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 �
KABUL, Afghanistan ? The following children froze to death in Kabul over the past three weeks after their families had fled war zones in Afghanistan for refugee camps here:
� Mirwais, son of Hayatullah Haideri. He was 1 � 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 in the south. Some people have been in the camps for as long as seven years; others arrived in the past year.
?There are 35,000 people in those camps in the middle of Kabul, with no heat or electricity in the middle of winter; that?s a humanitarian crisis,? said Michael Keating, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Afghanistan. ?I just don?t think the humanitarian story is sufficiently understood here. You?ve got a lot of people who really are in dire straits.?
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?s camps, however, international humanitarian policy subjects them to a pitiless Catch-22.
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 Solidarit�s 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, which already has the world?s third highest infant mortality rate. That means that one out of every seven children in the Kabul camps will not survive until his or her sixth birthday.
All of the 22 children known to have died were under 5.
Normally, Kabul?s winters are mild for a city in a mountainous country, but not this year. It was the coldest January in 20 years, according to Mohammad Aslam Fazaz, deputy director of the national disaster office. Most nights, temperatures have been dropping below 20 degrees. ?There is no clear strategy to help these people,? said Mohammad Yousef, the director general of Aschiana, a well-respected Afghan aid group that provides education and other services in 13 of the camps. ?They don?t have access to anything ? health, education, food, sanitation, water. They don?t even have an opportunity for survival.?
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 only to vulnerable groups like widows and the disabled.
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e155e01e4f7899e4bac43c1abe7c7bc9
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