Afghan Camps Receive Aid, but Shortages Loom

Afghan Camps Receive Aid, but Shortages Loom

By ROD NORDLAND 44 minutes ago

KABUL — Emergency cold weather supplies were distributed to families in a refugee camp on Sunday where two days earlier a 3-year-old died of exposure to the cold.

Cold Afghan Camps Receive Some Aid, but Shortages Loom

Vikram Singh for The New York Times

Rahima, center, a 24-year-old war widow from Helmand Province, with her children in the Nasaji Bagrami camp in Kabul.

By ROD NORDLAND

Published: December 30, 2012

KABUL, Afghanistan — The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on Sunday distributed emergency cold weather supplies to families in a refugee camp where two days earlier a 3-year-old child died of exposure to the cold.

Immediately, however, camp leaders and Afghan government officials criticized the aid delivery as inadequate to protect camp residents from continued cold weather conditions and to prevent further deaths of children from the cold.

Last winter more than 100 children died of the cold in refugee camps around Kabul, with 26 of the deaths in the Charahi Qambar camp in Kabul alone. That is also where the child died Friday, the first confirmed cold death this winter.

The distribution at the camp in western Kabul city, which has about 900 families, had previously been scheduled and was not prompted by news reports about the child’s death, according to Mohammad Nader Farhad, a spokesman for the U.N.H.C.R. in Kabul.

On less than an hour’s notice, the agency convened a news conference with Afghan government officials at the camp to announce the distribution.

Each family was given warm children’s clothing, blankets, tarps, cooking utensils and soap. Separately, other aid groups, financed by the United Nations and other donors, will be distributing charcoal once every month through February.

United Nations officials acknowledged, however, that the fuel distributions in themselves were not enough to heat the mud and tarp huts throughout the cold season, and there are no plans to distribute food to the families. In most cases the men, who are largely war-displaced refugees, are unable to find casual day labor work in the cold weather, so they are usually unable to buy food.

“We are happy to receive this,” said Tawoos Khan, one of the camp representatives. “But we want food and we need more fuel, we have all run out of firewood and charcoal.” He and other camp officials said large sacks of charcoal were distributed to every family more than two weeks ago, but supplies had run out.

“It’s supplementary,” said Douglas DiSalvo, a U.N.H.C.R. protection officer who was at the Charahi Qambar camp. “People have some level of support they can achieve for themselves.”

Mr. Farhad said: “The assistance we are providing, at least it is mitigating the harsh winter these families are experiencing right now.”

The estimated 35,000 people in 50 camps in and around Kabul city are not classified as refugees from an international legal point of view, but as “internally displaced persons.” Since the U.N.H.C.R.’s mandate is primarily to help refugees, defined as those who flee across international borders, in the past it has not provided support to these camps. That changed late last winter when the Afghan government asked it to do so in response to the emergency conditions that were taking so many lives.

This year, the agency is spearheading the effort to supply the camps, along with the Afghan government’s Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation, other United Nations agencies, and several aid groups, in order to prevent a recurrence of last winter’s crisis.

Ministry officials, however, were vocally critical of the effort on Sunday — even though they were joint sponsors of the distribution. “We have never claimed that we provided the internally displaced Afghans with sufficient food items, clothing or means of heat. We admit this, what the internally displaced people have received so far is not adequate at all,” said Islamuddin Jurat, a spokesman for the Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation.

“Before the arrival of harsh winter, we asked the international community and donor countries to help the internally displaced people, and luckily today U.N.H.C.R. provided them with some humanitarian assistance, but again we believe it’s not sufficient at all,” he added.

In the past, both aid officials and Afghan government officials have said they were wary about providing too much aid to the Kabul camps, for fear that it would turn the camps into magnets and encourage more people to leave their homes elsewhere in the country. That fear has also been why the Afghan government has refused to allow permanent buildings to be built in the camps, many of which are five or more years old.

“The illegal nature of these squatter settlements poses an obstacle to more lasting interventions and improvements,” Mr. Farhad said. “Coordination this year has been very strong, and we expect that the multiagency effort will help us to detect and respond to particular problem areas as the winter progresses. “

Little is provided in the way of food aid. The only food program in the Charahi Qambar camp, for instance, is a hot lunch program for 750 students run at a tented school staffed by an Afghan aid group, Aschiana.

The U.N.H.C.R. is providing the cold weather packages to 40,000 families throughout the country, 5,000 of them in the Kabul camps, at a total cost of $6 million. Other Kabul camps will receive distributions in the next two days, Mr. Farhad said.

The packages, which cost about $150 each, include two tarpaulins, three blankets, six bars of soap, a cooking utensils set, and 26 clothing items ranging from jackets and sweaters to socks and hats, mostly for children.

Taj Mohammad, the father of the child who died, Janan, said Sunday that he believed his son might have survived if the cold weather kit had arrived earlier. But like many of the refugees, he was critical of its contents, which he said were hard to sell in exchange for food.

“I didn’t know a package costs $150,” he said. “It’s a lot of money. It would have been much better if they had given us the money, and we would have spent it on what we need the most.” 

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