More on the Afghan currency reform:
telegraph.co.uk
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Kabul lights bonfire of the currencies
By Lucy Morgan Edwards
(Filed: 11/01/2003)
Black smoke from hundreds of primitive brick furnaces billowed into the skies of Afghanistan yesterday as billions of banknotes were burned in one of the largest currency reform programmes in history.
Onlookers watch as Afghan currency is burned.
As the winter snow has blanketed the Afghan mountains, mounds of afghanis - the national currency - have been ferried to small villages and towns to be destroyed.
The old currency is being replaced by a new afghani to enable President Hamid Karzai's transitional administration to gain control over fiscal policy as it struggles to bring the country into the 21st century.
A week or so ago in Chagcharan, a remote and mountainous province, US special forces shivered as they stood at the side of a road where snow was already drifting.
They waited patiently in their Humvee, wearing night-vision goggles to enable them to spot a potential enemy, until a van finally rumbled over the rutted mud road towards them.
The soldiers were taken aback to find it was not carrying Taliban sympathisers but a lone driver carrying wads and wads of cash. Confused, they allowed the driver to proceed and reported back to their commander.
What the US soldiers had not understood was that, throughout Afghanistan, money was being collected from countless villages for destruction.
The last day for handing in old banknotes has now passed but it is uncertain how long the furnaces will be running because nobody knows exactly how much money remains to be destroyed.
Previously 50,000 afghanis were worth one US dollar. With the new currency, a dollar is worth 50 afghanis.
The official Afghan notes, known as daulati afghanis, were printed at a press in St Petersburg but multiple currencies exist because in the past Afghan warlords needing cash simply engaged printers and ran off wads of their own.
In Mazar-e-Sharif, the warlord Abdur Rashid Dostum has put so much of his own, Uzbek-printed, currency into circulation that most of the 12 million people in the north of the country now use his notes, known as jumbeshi.
They are almost identical to the normal afghani note but Gen Dostum failed to realise that the serial number had to be below 35 to be valid.
His notes can thus be identified and will be worth only half the amount of the normal afghani when the Central Bank of Afghanistan exchanges new notes for old.
Some 18 trillion afghanis have been handed in under the programme since it began in October. At least four trillion of those are thought to have been warlord or counterfeit currency.
In sweeping away Afghanistan's multiple currencies Mr Karzai's administration hopes to undermine the power of the warlords and to extend his control over the unruly and largely still medieval provinces. |
