More Afghans in feeding centres than before September 11: aid group
( 2002-02-24 11:37 ) (7 )

Three months after the ousting of the Taliban, a new disaster is brewing in northern Afghanistan with tens of thousands fleeing starvation and ethnic persecution, aid workers have warned.

After years of drought, the food crisis in the north of the war-torn country "is reaching alarming proportions," according to aid organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, Doctors Without Borders).

There are now more people in MSF feeding centres in northern Afghanistan than before the September 11 attacks that prompted the US war against the Taliban, MSF said in a report.

The percentage of severely malnourished children is high. In January, one in six children admitted to MSF feeding programmes in northwest Faryab province were severely malnourished, it said.

"These children would probably not have survived much longer without specialized medical and nutritional aid," the report said.

And child mortality rates seem to have doubled since August, according to MSF surveys in Qaysar and Almar districts of Faryab province.

"In northern Afghanistan, a new disaster is in the making and can only be averted by immediate and unrestrained action," MSF operational director Christopher Stokes said.

The population of the vast, dusty Sar-i-Pul camp for displaced people swelled from about 15,000 at the end of November to 23,000 last month, the MSF report said.

And every day more people leave their homes in search of food, it said.

While aid centres might attract some, "the squalid conditions in most displaced camps suggest that people go there out of despair."

Ninety-nine percent of families interviewed in the Sar-i-Pul camp had left home because of lack of food, an MSF study found.

People have very little or no food left and cases of scurvy, due to a lack of Vitamin C, have been detected again since the beginning of this year, it said.

A quarter of the families interviewed had not even one day's supply of wheat; a third had enough for just one to three days and 93 percent had no rice left.

MSF said only a fraction of the food needed by the starving Afghans had been supplied or promised.

Some 42 percent of all the families assessed in Sar-i-Pul and Faryab had not received any food aid over the past year.

"We do not know where the problem lies. All we know is that the food that is needed to pull people through is hardly arriving in remote parts of the north," Stokes said.

"We urgently need donors and international organisations to pull together and act upon their commitment to the people of Afghanistan."

Two-thirds of the families assessed in Faryab had sold their land, livestock and belongings to buy food.

And the problem is not going to be solved soon as prospects for this year's harvest look grim.

Only one in three of the families interviewed have any land, and of them, only 3.2 percent have started planting and no more than 4.5 percent have any seeds to plant, MSF said.

"Almost half of those who still own some land say they have no hope of planting it this year," it said.

In addition to starvation, ethnic minorities in northern Afghanistan are also fleeing persecution.

Some 20,000 people, mostly Pashtuns, have been forced to flee under threat of persecution, a UN refugee agency spokesman said last week.

"We are concerned about minorities in the north who have been forced to flee, particularly from Kunduz, Baghlan, Takhar, and other areas in the north, predominantly Pashtuns, who are minorities in those areas," said Yussuf Hassan from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

"In the last few days we have seen thousands of people fleeing southwards, stranded, I would say, on the Afghan-Pakistani border, nearly 20,000 of them," he said on Wednesday.

And UN officials said local fighting in northeast Badakhshan province has prevented aid workers from treating a suspected influenza outbreak that has left more than two dozen children dead.

"We are getting increasingly frustrated with the promises of the international community," MSF's Stokes said.

"All the talk of world leaders, donor countries and international organisations about their commitment to the Afghan people translates into little for many people in remote areas."