U N I T E D   N A T I O N S
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
Integrated Regional Information Network for Central Asia

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e-mail: irin@irin.org.pk


Central Asia
IRIN-CA Weekly Round-up 30
26 October - 02 November 2001


CONTENTS:

AFGHANISTAN: Brahimi evaluates peace prospects
AFGHANISTAN: Focus on food assistance strategy
AFGHANISTAN: Focus on Afghan migration crisis
AFGHANISTAN-PAKISTAN: Interview with Refugees International
AFGHANISTAN: Interview with Ockenden International
AFGHANISTAN: Interview with Swedish Committee for Afghanistan
AFGHANISTAN: Aid workers await their fate
CENTRAL ASIA: Focus on regional refugee concerns
KYRGYZSTAN: Inflow of aid unequally distributed
IRAN: UN refugee head in Tehran to discuss Afghan crisis
IRAN: Tehran sets ceiling on border refugee camp
IRAN: MSF raises concerns over camps inside Afghanistan
PAKISTAN: Afghan refugees health deteriorating
PAKISTAN: Refugee flow continues
PAKISTAN: Government may accept "vulnerable" Afghan refugees
PAKISTAN: Hospital receives Afghan casualties
TAJIKISTAN: Focus on new routes for relief to Afghans
TAJIKISTAN: Views on a new Afghan government

AFGHANISTAN: Brahimi evaluates peace prospects

The UN Secretary-General's special envoy to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi,
has been tasked to find out how Afghans could, once and for all, bring
peace and stability to their war-torn country. Since his arrival in
Pakistan on Sunday, Brahimi has been in a listening mode. Speaking on
behalf of the special envoy, the director of the UN Information Centre in
Pakistan, Eric Falt, explained that it was still early days. "One of the
key aspects at present is that we don't see a formula emerging yet where
those who are holding the gun will stop holding the rest of the country
hostage," said Falt, relaying a quote from Brahimi on Tuesday.

AFGHANISTAN: Focus on food assistance strategy

In the last two weeks, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and partner NGOs
operating inside Afghanistan have agreed on a new wheat delivery system to
ensure that food reaches isolated Afghan communities before winter. The
new system sees commercial trucks from neighbouring countries bypass
logistics hubs in urban centres and travel directly to affected districts,
where NGOs will ensure onward distribution. Aid workers welcomed the
strategy shift, but added that it had contributed to ruptures in the
supply chain at a crucial time. WFP expects to commence conventional
airdrops in December.

AFGHANISTAN: Focus on Afghan migration crisis

The visit to Pakistan this week by United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR) Ruud Lubbers could lead to a more lenient refugee policy
being adopted by Pakistan. However, some aid officials maintain that the
opening of borders will make no difference to many Afghans too destitute
to leave. Rafael Robillard, the International Organisation for Migration's
(IOM) manager for Afghanistan, told IRIN that even if 1.5 million people
did cross, there would still be four million vulnerable people left
stranded inside. "Many Afghans cannot move even if they wanted to. They
don't have the means to pay the US $5 for travel, they don't even have
food in their stomachs to walk the 200 km to the borders," Robillard said,
explaining that the migration crisis was multi-layered.

AFGHANISTAN-PAKISTAN: Interview with Refugees International

Returning from the Afghan border near Quetta, Joel Charny, the Refugees
International vice-president for policy, told IRIN on Saturday that the
predicted influx of 1.5 million people into Pakistan had not so far
materialised. It was thought that Pakistan's decision to keep the borders
closed had discouraged potential asylum seekers. Charny said the aid
agencies needed to evaluate whether they could do more to assist Afghans
in the more secure northeast and northwest of the country.

AFGHANISTAN: Interview with Ockenden International

With unconfirmed reports of population movements in western Afghanistan,
there is concern over the situation of new population movements on the
part of those who have already been displaced due to the ongoing severe
drought. Ockenden International, a British NGO, which has been
concentrating its relief efforts in the western region since 1995,
reported that 10 percent of the population had left the Maslaq camp in the
western province of Herat, which houses 200,000 Internally Displaced
Persons (IDPs). The Afghans are said to have fled the camp in fear of the
US-led air strikes.

AFGHANISTAN: Interview with Swedish Committee for Afghanistan

With about 8,000 staff operating inside the country, the Swedish Committee
for Afghanistan (SCA) is one of the largest NGOs active there. Established
more than 20 years ago, SCA works solely for Afghanistan, and has three
main offices respectively in the northern region, the capital, Kabul, and
in the central province of Ghazni. Initially concentrating on emergency
response, SCA has been focusing on long-term development. Despite recent
difficulties following the withdrawal of international aid workers, SCA's
regional director for the northern region, Douglas Higgins, told IRIN that
they were managing to continue operations at almost 100 percent.

AFGHANISTAN: Aid workers await their fate

The eight aid workers on trial in Kabul on charges of preaching
Christianity are still awaiting their fate. "I was hoping for a judgment
from the Supreme Court last week, but we just don't know how long it will
take now," a lawyer for the aid workers, Atif Ali Khan, told IRIN on
Tuesday.

KYRGYZSTAN: Inflow of aid unequally distributed

A traditional beneficiary of international help, Kyrgyzstan is receiving
an increasing amount of aid as donors come to realise the importance of
stability throughout the region. On Tuesday, Kyrgyzstan received a US $5
million humanitarian aid package provided by the US-based group CitiHope
International Inc in cooperation with the US Department of State. This
programme, called Operation Provide Hope, delivers free medical equipment
and drugs for state hospitals, most of them in the capital, Bishkek.

"This is the typical mistake Western donors fail to see: almost 70 percent
of humanitarian aid is distributed in the north of the country, whereas
most problems lie in the south," Avazbek Atakhanov, an independent
specialist on Central Asia, told IRIN on Wednesday. Whereas the north of
Kyrgyzstan is relatively urban, secular and developed, the south remains
rural, religious and economically underdeveloped, as well as threatened by
ethnic tension between the Uzbek and Kyrgyz communities. On average,
revenues and salaries are three to 10 times lower than in the north.

IRAN: UN refugee head in Tehran to discuss Afghan crisis

With no imminent end in sight to the war in Afghanistan, United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees Ruud Lubbers arrived in Tehran on Tuesday
for talks with senior government officials and aid workers on the
unfolding humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. He urged the Iranian
government to open its borders in the event of a possible influx. Lubbers
is in the region to highlight the plight of thousands of new Afghan
refugees, as well as the state of preparedness on the ground in
neighbouring countries for coping with them. Earlier, UNHCR announced a
contingency plan to manage a worst-case scenario under which up to 400,000
asylum-seekers might attempt to cross into Iran to escape the effects of
the US-led strikes on Afghanistan, which started on 7 October.

IRAN: Tehran sets ceiling on border refugee camp

Iranian officials confirmed to IRIN on Wednesday that the government had
placed a ceiling on the number of Afghan refugees it would allow at the
Mahkaki refugee camp, two kilometres inside Afghanistan. The move comes
just days after the UNHCR announced that the number of new arrivals there
had reached 7,800.

IRAN: MSF raises concerns over camps inside Afghanistan

Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in Iran on Monday expressed concern over
plans by Tehran to establish a set of nine refugee camps inside Afghan
territory along its border in the event of a major influx into the area.
The NGO maintained that security and logistical viability were crucial for
such a plan to work. "It's a question of what the real situation is,"
Bruno Jochum, MSF's head of mission in Tehran, told IRIN. "In principle,
we don't have a position against camps inside Afghanistan, but under
present circumstances, with nobody able to work on the Taliban side, such
camps become impossible," he said.

PAKISTAN: Afghan refugees health deteriorating

The health of refugees at a temporary staging camp in southwestern
Pakistan and at a camp on Afghanistan's southern border is rapidly
deteriorating, with reports of the presence there of severely sick and
malnourished people, the UNHCR said on Wednesday. "Conditions at these
camps are not satisfactory," the UNHCR spokesman in the Pakistani capital,
Islamabad, Peter Kessler, told IRIN. He said more people were arriving by
the day at the Killi Faizo staging camp, and that UNHCR was doing its best
to cater for them by trying to improve sanitation.

PAKISTAN: Refugee flow continues

About 200 Afghans crossed into southwestern Pakistan in the first few
hours of Tuesday morning, Peter Kessler, the UNHCR spokesman in the
Pakistani capital, Islamabad, told IRIN. "There is a continuous flow of
refugees," he said, adding that families had been taken to what is known
as the "staging site" or temporary site of Killi Faizo, adjacent to the
border crossing at Chaman, where some 1,300 people are already waiting.
"We would like to move these people to the camps as soon as possible," he
added. A UNHCR spokesman on Monday told reporters that plans were being
made to start using some 15 camps in Pakistan, now being developed to
accommodate 150,000 people to cope with the influx of Afghan refugees
fleeing the US-led air strikes.

PAKISTAN: Government may accept "vulnerable" Afghan refugees

The Pakistani government has in principle agreed to accept more
"vulnerable" Afghan refugees as a result of the meeting between UN High
Commissioner for Refugees Ruud Lubbers and Pakistan's President General
Pervez Musharraf on Tuesday, a UNHCR official told IRIN on Wednesday.
UNHCR has announced it was ready to receive 150,000 refugees, and was
making arrangements to receive double that number. About 80,000 Afghans
have crossed over unofficially since 11 September. UNHCR is developing
refugee camps in southwestern and northwestern Pakistan, of which 15 sites
are due to become operational soon.

PAKISTAN: Hospital receives Afghan casualties

Nearly 200 Afghans wounded during US-led air strikes have been brought to
a hospital in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP), hospital
officials told IRIN on Wednesday. "We will need much more assistance if
the number of casualties from Afghanistan continues to increase," the
secretary for health emergency coordination at Hayatabad Medical College
in the NWFP, Dr Jamil Bangash, said. He added that resources at the
hospital, located 60 km from the border with Afghanistan, were stretched
due to the large number of Afghan refugees already admitted. The injuries
were mainly caused by shrapnel, and there were some who had been hit by
walls from collapsing buildings, Bangash said.

TAJIKISTAN: Focus on new routes for relief to Afghans

The opening of two new routes for food aid into northern Afghanistan
through Tajikistan and Uzbekistan was agreed following a visit by a senior
UN official to the Central Asian republics. The new crossing points into
Afghanistan were negotiated by UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Kenzo
Oshima, who has just ended a week-long tour of Central Asia, in an effort
to shore-up Central Asian cooperation in the task of feeding an estimated
half a million people displaced in northern Afghanistan, and another
100,000 in the non-Taliban controlled northeastern region. Although the
two crossing points negotiated by the UN were hailed as a breakthrough,
some aid workers remained skeptical, claiming that it would now be "a bit
easier" to ship food in.

TAJIKISTAN: Views on a new Afghan government

With the recent arrival of the UN special envoy for Afghanistan, Lakhdar
Brahimi, in Pakistan in search of views on the formation of a new
government in Afghanistan, a senior Tajik official said he would favour a
broad-based authority, representing all ethnic backgrounds. Abdunabi
Sattorzoda, Tajikistan's deputy foreign minister, told IRIN that the
future government in Afghanistan had to represent those legitimate
political forces which had fought to keep Afghanistan a single nation. "It
is only the Northern Alliance which expresses the interests of the Afghan
people, because almost all ethnic groups living in Afghanistan are
represented in this anti-Taliban coalition," he said.

CENTRAL ASIA: Focus on regional refugee concerns

Given the crisis in Afghanistan, refugees are becoming a high-profile
issue in Central Asia. The five Central Asian states - Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan - only began to
encounter the issue of refugees 10 years ago after gaining independence
from the former Soviet Union. Since then, internal and regional conflicts
have propelled tens of thousands of refugees across the region, initiating
a debate on the sociopolitical and legal aspects of the problem. The
situation in the region has changed dramatically in the past three years,
when refugees were once looked upon as victims and welcomed. Now they are
taken to be potential drug-dealers, terrorists or religious extremists,
according to human rights activists in the region.


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