PRESS BRIEFING BY THE U.N. OFFICES FOR PAKISTAN AND AFGHANISTAN (29 September 2001)

The following is a near-verbatim transcript of today's briefing in Islamabad by the United Nations offices for Pakistan and Afghanistan --excluding the Question and Answer session.

**Eric Falt, Director, UN Information Centre

Good afternoon and thank you for coming. There will be no briefing tomorrow, but I can confirm that the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Mr Kenzo Oshima, will be speaking here on Monday at 5:30 pm.

Mr. Oshima will arrive in Islamabad in just a few hours. He will have a series of meetings with UN officials working in the region on Sunday and Monday, and that will include the newly-appointed Regional Humanitarian Coordinator, Mike Sackett, and the Personal Representative of the Secretary-General, Mr. Francesc Vendrell. On Monday, Mr. Oshima will also meet with Government officials. On Tuesday, he will fly to Quetta and then on to Mashad, Iran. He is scheduled to be in Tehran on Tuesday.

**Stephanie Bunker, Spokesperson for the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Afghanistan

Before now, aid agencies in Afghanistan were struggling with one of the direst humanitarian situations in the world. The current situation, with lack of national staff and reduced activities, has exacerbated this crisis. I refer you to the case of Hazarajat.

Some Hazaras are returning from Kabul and Ghazni to their home areas in the central, impoverished region of Hazarajat. Some of these are people who were displaced in 2001 from Bamyan and Yakaolang, who have decided that Hazarajat is now more secure than Kabul. Of these, 1,500 families have just arrived in Behsud District, Wardak Province, from Kabul. These are twice displaced people, those who fled their homes for Kabul or Ghazni earlier in the year. Now, back in Hazarajat, they do not feel safe enough to go back to their original homes. They have joined the concentration of Bamyan IDPs already in Behsud, estimated at 3,000 families. All are in mountainous regions that are cold and already experiencing frost at night. Some of those displaced are almost entirely without any assets at all and are totally destitute.

The acutely vulnerable IDPs and drought victims have no access to assistance and the crisis is set to worsen rapidly, unless more aid can be provided in the area. There are urgent needs for temporary shelter, food and medical supplies for IDPs and food for the drought victims.

In Afghanistan's mountainous central region, Hazarajat is home to as many as 2,000,000 people. This remote and inaccessible area is comprised of all of Bamyan Province and parts of Urozgan, Ghor, Sar-i-Pul, Balkh, and Samangan provinces. Along with Badakhshan, it is one of the two poorest areas in a desperately poor country. For the past four years, the area has been badly affected by both drought and war. These have lead to large-scale emigration—within and outside Afghanistan--and to internal displacement of local populations within Hazarajat. This situation has also given rise to further impoverishment of those who remained in their home villages.

Hazarajat is divided into different areas of political control, and relief activities have been extraordinarily difficult to carry out. There are still areas of the region that have received little or no assistance. The nutritional crisis of Hazarajat is severe. There are areas where famine is already present, with starvation deaths in Yakawlang, Balkhab, and parts of Samangan and Balkh. So far this year, the aid community has been able to distribute 11,000 MT of wheat to some 50,000 households, but has by no means been able to meet the enormous needs. Unless more assistance can go in soon, the number of starvation deaths is likely to rise.

As of the end of August there were some 75,000 people internally displaced in Hazarajat or who had left the area. The reason for such low levels of displacement or emigration from this region is that most people simply do not have the means to leave.

The second item of news value I have for you today is that various reports indicate that the UNOCHA/UNDP Office in Mazar-i-Sharif has been looted. Due to the lack of any communication with Mazar-i-Sharif, we cannot assess the scale of the damage. There are indications that other aid agency offices might have met the same fate in the city. This report, if confirmed, is disturbing also in light of the fact that UN offices in Mazar-i-Sharif have already been looted twice in recent years. The UN and NGO community active in Mazar-i-Sharif is considering shifting its presence to Turkmenistan on a temporary basis. A UN and NGO inter-agency mission is on its way to Turkmenistan to explore such possibility.

We reported just the other day that 80,000 children die of diarrhoea every year in Afghanistan. We have just received a report from the World Health Organisation that shed some light on what is almost a daily occurrence in Afghanistan. It concerns mostly eastern Afghanistan.

In two villages of Ghazni Province, the World Health Organisation has received a report of an outbreak of acute diarrhoea. Six people have died, including four children. Swedish Committee for Afghanistan sent a team to the area to investigate the situation, with medical supplies from WHO. The outbreak is now under control. Another outbreak occurred in Arzo in Ghazni, where three children died. The Norwegian Afghanistan Committee went to the area, carrying medical supplies from the World Health Organisation. Another outbreak occurred in Kanadahari in Ghazni, which affected a lot of people and killed one girl. The World Health Organisation and the Ministry of Public Health took in medical supplies, organised health education on preventing diarrhoea for the community, and chlorinated the water sources used by the community.

**Peter Kessler, Spokesperson for UNHCR

UNHCR's chartered IL-76 cargo aircraft flew into Quetta this afternoon with some 9,000 plastic tarpaulins from our emergency stockpile in Copenhagen. After unloading, the giant cargo plane will depart tonight and will return on Monday with a flight into Peshawar carrying plastic tarpaulin, blankets and jerry-cans.

In addition to today's delivery of plastic tarpaulins, UNHCR already has 2,000 tents, 6,000 blankets and 2,000 kitchen sets in our Quetta stockpile, with a much larger stockpile of goods already in Peshawar. The UN/Government of Pakistan and NGO survey teams are still in the field, and we expect to have more clear reports on possible temporary settlement sites on Monday.

Already one fact is becoming apparent: providing sufficient water supplies will be a major problem in the event of a large-scale influx into this country. Baluchistan and much of North West Frontier Province is frankly parched, with barely enough water for the exisiting national population and long-time refugees. A new influx will pose very real problems in the water sector.

**Khaled Mansour, Spokesperson for WFP

A couple of hours ago, the World Food Programme sent food shipments into Afghanistan. This is the first time aid supplies cross the border into this country since the current crisis started on 11 September. Deteriorating security conditions and lack of commercial transport had forced WFP to halt food shipments to Afghanistan since then.

In total, 400 tonnes of food will be trucked this weekend from WFP's warehouses in Pakistan across the borders to help us continue our vital operations inside the country.

The first convoy, carrying more than 200 tonnes, left Peshawar today for Kabul and two other shipments are scheduled to truck 100 tonnes of food each to Kabul and Herat. The food should arrive in the two cities in a few days.

We are resuming food deliveries into Afghanistan on a trial basis but once we ensure that food aid is reaching the most needy people inside Afghanistan and local trucks continue to be available to move it from our warehouses inside the country to the rural areas, we will move more food into Afghanistan.

We have been lucky so far that this has not turned into a major refugee crisis. In contrast, the situation inside Afghanistan is extremely critical and could end with a humanitarian tragedy.

Even before the current developments, many Afghans have resorted to eating grass and locusts to survive and pre-famine conditions were observed in various parts of the country.

In additions to the convoy that left today and those leaving from Quetta shortly, trucks carrying WFP food are ready to move into Afghanistan from Iran, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan to replenish food aid stocks in the northern provinces within the coming few days.

Our local staff as well as aid workers from various NGOs are working under very adverse conditions to help avoid starvation in Afghanistan. Existing restrictions on communications make effective coordination extremely difficult.

But despite all this WFP has continued to feed up to a million people. Our main concern is still to ensure to access vulnerable people in Afghanistan.

WFP also continues to prepare for those Afghans who may cross the borders into the neighbouring countries. WFP started airlifting emergency food rations into countries neighboring Afghanistan on Friday. About 265 tons of high energy

biscuits will be pre-positioned in Pakistan, Iran and Turkmenistan before Monday to help feed the expected influx of refugees into these countries for the first few days when no cooking facilities are available.

The main reason we stopped food shipments is that we had reasonably good stocks inside the countries at the time (more than 15,000 tons) and that it became extremely difficult if not impossible to move food from the warehouses to the rural areas. All local trucks were either busy moving people out of the cities or taken out of the market. Now that we need to replenish our stocks and that local trucks became more available we are back.

Also since 11 September none of WFP food inside the country has been looted or taken. There was one incident in Kandahar that was cleared up and our local staff there are in control of the warehouse.

I should stress that this is happening on a trial basis with a few hundred tons and if we can ensure to a reasonable extent under the circumstances that the food will get to the people who need it, we will continue it.