From the Worldwide Faith News archives www.wfn.org
Despite uncertainties, ACT agencies respond to Afghan crisis
From
NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.ORG>
Date
Thu, 29 Nov 2001 15:38:50 -0600
Nov. 29, 2001 News media contact: Linda Bloom7(212)870-38037New York
10-71BP{561}
NOTE: This is a sidebar to UMNS story #560. Photographs are available. For
additional coverage, see UMNS stories #541, #543 and #551.
By Paul Jeffrey*
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (UMNS) -- While the world's media provide round-the-clock
coverage of a war that seems to be nearing its end, aid workers 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 in Peshawar for
Norwegian Church Aid, a member of Action by Churches Together (ACT), an
international network of church disaster agencies. The United Methodist
Committee on Relief is another ACT member responding to the Afghan crisis.
Citing poor security, the United Nations has so far only been able to
install 20 international staff workers at its office in Kabul, and their
travel is limited to the boundaries of the city. The United Nations has
reopened an office in Mazar-e-Sharif, but international workers are
commuting during daylight hours from Uzbekistan. Few nongovernmental
organizations have international staff inside Afghanistan.
The U.N.'s World Food Program, which announced in mid-November 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
Nov. 23, in an unprecedented move, the U.N. program started flying wheat
from Tajikistan into the northeastern Afghan city of Faizabad. The World
Food Program 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
nonfood 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, Norwegian Church Aid
reported that two trucks carrying 400 family-sized tents arrived safely in
Kabul on Nov. 21. A second shipment of 460 tents was scheduled to depart
Peshawar on Nov. 26, and a third shipment is scheduled to leave on Nov. 27.
Subsequent shipments will continue several times a week as long as the road
remains open to Kabul, Godtfredsen said. Even if the tents have to be
temporarily warehoused in Kabul, Norwegian Church Aid prefers having them in
the Afghan capital where they can be more rapidly dispatched to needy areas
when security conditions improve, he said.
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, a
London-based member of ACT. Church Aid is coordinating ACT-sponsored relief
work in the Herat area.
Church World Service reported that the situation in the northeastern city of
Jalalabad had stabilized, but that the relief agency's vehicles and office
remain in the hands of armed men. Naeem Shahid Ghauri, operations manager of
the Church World Service office in Peshawar, said a messenger was to be
dispatched to Jalalabad from Peshawar on Nov. 26, and was expected to return
with additional information later in the week.
# # #
*Jeffrey is a United Methodist missionary serving as an information officer
in Pakistan for Action by Churches Together.
*************************************
United Methodist News Service
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