Lebanon's once-flourishing drug trade is making a comeback. As a result of deteriorating economic conditions and the tacit approval of the Syrian and Lebanese governments, cannabis production in the Syrian-occupied Beqaa Valley has reached the highest level in eight years. The plants can now be seen growing even along heavily-traveled roads in the vicinity of Baalbek and Hermel.

Just don't try to bring in a television crew, or you'll risk coming under attack by Syrian-sponsored paramilitary units. When CNN Beirut bureau chief Brent Sadler and a team of cameramen traveled to an area 12 miles north of Hermel to do a story about the rise in drug cultivation, they were fired at and briefly detained by around 10 guerrillas carrying assault rifles, who confiscated all of their film equipment, including two cameras. "They forced the CNN crew out of their car at gunpoint and fired dozens of shots at random during the incident," recalled Sadler, who estimates the street value of the thousands of acres of cannabis currently growing in the Beqaa to be $2 billion.¹

Background

The Lebanese drug trade dates back to the Ottoman era, when the fertile Beqaa Valley became a haven for officially-sanctioned hashish production. After Lebanese independence, the central government waged a continuous (though not entirely successful) battle to eradicate the drug trade. After the outbreak of civil war in 1975, the breakdown of government authority and rising global demand led to a tremendous increase in cannabis and opium poppy cultivation.

After Syrian forces entered Lebanon in 1976, the drug trade increasingly came under the control of Damascus. Rifaat Assad, the brother of Syrian President Hafez Assad, Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass and other military and intelligence officials offered drug producers and smugglers "protection" and the right to travel unhindered in Syrian-occupied areas in return for a sizeable cut of the proceeds. By the late eighties, around one-third of the arable land in the Beqaa Valley was devoted to drug cultivation, generating about $4 billion annually. As a result of these profits, along with revenue derived from extortion, money laundering and other illicit activities in Lebanon, high-ranking Syrian officers grew enormously wealthy, cementing their allegiance to the Assad regime.

After Syria completed its military conquest of Lebanon in October 1990, the American government pressured Syria to crack down on drug production as a condition for its tacit acceptance of Syrian control over the country. With the help of millions of dollars in international assistance, the Lebanese government instituted a variety of crop substitution programs to compensate Lebanese farmers. Drug seizures and arrests by the Lebanese government became frequent and highly publicized.

Since virtually all major political groups in the country had been involved in the drug trade at one time or another, the crackdown naturally assumed a political dimension. In 1995, for instance, parliament member Yahya Shamas was arrested and charged with drug trafficking. Shamas, a long-time protege of Syrian intelligence, had reportedly bought a piece of land from Maj. Gen. Ghazi Kanaan, the head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon, and then made the mistake of refusing to sell it back to him at the original price once the value of the property appreciated.² Thus, the "war on drugs" became an instrument used by the Syrians to punish political elites who stepped out of line.

By 1996, poppy cultivation had declined to 370 acres, while cannabis production fell to around 600 acres. However, Lebanon remained a major source of heroin and cocaine processing, as the Syrian-protected drug business had merely "moved indoors." Dozens of indoor laboratories, located in Hermel, Baalbek, Dayr al-Ahmar, Zahle and other areas heavily occupied by Syrian troops, continued to process morphine base arriving from Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan and raw coca paste imported from South America. As a 1999 press release by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) stated, "Lebanon gradually transformed from a producer country into one of the regional thoroughfares for cocaine and heroin trafficking."³ In addition, the country's bank secrecy laws remained highly conducive to the laundering of drug proceeds.

Despite this, the US State Department removed Lebanon and Syria from its list of major drug-producing countries and drug transit countries. A March 2001 State Department report stated flatly that "Lebanon is not a major illicit drug producing or drug-transit country" and declared that there is "practically no laboratory processing" of drugs in the country.⁴

Cannabis Becomes King Once Again

The revival of the Lebanese drug trade comes amid a three-year economic recession in Lebanon that has devastated farmers in the Beqaa Valley. The deterioration of conditions faced by Lebanese farmers has been exacerbated by Syrian pressure on the Lebanese government to permit the free flow of cheap Syrian produce into the country and end subsidies on crops that compete with Syrian imports. Since the standard of living in Lebanon is over three times that of Syria, the influx of Syrian produce (and, to a lesser extent, produce from Egypt and other countries in the region) has driven agricultural prices to an unprecedented low.

As result, farmers associations in Lebanon have begun overtly criticizing economic ties with Syria. Most recently, on June 20 the Higher Coordination Authority for Agricultural Cooperatives issued a statement complaining that "the open Lebanese-Syrian border allows hundreds of tons of watermelons, tomatoes, bananas, almonds and other produce to enter the country, which damages our market and our economy."⁵

To make matters worse, the Lebanese government has mismanaged crop substitution programs or failed to provide necessary inputs and irrigation. Since 1997, for example, an American agricultural loan program has distributed around 3,000 dairy cows to Lebanon at below-market prices and provided farmers with training in modern dairy production. However, the Lebanese government's refusal to adequately subsidize grain imports led most farmers to feed their cows hay, which lowers milk production. Not surprisingly, Hezbollah's Al-Manar television station seized upon the issue and broadcast a series of reports accusing the US of dumping sick cows in Lebanon.

The rising level of anti-Syrian dissent among Lebanese farmers has caused great concern in Damascus, for it has helped fuel an increasingly populist wave of opposition to the presence of Syrian forces in the country over the last year. However, facing dire economic problems in his own country, Syrian President Bashar Assad has been unwilling to amend Syria's lopsided trade agreements with Lebanon or halt the flow of smuggled produce.

Instead, Syrian and Lebanese officials sought to reduce anti-Syrian sentiments among farmers by quietly suspending drug enforcement measures. Although Lebanese government helicopters continue to occasionally drop leaflets warning farmers that growing illegal drugs carries a sentence of up to life in prison, the Lebanese army discontinued its annual eradication campaign last year, a move that has been widely interpreted as a green light to resume cannabis and opium cultivation. For impoverished Lebanese farmers, who can sell a kilo (2.2 lbs) of hashish for $300 (compared to 20 cents for a kilo of potatoes), this newly permissive environment offered tremendous incentives to resume drug production.

It is widely suspected in Lebanon that high-ranking Syrian military and intelligence officials had a hand in the decision to turn a blind eye to drug production, as they have run out of other ways to derive illicit income from their financially bankrupt satellite state.

On June 15, Agriculture Minister Ali Abdullah said that the international community bears responsibility for the sudden rise in cannabis production. Speaking to reporters in Hermel, Abdullah blamed donor countries for their reluctance to support development projects in the Beqaa. Aside from exhibiting the well-known tendency of Lebanese officials to blame internal problems on (non-Syrian) outsiders, such statements may indicate a new strategy of pressuring the United States and other Western countries to abandon their principle precondition for economic assistance - the deployment of the Lebanese Army along the border in south Lebanon.

Notes

  ¹ AFP, 19 June 2001.
  ² During his 1996 trial, Shamas proceeded to implicate a number of important political figures, including Roy Hrawi, the son of then-President Elias Hrawi. Shamas was sentenced to seven years in prison with hard labor.
  ³ UN Economic and Social Comission for Western Asia, press release, 7 July 1999.
  ⁴ US Department of State, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, March 2001.
  ⁵ The Daily Star (Beirut), 21 June 2001.