As you know, our politicians are thieves none of them does anything but for themselves," Mr Shamas said. "Their focus when in power is how much they can make their private bank accounts grow. We gave them time to reform the region, to introduce alternative industries, but they did nothing. Every time we get help from overseas to this end, they steal it." In a country awash with weapons and militia groups from its decades of civil war, Lebanon's government has rarely had the military authority or the political unity to implement its laws fully. When security forces have destroyed illegal crops in the past, the farmers and their armed protection squads have retaliated by attacking their bases. The growth of Mr Shamas's militia is also a symptom of the Syrian war: throughout Lebanon's history, with every period of political and economic turmoil, the drugs trade has burgeoned. Lebanon's government has periodically tried to eradicate the drugs industry, which has existed in the Bekaa Valley since the days of the Ottoman Empire. But the efforts were abandoned after the outbreak of the civil war in 1975, when militias and political groups used the trade to fund the war and also diversified into opium and heroin production. In the 1990s, when the Syrian military occupation of the country began, the United States pressured Damascus to take action. An American agricultural loan paid for the import of 3,000 dairy cows in the hope of building alternative industries on which the Bekaa Valley residents could depend. A $300-million-a-year United Nations programme of crop substitution was also implemented, but government corruption prevented most of that money from reaching the people of Bekaa. At the beginning of the last decade, the pre-eminent drug lord was Jamal Hamieh, who threw lavish parties for Syrian intelligence officials and New York gangsters. Now his place has been taken by Mr Shamas. So confident is he of his power that he speaks on the record, and allowed The Daily Telegraph to film the three tons of hashish in his factory. For now with no end in sight to the Syria conflict and mounting pressure on Lebanon not to succumb to its sectarian violence, the future for the Bekaa's hash growers appears bright. "The families and clans of the Bekaa have come together after they suffered hunger," said Mr Shamas. "Until the situation improves we will not go away." - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom