25 - 31 October 2001
Issue No.557
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 25 - 31 October 2001 Issue No.557 |
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'Living like animals'
A calamity of apocalyptic proportions is befalling the Afghan people. Khaled Mansour*, in Islamabad, explains why help is a matter of life or death
Abdul-Rasool, a six-foot Afghan with blue eyes and brown hair, had tears in his eyes as he remembered his two youngest children. They had died a few days earlier during an arduous two-week march from his village in Faryab province to Aybak, the capital of Samangan province in northern Afghanistan. Abdul-Rasool's loss is hard to put into words, but so is the tragedy of the one million Afghan men, women and children who have been displaced from their homes over the past 12 months, fleeing a merciless civil war and a devastating three-year drought.
"My two youngest children could not make it. I collected firewood and saved money to come here because I was told that there were jobs and that the UN gives food," he said.
Abdul-Rasool is one of the six million Afghans who are now dependent on food aid from the UN World Food Programme. One million more Afghans could be displaced in the coming six months, according to the worst-case scenario, after military hostilities broke out in this shattered country.
Like the rest of Afghanistan, the northern regions are suffering. Over two decades of war have decimated the economy. A three- year drought, exacerbated by locust swarms, has brought agriculture to its knees, and with it many Afghans, since 85 per cent of the population lives off the land. Two million Afghans could simply run out of food in the country's northern provinces in the coming months, since these are Afghanistan's hunger belt.
Before the 11 September attacks on New York and Washington, the World Food Programme, the food-aid arm of the United Nations, was helping about four million Afghans stay alive in the country. And the WFP was expanding its operations to provide for more Afghans increasingly unable to provide for themselves and for their families. Now, we are also preparing for a massive influx of refugees. Some 1.5 million people, fearing what could happen to them in the military action, may now cross the border into neighbouring countries, especially into Pakistan and Iran.
I last visited Afghanistan in June, finding tens of thousands of people around the historical northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif living in the open, in abandoned buildings, under plastic sheets, eating a mixture of grass and breadcrumbs. These were desperate people, helplessly watching their children dying of diarrhoea and from other preventable diseases.
Mohibullah, 60, shivered as he recounted how many of his neighbours had had to leave their village to look for water. "We have been eating grass, and more than 20 people in this camp have died from hunger and from diarrhoea," he said, pointing at fresh graves in the dusty hills nearby, marked by only a few branches and stones. The smaller graves were the graves of children who had never known peace in their short lives. "We are humans, but we live like animals," Mohibullah said.
Nearby, an old woman was baking the only meal her family would have for the day. "We scavenge for breadcrumbs and mix them with grass. The children have to eat," she said.
In order to alleviate the terrible conditions suffered by the Afghan people in the Hazrtu Sultan district near Mazar-i-Sharif, the WFP provided aid to about 9,000 people in April and May 2001, in return for their work clearing the fields of locusts. Workers employed by the project were able to collect about 60 tons of the insects, clearing 110,000 hectares of land.
However, even this heroic effort has not been enough, and more locusts have now invaded the region, swarming in from Central Asia. Such locust swarms have made an already poor harvest far worse, but they have also provided a further component to the already surreal diets of the starving. Mulla Diljan, 40, has to provide for eight people in his family, and the same locusts that destroyed his livelihood, together with that of other farmers in the region, have now become a staple food.
Forced to flee his native village destroyed by fighting between the Taliban and the northern forces that oppose them, Mulla Diljan has been forced to scratch out a living as a refugee.
Afghan women in the area commonly walk four hours every day to the nearest water source, and nine children had died in the district in the previous two days.
Thinking back to conditions in the northern districts earlier this year, it is difficult not to recount endless similar horrors. The voice of Lal Mohamed, who walked for 20 days with his family, surviving on only grass and breadcrumbs, still rings in my ears. When I close my eyes I can still see the three families who had pitched plastic sheets and tattered rugs on the stage of a derelict movie theatre in the town of Aybak in a desperate bid for shelter.
Following the 11 September attacks in the United States, all foreign aid workers left Afghanistan. The local transport network, already strained to breaking point, is crumbling further, and the UN believes that the refugee problem in the region can only get worse, with another million possibly being displaced in the coming six months.
I cannot go to Afghanistan now, but Afghan colleagues and friends still work inside the country, providing food aid to the two million people to whom they can get access and working hard under extremely difficult conditions to reach many more. The World Food Programme also plans to make food drops to the more than 100,000 families living in the central highlands of Afghanistan, which will be cut off by snow after mid- November, when winter arrives.
We are currently hiring extra planes and purchasing extra trucks for this effort, and more than 40 WFP workers have left their duty stations in Africa and Asia to come to the region and offer their desperately needed experience in international relief. The WFP hopes to be able to reach all six million people in need of assistance inside Afghanistan soon, and aims to continue increased assistance efforts in the country at least until the summer of 2002. Such assistance is the only way Afghan civilians can be saved from starvation, or from having to flee their country for Pakistan and Iran, where there are already more than 3.5 million Afghan refugees.
The few thousand civilians who have managed to leave the country over the past four weeks, mostly destined for Pakistan, have been either rich enough or lucky enough to make this risky trip. There are still millions more people inside the country's borders too weak, too poor or too old to leave, and these people must be helped. Millions of Afghan men, women and children now depend largely on WFP assistance, and on that of other aid agencies. They will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Thus far, the WFP, together with the other relief agencies operating in the region, has received generous support from North America, Europe and Japan. However, Arab and Muslim countries should also join this effort. In their time of need, the international community must not let innocent Afghan civilians down.
* The writer is World Food Programme regional public information officer for the Mediterranean and Central Asia.
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