Fri, Nov 23, 2001 page4

• Gangs block relief routes into Afghanistan

  DESPERATE TIMES Several aid agencies are calling for military action to stop the hijackings and killings by bandits on the main highway from Pakistan to Kabul

  • THE GUARDIAN
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  The race to get emergency food and clothes to millions of Afghans threatened with starvation before winter snows block the high passes is being hampered by lawless roadside gangs preying on goods traffic, aid agencies warned yesterday.

  Bandits and local militias -- erecting roadblocks and demanding so-called "taxes" -- are deterring convoys from delivering blankets, tents and flour to the villages and valleys where the need is most desperate.

  

  Sadia Haidari, wife of Reuters photographer Aziz Haidari, mourns over the casket of her husband with other family members on Wednesday. Haidari, 33, was killed along with three other journalists on the road from Jalalabad to Kabul on Monday.

  PHOTO: REUTERS

  After hijackings of trucks and the murders of four journalists on the main highway from Pakistan to Kabul, several agencies called yesterday for military action to secure the main routes and distribution networks all over Afghanistan.

  "Warlords and bandits are preventing food from getting to some of the most desperately needy districts," Oxfam said in a statement yesterday.

  "At the same time, winter has come early to parts of the country. Snow has already begun to fall. In the central districts of Chagcharan and Taywara, it is those twin enemies -- winter and the gun -- which threaten starvation."

  On Tuesday, gangs of armed men tried to extort "taxes" from drivers of food lorries from Kabul to Bamyan in the central highlands, Oxfam said.

  Immediate deployment of "a UN-authorized security force" was needed, it said. According to the US Agency for International Development, six million people inside Afghanistan, and 1.5 million Afghan refugees, depend on foreign aid for food.

  Care International also called for UN-mandated troops as a "last resort" to ensure food convoys got through. "After three years of drought we expect to find a population on the edge of starvation," said Kaye Stearman.

  The long and severe drought has run down the health and resources of remote communities. There are now estimated to be around two million people internally displaced, according to the UN Childrens' Fund (UNICEF).

  When the conflict began in September families fled the first American and British bombing raids against the Taliban regime and Osama bin Laden's associated al-Qaeda fighters, and then ran from the rapidly shifting frontlines between the Northern Alliance and the retreating Taliban.

  Earlier this year, due to poor nutrition and disease, as many as one in four Afghan children were reported to be dying. In some internal camps for displaced people that has risen to one in three, UNICEF says.

  "We are talking about an additional 120,000 children not making it to their fifth birthday," said a spokeswoman in London.

  "Some of our commercial truck drivers are reluctant to move their convoys at the moment. The aid getting into Afghanistan since mid- September has slowed to a trickle. The situation is very patchy and changing all the time."

  But some supplies are getting through. The first UN aid flight since Sept. 11 touched down in Kabul yesterday from Pakistan's capital, Islamabad. The big C-130 transport brought biscuits, clothes and computer equipment supplied by UN agencies.

  The UN World Food Program said a convoy of 58 trucks laden with 1,787 metric tonnes of food left Peshawar in north-western Pakistan yesterday, heading for Jalalabad and Kabul. The WFP is avoiding the other other main route from Pakistan, via Quetta, because the remaining Taliban forces have massed across the border near Kandahar.

  Three days ago the organization lost five trucks heading to Herat. Unidentified fighters took them to a village called Shindand, it was reported, "where they were unloaded and the food distributed among villagers". In total, 185 tonnes of aid was taken.

  The most reliable route at present is from Uzbekistan where barges ferry aid over the Oxus river, now known as Amu Darya. It is unloaded and driven down to Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan.

  The problem, however, is getting it into the highlands away from the main roads.
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