"To Die For" (murder in Afghan poppy replacement program)

[Minstrel Boy]

To Die For

Mar 13, Sunday Herald

Steven MacQueen worked in Afghanistan providing farmers with credit to stop growing the lucrative crops of poppies which end up as the heroin. His murder last week is sending shock waves around the Western world as power in this already fragile nation slips into the hands of drug lords who rule with guns.

THERE are thousands of individuals whose daily work in turning the grand gestures of geo-policy into practical reality usually merit no more than a passing mention. Steven MacQueen was one of those people.

In Kabul, where he had been based since June 2003, he headed up the World Bank’s Microfinance Investment and Support Facility for Afghanistan. It sounds like a high-powered job, and it was, but basically it involved making small amounts of credit available to peasant farmers to break their reliance on the lucrative poppy crops that end up as lethal heroin on Western streets.

In that sense, MacQueen was the nuts and bolts end of Tony Blair’s promise, delivered in late autumn 2001 as the US prepared to displace the Taliban regime, that the invasion of Afghanistan would stamp out the heroin trade. MacQueen took up the challenge of making that happen. Having found easy success for over a decade in a merchant banking career, the 41-year-old from Hawick turned his back on big finance deals in London to use his skills in the nitty-gritty job of making small amounts of money work positively for some of the poorest people in the world.

Last Monday night MacQueen was gunned down in a Kabul street, probably because of his incidental connection with the poppy replacement programme on which the West’s hopes for a fragile nation rest.
http://www.sundayherald.com/48304