Uzbekistan has closed its border port to Afghanistan, delaying desperately needed aid convoys, say workers on the ground. But the UN’s withdrawal of its staff from Mazar-e-Sharif on 3 December makes it likely that few convoys will now set off for northern regions.
A journey to Mazar-e-Sharif, the central distribution point for aid to northern Afghanistan, used to take one hour. Now it will take two days, says Brendan Paddy of the UK’s Save the Children, who is in Uzbekistan.
Children and elderly people in refugee camps around the city are dying of hunger, cold and preventable respiratory infections, as temperatures regularly drop below freezing, he says. An estimated 500,000 people, forced out of their homes following three successive years of drought and 26 years of war, have fled to the area.
Sizeable communities living in the remote mountains north of the town of Mazar-e-Sharif are also at real risk of freezing or starving to death as they become cut off from supplies following heavy snow fall.
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Fragile situation
The UN’s World Food Programme pulled its staff out of Mazar-e-Sharif following an escalation in fighting in the city. “Everyone’s waiting for stability to return to Mazar. There was a lull yesterday but the situation is still very fragile,” Christiane Berthiaume of the UN’s World Food Programme said on 4 December.
Matthew Granger of Oxfam says: “If a ‘liberated’ urban centre can’t receive aid it gives you some idea of what’s going on in the rest of Afghanistan.”
However, some supplies are being distributed from Kabul to the central highlands. In November, the World Food Programme trucked 56,000 tonnes of food into Afghanistan. But much more is needed. An estimated 7.5 million people in the country are at risk of starvation.
Closed city
The closure of the border port of Termez on 4 December will dramatically worsen the situation, says Paddy.
“At first, the Uzbeks only allowed the UN to send supplies over the river on barges. We arranged to send some of our supplies with the UN, but the volume of aid we could send was greatly reduced by barge and we couldn’t send any staff.
“Now the situation has worsened still – they are not allowing anyone across and have declared the border port of Termez a ‘closed city’,” he told New Scientist.
Animal dung
Aid agencies fear that large parts of the north will soon become inaccessible except by donkey or aerial drops.
Kim Gordon-Bates of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva, says a lack of fuel will be one of the major problems facing people in northern Afghanistan. “Fuel will be a real problem as people have already started knocking down fruit trees,” he says.
Paddy agrees. “People are burning animal dung if they can get hold of that. The whole area has been deforested. Many have eaten the seeds they were going to plant, they have sold their tools for food and they haven’t any water to grow anyway.”
