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

Tel: +92-51-2211451 Ext 484
Fax: +92-51-2211 450
e-mail: irin@irin.org.pk


Central Asia
IRIN-CA Weekly Round-up 61
01 - 06 June 2002


CONTENTS:

AFGHANISTAN: Funding shortfall ahead of Loya Jirga
AFGHANISTAN: Poppy growing continues despite ban
AFGHANISTAN: Interview with governor of Zabol Province
AFGHANISTAN: Women rejoin police force
TURKMENISTAN: Focus on press freedom
TURKMENISTAN: Contraceptive use increasing
TAJIKISTAN: Interview with UN Resident Coordinator Matthew Kahane
KYRGYZSTAN: First return of Afghans from non-bordering country
KYRGYZSTAN: Poverty and migration in the Fergana Valley
PAKISTAN: Vulnerable cities prepare for conflict
PAKISTAN: Afghan repatriation approaches one million
PAKISTAN: Focus on violence against children
KAZAKHSTAN: Focus on the health impact of Soviet nuclear testing
IRAN: Repatriation from southern exit point suspended


AFGHANISTAN: Funding shortfall ahead of Loya Jirga

Donors could be hanging onto their money until the outcome of next week's
Loya Jirga (Grand Council) meeting in Kabul, an International Organisation
for Migration (IOM) official said on Tuesday, as aid agencies began to
trim their Afghanistan programmes because of funding shortfalls. United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spokesperson Melita Sunjic
told IRIN on Tuesday that the agency, which has been faciliting a rapid
return of refugees to Afghanistan, would run out of money at the end of
June. "We will be broke by the end of June, which means we cannot pay
staff or give assistance to refugees," she said. The World Food Programme
(WFP) announced on Sunday that its precarious food pipeline had resulted
in the suspension of several of its implementing partners' projects and
the suspension of some food-for-work projects.

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=28122&SelectRegion=Central_Asia&SelectCountry=AFGHANISTAN

AFGHANISTAN: Poppy growing continues despite ban

You need not go far from the southern city of Kandahar, the former
spiritual stronghold of the Taliban, to find poppy fields. A 20-minute
drive away, farmer Mahbub is busy harvesting his crop, despite the Interim
Authority's ban in January this year on poppy cultivation. Sap from the
poppies is turned into opium - a class-A drug sold for millions of US
dollars around the world.  "There is no way I will stop growing poppies
unless you can offer me an alternative crop which will give me the same
amount of money," Mahbub told IRIN, squeezing the juice from a poppy head,
which is then refined into the lethal drug. Last year he had been unable
to cultivate poppies due to a ban imposed by the Taliban ban. In 2000,
however, he had managed to harvest 13 kg, which, at US $416 each, had
fetched him $5,400. "I sell my crop to local dealers in the local bazaar,
who then sell it on to dealers in Herat [western Afghanistan]."

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=28086&SelectRegion=Central_Asia&SelectCountry=AFGHANISTAN

AFGHANISTAN: Interview with Hamidullah Tokhi, governor of Zabol Province

Zabol in southern Afghanistan is one of the poorest provinces in the
country. With a population of more than a million, it is often neglected.
In an interview with IRIN, in the southern city of Kandahar, Hamidullah
Tokhi, the governor of Zabol Province, said he felt one of his greatest
challenges was to ensure that salaries of Afghans were paid soon, before
they lost faith in the Interim Administration. With regard to security in
the province, Tokhi said it was "generally safe". However, he requested
the presence of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=28116&SelectRegion=Central_Asia&SelectCountry=AFGHANISTAN

AFGHANISTAN: Women rejoin police force

Armed with a pistol, Malalai sits behind her desk at police headquarters
in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. She is a rare sight in this
deeply Islamic country, where just a few months ago the hardline Taliban
reigned supreme. She was the first woman to join the police force in the
city after six years of exclusion imposed by the oppressive rule of the
Taliban, who banned women from education and work and restricted their
movement. "I have wanted to work for the police force for as long as I can
remember," she said. Having previously joined the force some 10 years ago,
she was forced to leave when the Taliban regime came into power. Over the
past six years she has been at home working as a seamstress, but rejoined
the force two months after the fall of the Taliban.

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=28142&SelectRegion=Central_Asia&SelectCountry=AFGHANISTAN

TURKMENISTAN: Focus on press freedom

Sprouting from rooftops all over the Turkmen capital Ashgabat, thousands
of satellite dishes beam the latest news and information from around the
world. CNN, BBC, as well as a broad spectrum of Russian programming, is
freely watched by millions of Turkmen throughout the country. But critics
charge the illusion of such an open and transparent society ends there.
Closer inspection reveals a media tightly controlled in this reclusive,
but otherwise stable Central Asian state, they claim. "It is simply not
possible to speak of free press in Turkmenistan," Emma Gray, European and
Central Asian consultant of the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists
(CPJ), a non-profit, non-partisan organisation dedicated to the global
defence of press freedom, told IRIN.

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=28147&SelectRegion=Central_Asia&SelectCountry=TURKMENISTAN

TURKMENISTAN: Contraceptive use increasing

While contraception may not be openly discussed, knowledge of
contraceptive methods in Turkmenistan is widespread, according to a new
survey. "Contraception usage is increasing," national programme officer
for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Dr Eziz Khellenov told
IRIN in the Turkmen capital Ashgabat on Monday. "Over the past five years
the number of women using modern contraception measures has increased
significantly," he maintained. According to an independent survey
commissioned by the Turkmen Ministry of Health - the Turkmenistan
Demographic and Health Survey (TDHS) released in September, among married
women, knowledge of at least one method was universal (99 percent). Data
on contraceptive knowledge was collected by asking the respondent to name
ways or methods by which a couple could delay or avoid pregnancy.

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=28087&SelectRegion=Central_Asia&SelectCountry=TURKMENISTAN

TAJIKISTAN: Interview with UN Resident Coordinator Matthew Kehane

Five years after emerging from a disastrous post-independence civil war
which claimed the lives of up to 100,000 people, Tajikistan is still
considered the most vulnerable and backward of the five Central Asian
states. Last week IRIN spoke to United Nations Resident Coordinator,
Matthew Kahane and asked him if the stereotypical view of Tajikistan as a
failed state still held true and whether any significant strides toward
development had been made since the end of the war in 1997.

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=28149&SelectRegion=Central_Asia&SelectCountry=TAJIKISTAN

KYRGYZSTAN: First return of Afghans from non-bordering country

The first group of Afghan refugees left Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia for
their homeland on Monday. The Bishkek Office of the UN High Commissioner
for Refugees (UNHCR) told IRIN on Tuesday that this was the first
organised repatriation of Afghans from a country that does not share a
border with Afghanistan. Many among the group of returnees are prominent
people in their communities. For example, one has been assigned
responsibility for transportation matters in his home region, while
another has been selected to take part in the Loya Jirga (Grand Council).

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=28118&SelectRegion=Central_Asia&SelectCountry=KYRGYZSTAN

KYRGYZSTAN: Poverty and migration in the Fergana Valley

On the side of a small hill overlooking the town of Osh in the Fergana
valley, stands a small tomb-like structure said to have been built five
centuries ago by a son of the valley named Babur. From the front of the
otherwise unimposing building the vista stretches down across vermilion
fields before rising to the Alai mountain range to the south. History does
not record whether Babur planned his route of conquest - that was to
culminate in the establishment of Mogul empire - from this very spot, but
it is easy to imagine how the young man was tempted to look away and out
of the topographical confines of the valley for the realisation of his
military and political goals.

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=28174&SelectRegion=Central_Asia

PAKISTAN: Vulnerable cities prepare for conflict

While several nations of the world clash on the green fields of Japan and
South Korea for supremacy in soccer, the small dusty Pakistani border city
of Sialkot, famous for manufacturing footballs, is getting quietly
prepared for a more deadly confrontation if war breaks out between
arch-rivals India and Pakistan. The two countries have had three wars
since 1947 after gaining independence from Britain. Their present
hostilities and presence of hundreds of thousands of troops ready for
battle have once again raised the spectre of war though the international
community is working hard to avert it.

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=28172&SelectRegion=Central_Asia&SelectCountry=PAKISTAN

PAKISTAN: Afghan repatriation approaches one million

The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
said that the number of Afghan refugees who had voluntarily returned to
Afghanistan from Pakistan had officially surpassed 800,000. "There had
been speculation that the increasing heat and upcoming Loya Jirga [Grand
Council] might slow [down] the return process," a UNHCR spokeswoman,
Melita Sunjic, told IRIN on Tuesday in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.
"However, Afghan refugees seem determined to return to their homeland,"
she said. According to agency figures, as of Sunday, 802,000 returnees had
made the journey back since the joint programme between the refugee agency
and the Pakistani government was launched on 1 March.

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=28114&SelectRegion=Central_Asia&SelectCountry=PAKISTAN

PAKISTAN: Focus on violence against children

When Islamabad social worker Ayesha Muzaffar is out raising awareness in
schoolsabout child sexual abuse, she has to make sure she does not refer
to male and female body parts by name - considered highly offensive in
this deeply Islamic country. Instead she has to come up with descriptions
that allow her to communicate to children without violating such strict
social norms. Talking openly about sex is strictly taboo in Pakistan. It
is even more unacceptable to openly discuss the sexual abuse of children.
"Many people say to us what are you talking about?" Muzaffar, a
psychologist and Office Coordinator at Aangan, an Islamabad-based NGO,
working on child sexual abuse, told IRIN. It is hard to convince schools
to let them work with children and often permission is denied on the
grounds of "What would the parents say?"

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=28115&SelectRegion=Central_Asia&SelectCountry=PAKISTAN

KAZAKHSTAN: Focus on the health impact of Soviet nuclear testing

Sometime in the late summer of 1982 a newly qualified doctor named Maira
Bugembayeva drove the final hundred kilometres toward her new home in the
town of Semipalatinsk in northern Kazakhstan. As the car lurched along the
uneven road, Maira glanced out of the window across the flat and
featureless steppes which stretch into the distance as far as the eye can
see. Nothing seemed untoward. And neither should it have, since neither
Maira nor the vast majority of her fellow Kazakhs knew anything of the
Polygon, the Semipalatinsk Test Site or the secret town of Kurchatov. She
had no idea that within fifty kilometers of her new home was centred one
of the greatest concentrations of scientific brilliance anywhere within
the vast Soviet empire.

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=28119&SelectRegion=Central_Asia&SelectCountry=KAZAKHSTAN

IRAN: Repatriation from southern exit point suspended

As its massive effort to help hundreds of thousands of Afghans to go home
from Iran voluntarily this year continues, the office of United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has temporarily suspended its use
of the southern Milak border crossing, citing security concerns.  "The
outbreak of more clashes in the Zaranj area, just across the border with
Iran, on 31 May has again disrupted voluntary repatriation operations at
the southern crossing of Milak," a UNHCR spokeswoman, Laura O'Mahony, told
IRIN from the Iranian capital, Tehran, on Tuesday. "All returns through
Milak have been postponed until further notice," she said.

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=28113&SelectRegion=Central_Asia&SelectCountry=IRAN


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