wfn.org | Afghanistan: Where the men with guns control everything

[NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.ORG>]

Nov. 21, 2001 News media contact: Linda Bloom7(212)870-38037New York
10-71B{551}

ByPaul Jeffrey*

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (UMNS) - Mehmood Sadege had to hike over the mountains on
an old  smuggler's footpath after Pakistani border guards refused to let him
leave Afghanistan.

Hitching a ride on trucks and hiking through the mountains, it took the
Afghan development worker two days to make it from the besieged city of
Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan all the way to Peshawar, a dusty border
city inside Pakistan, in order to report that the church-sponsored agency
where Sadege worked had been taken over by armed rebels.

Sadege said the Jalalabad office of Church World Service (CWS) remained in
the hands of armed Afghan fighters allied with Abdul Qadir, a mujahidin
commander loosely aligned with the Northern Alliance, the coalition of
warlords that has driven the ruling Taliban into retreat. He said two
vehicles belonging to CWS had been seized, and that one was in the hands of
Qadir, who had declared himself the provincial governor.

According to Sadege and other sources, more than 50 offices of United
Nations agencies and nongovernmental organizations in Jalalabad were taken
over in the wake of the Taliban retreat from the city on Nov. 15. Computers
and furniture were taken, and over 100 vehicles belonging to the groups were
seized. Sadege said those in the hands of Qadir had been painted just enough
to obscure the logos and organization names on the side of the vehicles.

During the melee, one CWS employee was beaten when he refused to turn over
the keys. Sadege said one man had been shot in the CWS office, but he said
the injured victim was a member of one armed group who had been shot by a
member of another armed group.

CWS is a member of Action by Churches Together (ACT), a Geneva-based
international network of church-based disaster agencies.

Sadege reported that dozens of foreigners had moved into Jalalabad in recent
months in support of the Taliban. He said the newcomers included Uzbeks,
Chechens, Chinese, and Arabs. Even more foreigners came to Jalalabad once
the U.S. bombing began in the Kabul area, he said. Yet when the Taliban
retreated quickly from Jalalabad, the foreigners departed with them. In
their wake, they left a vacuum during which "anyone could do anything they
wanted," he said.

The U.S. military stepped up its aerial bombing of the Jalalabad region in
recent days, reportedly attacking some 1,500 mostly Arab combatants, many of
them affiliated with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, who are holed up in
mountains to the southwest of the city. Sadege said about 100 people had
been injured or killed by U.S. bombing around the city. The casualties could
not be independently confirmed.

Sadege said many of the armed men who have taken over Jalalabad "are the
same faces we saw in charge between 1992 and 1996," when the country was
plunged into civil war. The rise to power of the Taliban, a strict Islamic
movement among the Pashtuns, the country's largest ethnic group, was
welcomed by many Afghans because the Taliban put an end to the violent feud
among the warlords.

"The way things are going, we are walking toward a big chasm. The future
looks an awful lot like the past, where the men with guns control
everything," Sadege said.

As many as 100 foreign journalists are in Jalalabad. According to press
reports here, many are unwilling to leave the city after four journalists
working for foreign media were killed on Nov. 19 by armed men on the road
from Jalalabad to Kabul, the nation's capital. The bodies of the four
were transported to Peshawar two days later.

While Jalalabad's future remains uncertain, diplomats have arranged a Nov.
26 summit meeting in Germany where several Afghan leaders, including the
military commanders of the Northern Alliance, will gather to craft a
government for post-war Afghanistan, should the war really end.

The main contenders for political control of the country include former
President Burhanuddin Rabbani, an ethnic Tajik who has taken control of much
of the capital, and former King Zahir Shah, who has lived for decades in
Italy but who many see as the only figure capable of bringing about a
broad-based consensus among rival ethnic groups and dueling warlords.

CWS Director Marvin Parvez said the events in Jalalabad show how "the
military always moves faster than the politicians. I'm afraid these old
groups will be firmly in place by the time the politicians figure it out."

Parvez said CWS had been carrying out community-based health programs and
rural development work around Jalalabad, and that several rural health
centers had been occupied day and night by villagers determined to protect
them from the marauding armed groups.

"The health workers and the village elders are trying to talk with Abdul
Qadir in order to request that he guarantee their security so they can begin
working again," Parvez said.

While the Jalalabad area remains one of the more conflictive regions inside
Afghanistan, communication remains difficult even with areas where the
fighting has stopped, aid workers report.

"Every day communication is getting better. People are digging up the
satellite phones that they buried when the Taliban proclaimed they would
execute anyone caught with them. We're getting batteries for the phones into
the country any way we can," said Kjell Helge Godtfredsen, the Afghanistan
emergency response coordinator for Norwegian Church Aid (NCA), another
member of ACT.

Godtfredsen said the security situation for transporting material across the
border from Pakistan seemed to be improving, though he had yet to receive
confirmation that trucks carrying 400 tents that left the border on November
20 had indeed arrived in Kabul. He said the Pakistani government today
granted NCA permits to send 30 more trucks of aid material from Peshawar. He
said he hoped they could ship an additional 4600 tents, along with 25,000
blankets, by the middle of December.

In Dushanbe, Tajikistan, the head of mission for the United Methodist
Committee on Relief (UMCOR), Erik Blender, said the Tajikistan government
"wants to make the process simpler" for shipping relief supplies into
northern Afghanistan, and was revising and unifying its customs procedures.
Blender said UMCOR, another ACT member, is preparing to ship 1,300 tents and
other household items into the country for internally displaced families.

Godtfredsen said several Afghan nongovernmental organizations had
distributed food purchased inside Afghanistan with assistance from ACT. He
said the Sanayee Institute of Education and Learning just completed
distribution of two months of food to 3,570 families in the outlying areas
of Kabul.

When possible, ACT is purchasing food on the open market in Kabul or
provincial cities, according to Geir Valle, the director of NCA's operations
here. "It's the easiest way to help, and it supports and encourages the
development of normal economic life in the country," said Valle, who
reported that NCA's partners in Afghanistan were monitoring prices to make
sure massive food purchases weren't distorting prices for basic foods.

#  #  #
*Jeffrey is a United Methodist missionary in Central America. He visited
Pakistan on special assignment as an information officer for Action by
Churches Together (ACT). 

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United Methodist News Service
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