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Monday, Jan. 21, 2002. Page 4
World's Highest Tunnel Is Reopened
By Tom HeneghanReuters
SALANG PASS, Afghanistan -- Shivering Afghan and Russian officials reopened the Salang Tunnel, the highest in the world, on Saturday after workers cleared tons of debris left over from war there in the late 1990s. Twenty trucks loaded with Russian food and medicines for needy Afghans made up the first convoy to travel south through the dimly lit tunnel under the snow-capped Hindu Kush mountains. Russian and Afghan workers, helped by British and French nongovernmental organizations, cleared the 3 kilometer-long long tunnel and its anti-avalanche galleries in a month to reopen the main artery linking northern and southern Afghanistan. Besides private traffic and trade, the 3,363-meter-high tunnel will be a major conduit for humanitarian aid coming down from Russia and the Central Asian republics and for refugees returning from Pakistan to their homes in the north. The tunnel, built by the Soviet Union in 1956-64, was a major supply route for Soviet troops during the 1980s war. "We greatly appreciate the work of the four organizations that have helped us clear up the tunnel," said Afghan Public Works Minister Abdul Khaliq Fazal during a short ceremony at the northern end of the tunnel. Russian and Afghan workers, some with the French charity Acted, worked together with deminers from Britain's Halo Trust to clear mounds of rubble left after anti-Taliban fighters led by Ahmad Shah Massood destroyed both entrances in 1997. Deputy Emergency Situations Minister Valery Votrotin, who was an engineer at the tunnel during the Soviet-Afghan war in the 1980s, wished the Afghans peace, independence and good relations with their neighbors. Only a few meters from Votrotin, an Afghan soldier held up a flower-framed picture of Massood, who held off both the Soviets and Taliban only to be assassinated by suspected members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida in September. The Salang Tunnel is one of the biggest of a series of development projects Moscow carried out in Afghanistan in Cold War competition with U.S. projects in southern Afghanistan. It cut traveling time from Kabul to the main northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif by about eight hours. But during the Soviet-Afghan conflict the Salang highway turned into a shooting gallery for Afghans who often waited for Soviet convoys to emerge from the southern end. Massood owed part of his fame to his ability to attack the Salang highway from his nearby stronghold in the Panjsher Valley. Impatient to return home or resume old trade links, Afghans have been crossing through the tunnel for at least a week, some of them walking the whole way with goods piled on their backs. "There were about 7,000 refugees passing through the tunnel from both directions while we worked," chief Russian engineer Nikolai Vdovin said. "We had to work and help them at the same time." | ||||
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