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U.N. Calls Emergency Meeting Of Donors To Afghanistan
ISLAMABAD (News Agencies) - U.N. Coordinator for Afghanistan Eric de Mul has called an emergency meeting of donors and asked for an immediate response to funding appeals amid a devastating drought which has raised fears of famine, a U.N. statement said Friday.
It said the situation in Afghanistan, crippled by drought and more than two decades of war, was "rapidly deteriorating" with more than half a million people - or some 2.6% of the population - internally displaced.
The U.N.'s consolidated appeal for Afghanistan this year totals $229 million for some 332 projects including mine clearing, drought relief, refugee assistance and drug control.
De Mul specifically called on donors to provide $3.5 million for non-food items such as shelters, blankets and clothing, $3.2 million to food for work programs and $600,000 for seeds.
"Since summer last year, about 470,000 people have left their homes and most of these families are internally displaced inside Afghanistan," de Mul's office said in a statement issued in neighboring Pakistan.
"This total represents only new internally displaced persons [IDPs] in 2000/2001 and does not include at least 100,000 old IDPs from 1999."
The latest count of recent refugee arrivals in Pakistan was 68,000 since September, when fighting between the ruling Taliban militia and opposition forces in the northeast drove whole communities off their ancestral lands.
Some 200 Afghans are crossing into Pakistan every day, and most end up living under plastic sheets in appalling conditions at the Jalozai camp in the North West Frontier Province.
Children have been dying of pneumonia every day at Jalozai with the onset of winter. Most of the 48,000 refugees who have arrived there since September are surviving off bread and tea, with no sanitation.
WFP Afghanistan Country Director Gerard van Dijk on Thursday said that if rains failed again during the next harvest as early as July, "we could see a famine."
WFP officials late last year warned that up to a million Afghans could starve to death in the worst-case scenario, if the next harvest failed and urgent international aid was not forthcoming.
"The reports coming from Afghanistan indicate that the people here [at Jalozai] are the lucky ones because they can afford the transport," United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees emergency coordinator Mohammad Adar said this week.
"I think the situation in Afghanistan is becoming a famine - it's not just a drought anymore."
The Taliban took control of Kabul in 1996 but are still battling forces loyal to ousted defense minister Ahmad Shah Masood and other opposition groups, especially in the rugged northeast.
Under the Taliban, women are barred from education and most employment, and widows with large families are a common sight at Jalozai.
The drought, the worst in at least 30 years, has destroyed almost all rain-fed crops, which are vital to the 85% of the population who live subsistence lifestyles.
But U.N. officials have complained that since Afghanistan lost its significance as a Cold War battleground during the 1979-89 Soviet occupation, responses to funding appeals for the latest crisis have been slow.
"Repeated requests for cash for seed since summer 2000 have met with virtually no response," de Mul's office said Friday.
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