Despite Uncertainties, ACT Agencies Respond to Afghan Crisis

By Paul Jeffrey

Three young Afghan girls in Shamshatoo camp near Peshawar, Pakistan. Credit: Paul Jeffrey, ACT International, November 2001.

Peshawar, Pakistan. Although the world's media are providing round-the-clock coverage of a war which seems to be nearing its end, aid workers here on the Afghanistan border report growing frustration that they are still unable to provide assistance to most of the Afghans left at risk throughout the besieged country.

"Watching the country only on the television, it would seem to be easy. Yet the task of providing aid seems only to be getting more difficult," said Kjell Godtfredsen, director of the emergency program here for Norwegian Church Aid (NCA), a member of Action by Churches Together (ACT), an international alliance of church agencies.

Citing poor security, the United Nations has so far only been able to install 20 international staff at its office in Kabul, and their travel is limited to the boundaries of the city. The UN has reopened an office in Mazar-e-Sharif, but international staff members are commuting during daylight hours from Uzbekistan. Few non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have international staff inside Afghanistan.

The UN's World Food Program (WFP), which a few days ago was announcing that it had managed to get enough food into Afghanistan to meet current needs, has admitted it lacks the ability to get that food to communities at risk. On November 23, in an unprecedented move, the WFP started flying wheat from Tajikistan into the northeastern Afghan city of Faizabad. The WFP plans to send four flights a day, each carrying 17 tons of wheat, for the next several weeks.

"If security does not improve, we will not be able to have direct access to the populations at risk," said Filippo Grandi, chief of the Afghanistan mission of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). "Of course we can continue to do what we have been doing in the last few months: send convoys and send aid to insecure areas. But that is not the same as being present, monitoring, and ensuring that the food and the non-food items reach the populations in need."

Despite lingering security problems on the road that runs from Peshawar across the border to Jalalabad and on to Kabul, NCA reported that two trucks carrying 400 family-sized tents arrived safely in Kabul on November 21. A second shipment of 460 tents is scheduled to depart Peshawar on November 26. A third shipment is scheduled to leave on November 27, and Godtfredsen said subsequent shipments will continue several times a week as long as the road remains open to Kabul. He said that even if the tents have to be temporarily warehoused in Kabul, NCA preferred to have them in the Afghan capital where they could be more rapidly dispatched to needy areas when security conditions improve.

The shipments to date are part of a larger allocation of 5,000 tents and 25,000 blankets funded by the current ACT appeal for the people of Afghanistan.

The first shipment of tents was destined for Herat, but remains in Kabul awaiting better security on the road to Herat, according to Julia McDade, the coordinator of emergency activities in Afghanistan for Christian Aid (CAID), a London-based member of ACT. CAID is coordinating ACT-sponsored relief work in the Herat area.

McDade reported that several programs to aid internally displaced families in the Herat area are on hold because disputes between militia leaders have disrupted the money market in that city, and thus CAID has been unable to transfer money that local partners need to purchase food locally.

McDade said CAID partners in Herat reported that at least one house was destroyed by falling food packets dropped from U.S. military aircraft. She said the food packets had become hotly traded commodities in the Herat marketplace.

The resumption of normal activity in the Kabul money market has allowed ACT members to transfer funds to local partners which are buying relief supplies on the market there. Afghan staff of NCA in Kabul reported that commodity prices remain uninflated. They said the temporary ban on NGO activity imposed by Northern Alliance forces was lifted earlier than expected because of international pressure.

NCA staff in Kabul reported they have traveled to the outlying areas of Kabul to monitor the successful distribution of two months of food to 6,570 families by two NCA partners, the Afghanistan Rural Rehabilitation Association and the Sanayee Institute of Education and Learning. The NCA Kabul office is currently monitoring other food distribution programs being carried out by Afghan NGOs and funded by the ACT appeal for Afghanistan.

Church World Service (CWS) reported that the situation in the northeastern city of Jalalabad had "stabilized," but that their vehicles and office remain in the hands of armed men. Naeem Shahid Ghauri, operations manager of the CWS office in Peshawar, said a messenger was to be dispatched to Jalalabad from Peshawar on November 26, and hopefully return with additional information later in the week. All international agencies and NGOs in Jalalabad had their offices looted and vehicles stolen in the wake of the Taliban's retreat from the city. Security in the city has been delegated to militia leader Hazarat Ali, who has announced a gun confiscation program run by his own armed men.

Aid agencies report complicated patterns of refugee movement throughout the region. Some Afghan refugees are reportedly returning from Iran, as well as in smaller numbers from the north of Pakistan. In southern Afghanistan, refugees are attempting to flee aerial bombing and ground combat in Taliban-controlled areas, but most are unable to cross the border into Pakistan, which for weeks has officially prohibited the entry of new arrivals from Afghanistan. Border guards are nonetheless letting some elderly and women refugees across, and others are sneaking into the country on foot via smuggler routes. At least 60,000 internally displaced people remain inside Afghanistan, some of them gathered in camps such as the Taliban-controlled one at Spinbaldak, which journalists covered en masse in recent days.

Internal displacement continues because of the war against the Taliban and the lingering violence between militia leaders who have taken control of other parts of the country. In some areas, internally displaced families have begun to return home. The UNHCR's Grandi said the refugee situation inside and outside Afghanistan "is extremely difficult in terms of planning, in terms of raising resources, [and] in terms of managing the situation."

In Peshawar, the UNHCR has quietly asked four NGOs, among them NCA, to cooperate in distributing food to 25,000 "invisible refugees" living in the urban areas of Peshawar. These are new arrivals from Afghanistan who have not registered as refugees. Many are living with relatives in the sprawling border city, and aid officials say their conditions are often precarious. UNHCR will provide a package of basic food. NCA will add additional food, and two of NCA's local partners will conduct a survey to identify needy families and carry out the distribution. The distribution will be carried out without publicity given the reluctance of Pakistan's government to assist newly arrived refugees.

NCA will also give 40 tents to be used by as classrooms by schools in Peshawar, which have been overflowing with newly arrived refugee students since the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan began.

NCA staff traveled on November 24 to survey conditions among "invisible refugees" living in Attock, some 80 kilometers east of Peshawar in Punjab province. According to Godtfredsen, some 150 Afghan refugee families arrived in the city several years ago. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, 450 new families arrived. Godtfredsen said they are living in "appalling conditions," many sleeping in the open, with no sanitary facilities or potable water. As part of the ACT appeal for Afghanistan, and in cooperation with the Afghan Women Skills Development Center (AWSDC), NCA is designing a plan to assist the families, and will ask the UNHCR and other NGOs for help.

According to AWSDC Director Mary Akrami, many of the new arrivals in Attock survive only by putting all family members to work in local carpet mills. Afghan physicians attempting to treat sick refugees were jailed after Pakistani physicians complained.

Since November 19, the UNHCR has moved several hundred refugees a day from the unofficial Jalozai camp near Peshawar to the Kotkai camp near the Afghan border, one of 11 camps that the UNHCR and NGOs have prepared for 110,000 refugees. By registering with the UN and accepting the move, the families will receive food, shelter, water, and medical care - all things they lacked in the unofficial camp.

The refugees going to Kotkai are ethnic Pashtuns, and the UNHCR has said it will soon start moving refugees who are ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras into other camps along the border.

NCA has set up water and sanitation facilities in several of the new camps, and has kept some of the equipment safe in Peshawar awaiting the UNHCR's decision to open a particular camp. NCA has also recognized that other urgent uses might arise, and has just decided to give two water bladders to the International Rescue Committee for a camp at Basu in the Kurram Tribal Agency.

One of the elements contributing to the changing context for relief work along the border here is a meeting of Afghan military leaders and politicians set to begin November 27 in Germany. According to McDade taken to consideration." She said that a lot of policy decisions being made about Afghanistan were being made with the humanitarian mandate in mind, but that neglected the Afghans' priorities of building a viable and strong civil society.

"It is important to note that for our partners the longer-term success of the change in political control is as important, if not more important, than meeting the immediate humanitarian needs," said Nick Guttmann, manager of CAID emergency programs. "For outside humanitarian organizations, the humanitarian imperative comes first, but in calling for this we could be undermining the long-term stability and future reconstruction of Afghanistan."

"We must avoid the trap of assuming that aid has to be provided by international agencies," Guttmann said. "Our partners have been and continue to deliver assistance to communities that are outside our reach. There are many options still available to the international community to provide humanitarian assistance especially through the increased use of the commercial sector to provide food and by calling on and applying pressure on neighboring countries to open their boarders so that relief can be delivered into the country."

In an open letter to participants in the German summit, CAID called on the delegations to take steps "that will guarantee security to humanitarian aid convoys inside Afghanistan. It is increasingly urgent that food and other emergency supplies reach people in need in remote areas, as winter sets in. We believe this humanitarian commitment is an essential first priority in your political discussions. It can also help to create the stability that a broad-based democratic solution depends on. The first act of an emerging Afghan democracy must be to care for its people."

November 26, 2001

How You Can Help

UMCOR 9/11 Update September 2004: UMCOR's response to the aftermath of September 11 continues. We thank are thankful for all of contributions that United Methodists and others have so generously given.