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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: unclewest who wrote (12658)	12/4/2001 7:42:07 AM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Aid crisis as Afghan children die [Hi uw, I remember reading before about the "frendship bridge" that would not be opened for security reasons. Do you have any info on the problem?...pb] Babies and infants stranded in northern Afghanistan are dying as temperatures in the war-ravaged country continue to plummet, the UK charity Save the Children has warned. An estimated 150,000 people are living in flimsy tents in a refugee camp near Mazar-e-Sharif, where snows have arrived and temperatures drop below freezing every night. Mazar-e-Sharif, close to the Uzbek border, is a key distribution point for aid agencies trying to deliver food and clothing to the rest of the north and down to the central highlands, where people will soon be totally cut off by the snow. But aid agencies say their work here is being severely hampered by the refusal of the Uzbek government to re-open the Friendship Bridge which leads across the Amurdarya River into Afghanistan for security reasons. A journey that should take 40 minutes is taking up to 10 days as agencies try to find alternative routes through Turkmenistan and Pakistan. "We haven't got the flood of aid we need. We've just got a trickle," Save the Children's Brendan Paddy told the BBC. "We were seeing deaths of children and infants even before the temperatures dropped. And it could go 20 degrees lower." In the north, clothing is taking priority over food. "Obviously, food is important but at the moment we are desperate to get tents, quilts and warm clothing to these people," said Mr Paddy. "If you are cold as well as hungry, you don't really have much of a chance." Meanwhile in the Afghan capital, Kabul, the UN's World Food Programme is beginning an emergency food distribution scheme for an estimated one million people who are too poor to feed their families. Hundreds of Afghan men and women have been employed by the WFP to survey households in the capital's poorest areas, calculate how many people there are and how urgent their need is. They will be distributing food coupons that will entitle a household to a 50 kilogram sack of wheat - enough, it is estimated, to last a month. UN spokesman Khaled Mansoor says food stocks themselves are not the issue. "The problem ...is not really the availability of food but the purchasing power of the people, because a casual labourer here doesn't get enough money to provide for a family of six people, which is the average number of people in a family in Afghanistan." The World Food Programme hopes to have its food distribution centres in Kabul ready by Sunday. This is a one-off emergency effort and the WFP is employing large numbers of women, who were forbidden from working during Taleban rule. It is both easier for them to gain access to households and a way of providing the women themselves with some income. The survey team members are getting an average of $30 each. news.bbc.co.uk