Helping the Afghans in Afghanistan

Islamabad (Office of the United Nations Co-ordinator for Afghanistan), 29 May 2001 -- The Office of the United Nations Co-ordinator for Afghanistan deplores the interference the aid community in Afghanistan has increasingly faced in recent weeks while staff work to alleviate the suffering of the Afghan people. In view of this situation, a United Nations team has been holding discussions with the Taliban in Kabul over the past three days.
Over the last three years, the assistance community has channelled over $600,000 per day into Afghanistan, a figure that is expected to reach $800,000 per day in 2001. Funds provided by taxpayers in donor countries help the United Nations and the aid community assist needy Afghans regardless of ethnicity or political affiliation. Every year, millions of Afghans have benefited from international assistance. In 2001 alone, food aid will reach almost four million needy Afghans out of a total population estimated at between 20 to 22 million. Victims of emergencies will receive food aid, while over 430,000 Afghans, mainly women and children, receive heavily subsidised bread from WFP bakeries in Kabul and Mazar. The United Nations has trained over seven million Afghans in mine awareness, cleared 550 million square meters of land and destroyed 1.6 million explosive devices, rendering farmlands, and residential areas safe. The international community has built or rehabilitated drinking water schemes and wells in hundreds of communities. UN agencies, the ICRC, and NGOs have worked variously in food security, disability, education, infrastructure, and governance. These programmes help stem displacement, keep families alive, and provide hope for the future. The United Nations has helped form over 1,200 community organisations. These help improve stability and promote peace locally in the areas in which they operate. Especially outside of provincial capitals, they have been instrumental in helping avoid conflicts over scarce resources. The aid community has also immunised millions of Afghan children, with over five million being reached in each round of polio vaccination. In every sector, and year after year, insofar as funding has allowed, the assistance community has helped millions of Afghans by trying to fill in the massive gap left by fighting factions, who have chosen to devote their resources to war.

The aid community also provides stable employment for Afghans in Afghanistan. The assistance community currently employs about 25,000 Afghans, with the Mine Action Programme being the single largest provider of decent paid employment in the country. If these people provide food, clothes, and shelter for ten others in their families, then almost a quarter of a million people are benefiting from employment by the aid community. This number does not include the tens of thousands of Afghans who are benefiting from Food for Work projects, which provide temporary employment. Given the lack of jobs that pay enough to support a family inside Afghanistan, this contribution is significant.

Without this assistance over the years, neighbouring countries would have witnessed and borne the burden of massive emigration of families desperate to survive.

In 2000, the combination of conflict and drought triggered a major displacement of Afghans. At present, about 800,000 Afghans have left their homes, with at least half a million internally displaced inside Afghanistan. Estimates of Afghans stranded in villages who lack the money for transport to leave vary between one to two million people. Numbers of persons leaving their homes are increasing every day. In the course of 2001-2002, the United Nations now believes that the number of Afghans who will have to leave their homes to survive may more than double. In short, the people of Afghanistan are facing the most serious crisis in the recent history of the country.

In response to this emergency, the aid community has tried to address both the needs of the internally displaced as well as those of families in their areas of origin. One of the main elements of this strategy is to deliver aid, including but not limited to food aid, to populations in areas of origin to help them survive without having to migrate to urban centres in Afghanistan or beyond Afghanistan's borders.

For those who chose to move within Afghanistan--due to fighting, fear of persecution or drought--the aid community developed a range of assistance responses ranging from formal camps (Herat, Faizabad) to assistance to displaced persons staying with local families and in makeshift shelters. The aid community has provided food to hundreds of thousands of the displaced, and shelter of various kinds--from mud houses to tents to plastic sheeting--to almost 200,000 of the newly internally displaced. It has also intervened with local authorities to make available vacant public buildings for sheltering the displaced and has helped to winterise these public buildings. The aid community has also provided for such basic needs as blankets, quilts, clothing, water cans, soap, cooking kits, fuel and other non-food items insofar as resources have permitted. Had that assistance not been provided, and had the aid community not scaled up its response, undoubtedly several hundred thousand more Afghans would have fled to neighbouring countries.

For more information, please call Stephanie Bunker, Public Information Officer and Spokesperson for the Office of the United Nations Co-ordinator for Afghanistan: mobile 0320 4261325; office 211451, ext. 415.