Alarm over aid drop in 'world's biggest minefield' War on terrorism: Relief By Peter Popham in Islamabad 09 October 2001 The decision by the United States to drop 37,000 food packets on Afghanistan is not just irrelevant but could be lethal, aid workers are warning.
The food aid is being dropped from two C-17 cargo planes flown from Germany at high altitudes to avoid missiles. But high-altitude food drops end up being scattered over wide areas and often do not reach the people they are intended for.
"Random food drops are the worst possible way of delivering food aid," a spokesman for a big international charity active in Afghanistan told The Independent, on condition of anonymity. "They cause more problems than they solve. We only use them as a last resort.
"They create flows of people fleeing the fighting migrating to the sites where the drops have been made. And most important, they are happening in Afghanistan, which is the world's biggest minefield."
Hungry and desperate Afghans could get themselves blown up attempting to retrieve dropped food packets.
According to Omar, an organisation working to rid Afghanistan of its 10 million landmines, there are still large areas of the country seeded with unmapped mines, a legacy of a Soviet policy of random mine drops in the 1980s.
The aid spokesman said: "There are still 10 to 15 mine incidents every day. The food packets were mainly dropped in the central highlands and along the Pakistan border, both areas with suspected mines. We have to ask if the Americans are aware of the situation on the ground."
Apart from the 37,000 small packets - a drop in the ocean of Afghanistan's daily need - for the time being the hungry millions of Afghanistan are on their own. Last week, the United Nations' World Food Programme (WFP) announced with a flourish that deliveries of wheat flour to Afghanistan, suspended after President George Bush's threat to attack the country, had been resumed. The aim was to truck hundreds of consignments of flour into the country in a sort of Dunkirk-style rescue operation so that 150,000 tons would be in warehouses across the country ready for distribution to the starving once winter had made roads impassable in the middle of November.
But last night Khaled Mansour, a spokesman for the WFP, told reporters in Islamabad: "The World Food Programme today temporarily suspended food deliveries into Afghanistan. An aid food truck convoy on the way to Kabul was recalled by the local transporter company after they had reached Jalalabad," a town a short distance from the Pakistan border. The WFP's convoys are trucked in by commercial carriers. While 400 tons have safely arrived in the "hunger belt", the hill country of northern Afghanistan, the fate of a convoy carrying 425 tons to Herat in the north-west is unknown. "They are due to arrive there by the end of the week," Mr Mansoor said. "We hope they arrive safely."
The fog of war descended on Afghanistan in full strength yesterday. Stephanie Bunker, the UN's chief spokesperson in Afghanistan, said: "I have very little to say. There's been almost no radio contact with any UN office in Afghanistan since the attacks began. We don't know the status of the refugee situation or of our programmes in the country."
While all foreign aid workers were expelled by the Taliban soon after President Bush declared war on terrorism, hundreds of local staff are still at work in the country. The UN agencies were unable to give any details to reporters concerning the large numbers of people who were reported to be moving towards border areas in the hope of fleeing the country.
Ms Bunker said: "Some Kabul residents are still moving into areas held by the Northern Alliance ... There are almost no vehicles on the streets of Kabul.
"The situation for IDPs [internally displaced people, in UN jargon] has grown more acute. We emphasise the need to secure control of the country so that aid deliveries can be resumed as quickly as possible. People do not die of hunger over night. They suffer slowly, often for many months, before a final release in death. For some people, another day of delay can mean another death."
The UN expects that eight million people in Afghanistan will be hungry and in need of food aid this winter, more than a third of the population.
Mr Mansoor said: "Although the WFP has 8,000 tons of food inside Afghanistan, the needs are huge - more than three times as many people need food as we have been able to reach in the past month." Rumours of refugees gathering on the Afghan side of the Pakistani border circulated yesterday, including talk of one thousand at the Chaman border crossing near Qetta in the south-west of Pakistan, but independent verification was impossible.
The United Nations' High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is struggling to make new camps for the expected influx, which has been predicted to reach 1.5 million, but tribal people in two of the 32 planned camps forced teams attempting to prepare the sites to turn back yesterday, protesting that the land was their own.
Yusuuf Hassan, a spokesman for the UNHCR, said: "We are ready to provide shelter for 100,000 refugees and are preparing for an initial influx of 300,000." But Pakistan's President, General Pervez Musharraf, threw these plans into confusion yesterday when he called for any new refugee camps to be established not in Pakistan but over the border in Afghanistan. Mr Hassan commented: "There are no plans to establish camps on the Afghanistan side at present."
Food package drops
The US has dropped around 37,000 individually-wrapped food packages into some of the most impoverished and remote parts of Afghanistan. The areas included the central highlands, where the Hazara ethnic group live in inaccessible valleys.
The packages, which bear the words "Food gift from the people of the United States of America", were dropped from two C-17 cargo planes. Packed in crates designed to break open on hitting the ground, each package has its own paper wing attached to help it survive the high-altitude drop.
Described as "humanitarian daily rations", each pack contains 2,300 calories. Officials admit the drops are as important for their psychological value as their nutritional effect, because the packages often get into the wrong hands.
Each package contains:
* Beans and lentils in tomato sauce;
* Peanut butter;
* Strawberry jam;
* Fruit bar;
* Beans and tomato vinaigrette;
* Biscuit, shortbread and fruit pastry;
* Utensil package of salt, pepper, napkin and a match.
Andrew Buncombe