[ Home | 9/11 Webpage]

FLASH 6: Humanitarian Crisis: Deaths from Starvation and Cold in Afghanistan

On 11/7/01 Le Monde transmitted a report, translated into English by Truthout, that "177 people (in majority children) died of hunger and cold in a camp during the four past weeks, in a camp near Kunduz." The information was from a 12/7 press conference held in Geneva by the International Organization for Migrations (IOM). The IOM reported also that its aid operations in the Kunduz area had been interrupted first by the Taliban and then by the Northern Alliance.

On 12/9/01 the Montreal Gazette reprinted a story by Christina Lamb for the London Daily Telegraph about even more deaths from starvation and cold at another camp near Herat: "A dirty gray blanket on the hard desert ground is all that is home for Bibi Gul and her family in the new Afghanistan.... It is more than a week since she and her five children had their last meal - a begged bowl of rice - and on Friday she woke to find her 2-year-old son, Tahir, stiff and cold, frozen to death in the rain. While the West celebrates the surrender of Kandahar and the collapse of the Taliban, here in Maslakh camp in western Afghanistan there is no celebratory slaughtering of goats or distribution of sweets, but only weeping and funerals.... Every night as the temperature dips well below zero, as many as 40 people die from cold and starvation. In the six cemeteries scattered through the camp, many of the piles of stones marking graves are so tiny that it is clear most victims are children and babies."

Another story of camp deaths was printed on 12/07/01 in The Australian.

My LEXIS-NEXIS search has failed to turn up any comparable reports in the US press. The foreign reports are considerably more alarming than an op-ed of 12/9/01 in the New York Times by Roberta Cohen of the Brookings Institution, even though her piece is alarming enough: "For the United States, the war in Afghanistan has been a quick success. For the people of Afghanistan, the situation is different. While Afghans in Kabul celebrate the end of Taliban tyranny, in much of the rest of the country lawlessness and banditry are growing and millions are near starvation.

"International relief agencies have enough food in Afghanistan and nearby to feed six million people for at least a month, but they cannot distribute it safely. On many important roads, aid convoys have been attacked. Truckers dare not travel to certain provinces, and in Mazar-i-Sharif and other cities where there is fighting, armed groups have sacked and occupied aid offices and warehouses. Afghan leaders negotiating in Bonn have agreed to the establishment of a limited international security force. The United Nations Security Council is scheduled to act on this matter sometime later this week, but all that's envisioned now is a small force to maintain stability in Kabul and possibly one or two other cities. That is hardly enough.

"The world should provide a more substantial force, with a broader mandate -- to restore security for food distribution and to protect civilians, including the many internally displaced Afghans, people who have fled to camps in their own country. Thousands of them are subject to violence in the camps or are living in the open without shelter.

"European nations have been pressing for such a force. The American position is that we must first finish the war against Osama bin Laden, but now that this military objective is close to being achieved, the Bush administration still shows little sense of urgency about protecting Afghan civilians.