[The United
Nations and major relief groups last Saturday started what is called the
Consolidated Humanitarian Appeal, asking donor groups and governments for $452
million in aid for the coming year, a 22 percent decrease from last year’s
appeal of $582 million.]
By Rod Nordland
 |
Andrea Bruce for The New York Times
Children gathered around a fire last week in the Nasaji Bagrami
refugee camp in Kabul, where 14 Afghan infants have frozen to
death in the past month. More Photos »
|
Mirwais, son of
Hayatullah Haideri. He was 1 ½ years old and had just started to learn how to
walk, holding unsteadily to the poles of the family tent before flopping onto the
frozen razorbacks of the muddy floor.
Abdul Hadi, son of
Abdul Ghani. He was not even a year old and was already trying to stand,
although his father said that during those last few days he seemed more shaky
than normal.
Naghma and Nazia,
the twin daughters of Musa Jan. They were only 3 months old and just starting
to roll over.
Ismail, the son of
Juma Gul. “He was never warm in his entire life,” Mr. Gul said. “Not once.”
It was a short
life, 30 days long.
These children are among at least 22 who have died in the
past month, a time of unseasonably fierce cold and snowstorms. The latest two
victims died on Thursday.
The deaths, which government officials have sought to
suppress or play down, have prompted some soul-searching among aid workers
here.
After 10 years of a large international presence,
comprising about 2,000 aid groups, at least $3.5 billion of humanitarian aid
and $58 billion of development assistance, how could children be dying of
something as predictable — and manageable — as the cold?
“The fact that every year there’s winter shouldn’t come as
a surprise,” said Federico Motka, whose German aid group, Welthungerhilfe,
is one of the few at work in these camps, which aid workers call the Kabul
informal settlements — since describing what they actually are, camps for
displaced persons or war refugees, is politically sensitive. The Afghan
government insists that the residents should and could return to their original
homes; the residents say it is too dangerous for them to do so.
The deaths occurred at two of the largest camps, Charahi
Qambar (8 cold-related deaths), and Nasaji Bagrami (14 such deaths). Both camps
are populated largely with refugees who fled the fighting in areas like Helmand Province
“There are 35,000 people in those camps in the middle of Kabul Afghanistan
The United Nations and major relief groups last Saturday
started what is called the Consolidated Humanitarian Appeal, asking donor
groups and governments for $452 million in aid for the coming year, a 22
percent decrease from last year’s appeal of $582 million.
Far larger funds are separately available for development
aid — nonemergency assistance to do things like build schools and
infrastructure.
For many of the displaced people in Kabul
The camps do not qualify for development aid because they
are viewed as temporary facilities — and many Afghan officials oppose their
presence. On a practical level, pouring aid into the camps would encourage
people to stay in them, and perhaps draw more people there as well.
On the other hand, because the camps have been in a state
of “chronic emergency,” most aid donors view that as, by definition, no longer
a humanitarian crisis. “People seem to think you can’t call it an emergency if
it’s going on for 10 years,” said Julie Bara of Solidarités
International, a French group that has had a limited program of
emergency food aid and
sanitation in the camps, “but in fact it is.”
Her organization surveyed mortality rates in the camps in
recent months. Among children under 5, Ms. Bara said, the camps’ death rate is
144 per 1,000 children, stunningly high even for Afghanistan Kabul
All of the 22 children known to have died were under 5.
Normally, Kabul
Aschiana provides four teachers to the Charahi Qambar camp,
where they are the only regular humanitarian presence. Residents say there used
to be food distributions by the World Food
Program in the camp,
but that stopped last year. A food program spokeswoman, Silke Buhr, said the
agency currently provided food deliveries in Kabul
In the worst-hit camps, even if the men can find work as day laborers or street peddlers, the pay is so
scant that they have to choose between buying food or fuel, usually firewood.
“You won’t die of hunger, but you will die of cold,” as one father put it.
When it comes to children, however, that is not strictly
true. Poorly fed children are much more likely to succumb to hypothermia and
disease.
Last month, Kabul
The combination of damp and cold proved deadly.
Mirwais’s father, Mr. Haideri, was awoken by the 5 a.m. call to prayer at the Charahi Qambar camp on Jan. 15 and
found his son stiff as a board. “His color was dark, like when a leaf is
frozen; you know it is frozen just by looking at it,” he said.
His wife and he have five surviving young children. “My
wife keeps telling me, ‘You have to do something to save our other children,
who will die in this cold,’ ” he said. “What can I do?”
That same day in the same camp, Mr. Ghani found his son
Abdul Hadi with a fever; when they called for an ambulance, the rescue workers
refused to come. “They told me it was too cold,” he said. Abdul Hadi bedded
down under a blanket with his mother, but there was no heat in their hut, and
the mud under them was wet. When his parents tried to rouse him late that
night, Mr. Ghani said, “He was frozen stiff.”
In the Nasaji Bagrami camp, where 14 deaths from cold were
reported, according to a camp representative, Mohammad Ibrahim, there were two
families that each lost two children.
Born on the same day, the identical twins Naghma and Nazia
died on the same night, Jan. 15-16.
The children who died had been tucked up under blankets,
sleeping with family members. But camp residents explained that what happens is
that very small children are often physically unable to keep blankets pulled
tightly around them, and are too young to ask for help. So if there is no fire
and they fall asleep, they die.
“Adults know how to keep warm, but the little ones do not,”
said Mualavi Musafer, a mullah at the Charahi Qambar camp. His nephew was one
of the children who died from the cold, he said.
Mohammad Ismail, a refugee from the Sangin district, one of
the worst places in Helmand Province, also lost two children, one to the first
snowstorm — his daughter Fawzia, 3 — and one to the second — his son, Janan, 5.
Now he and his wife have two surviving children, a baby and their eldest child,
7-year-old Tila.
“The whole night they cry because of the cold,” Mr. Ismail
said. “Tila misses her brother especially.” Her brother and sister are buried
without formal headstones in a patch of wasteland that has become the Nasaji
Bagrami camp cemetery. Tila knows the place. “She goes there every day to see
her brother,” her father said.
