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Afghans Starve to Death As Aid Donors Talk
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| An Aghani man cries in despair as he eats bread made of grass |
KABUL, Jan. 10 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - As delegates from around the world prepare to head to Tokyo to haggle over what they can offer a country devastated by 23 years of conflict, the Afghans are starved to death in remote mountainous areas, news agencies reported Thursday, January 10, 2002.
The International Rescue Committee (IRC), a U.S.-based aid organization, said that an estimated 50,000 people in the remote mountainous region of Abdullah Gan are surviving on grass, a mixture of water and straw and roots of wild vegetables, reported British daily newspaper, The Guardian.
IRC said it is providing another 44,000 people with emergency food aid in the Mazar-e-Sharif area.
Some of the stronger villagers in Abdullah Gan have started coming down from the mountains to collect bags of wheat from Zari, some four and a half hours away by donkey, said Ken Burslem, a spokesman for IRC.
"Some are coming on foot, some on donkey, and they're taking [food] back to the villages for people who can't walk," Burslem told BBC News Online service.
However, reaching people in inaccessible villages deeper in the mountains is even more difficult.
Burslem said the IRC's field co-coordinator in the Mazar-e-Sharif area, Idrees Rahmani, had asked first the U.S.-led coalition and then the Northern Alliance for a helicopter to enable air drops of food in the mountains, but was turned down.
Rahmani said the reason given was that due to the high altitude, a helicopter would only be able to carry one metric ton of food at a time.
Since October 7, 2001, U.S. F-16s and B-52s have been dropping bombs weighing up to 7 metric tons in a so-called "war on terrorism", supposedly aimed at finding Osama bin Laden, whom the United States suspects of masterminding the September 11 attacks.
Lacking a more efficient alternative, the IRC has now hired some young people and horses and donkeys, Burslem said.
The plan, he said, is to visit one village at a time, feed the villagers, and after they gain some strength, have them help carry food to the next village.
The most remote area is about four days from Zari on foot.
A spokesman for Save the Children, which provides food and aid in other areas of Afghanistan, said aid organizations had warned months ago that food aid had to get to the mountains before winter.
"We always knew that we had to get the aid in before the snow fell. We were not able to do that because of the bombing and instability," Brendon Paddy said.
He said one of the main obstacles now was that there was no strong local authority.
"We do have a large number of men with guns, and in the absence of any authority, people with guns expect to be involved and to get a slice of things," Paddy said.
Japan's special envoy to Afghanistan, Sadako Ogata, visited the area briefly Wednesday, and described the return of refugees to Afghanistan as "very unusual" given that the traffic has typically gone the other way, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Ogata, a former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees who will co-chair the January 21-22 Tokyo conference of nations willing to help Afghanistan rebuild, said the villagers trickling back faced difficulties "on a huge scale".
Just four to six thousand people of the original population of the Shomali plain have returned since New Year's Eve, according to UNHCR estimates.
The returning families say they have little to eat, but aid agencies are already overstretched.
The World Food Program's spokesman in Kabul, Jordan Dey, said he was unaware of when food supplies would begin reaching them.
"We are feeding six million people every day," he said.
On the scale of suffering used to distinguish the most needy Afghan refugees, the villagers of Estalif are considered more fortunate than most. They, at least, are home (in their homeland).
Estalif villages, perched in the mountains that ring the Shomali plain north of Afghanistan's capital of Kabul, have been reduced to rubble by the U.S.-led bombing.
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