Relief agencies seeing hunger growing

Hungry they came. Hungry they left. Whole families jealously eyed each 50-kilogram bag of wheat, hoping there would be more for them. Newly arrived refugees loudly pled to be registered for the weekly food supplies.

Young girls rushed forward whenever the bags were handed out, quickly groveling in the thick dust so they could sweep up whatever fell from the bags.

At the weekly food distribution for refugees here about 100 miles east of Mazar-e Sharif in northern Afghanistan,arranged by a French agency and based on donations from France, the European Community, the U.S. and Turkey, the talk of hunger was not new, and this is an issue that very much worries foreign relief workers.

“With winter coming on soon, the refugees need four months’ worth of food supplies and they don’t have it,” said Cyril Dupres, an official with ACTED, the French agency coordinating food and other forms of humanitarian relief in territory held by the Northern Alliance in northern Afghanistan.

But the Afghan refugees who fled Taliban-held areas are not the only ones who are hungry. Afghans who live in the high mountain areas where there has been a devastating three-year drought have barely any food. Villagers in areas cut off by the fighting by the Taliban and their foes, the Northern Alliance, have gone months without food other than what they could grow themselves.

Officials fret about reaching the hungry people in areas now under the control of the Taliban, where the militant Islamic fighters have seized control of relief offices and cut off food supplies. In some mountainous areas already covered by snow, they worry that food supplies must be stocked before it’s too late to travel there.

As for the food dropped by the United States, some refugees say many packages have been scooped by soldiers from the Northern Alliance, a point backed up by relief officials here. Still, some supplies are reaching people: Many youngsters use the yellow plastic bags that contained U.S.-supplied vegetarian Meals Ready to Eat to hold their school notebooks.

While so many are going hungry, some refugees are hoarding the food they get from the relief agencies, said Laurence Lizogot, an official with Doctors Without Borders, the worldwide relief agency that runs health clinics here.

The refugees “are hungry, but they are not malnourished,” he added.

But that was not what the refugees said as they waited all day in the blazing sun or fierce dust storms for their bags of wheat.

“Here look at him. Look at his bones and the scars on his face,” said 25-year-old Islam, as he lifted up the shirt of Necmettin, his 10-year-old cousin whose bones, indeed, were evident.

“My children need to eat more,” said Sartar Abange, 50, who arrived three months ago in a nearby refugee camp with his family of 15, having escaped from an area controlled by the Taliban. “We eat once or twice a week. All we have to eat all the time is bread and water. The Taliban took away everything I had, and now I am here and waiting for this food.”

Nearby, Mohammed Hasan made sure he stood his place in the crush of people waiting to sign up for the food supplies. He said he lived in a nearby refugee camp, not yet visited by relief agencies, and which desperately could use the help.

“If you find dinner, you cannot find breakfast,” explained the short, grizzled 35-year-old who looked at least 20 years older, a fact he attributed to all the years of fighting the Afghans have endured.

“Here we have no food, no clothes, nothing, nothing,” he said.

Meanwhile, in anticipation of an eventual Northern Alliance victory in Mazar-e Sharif, United Nations aid agencies are sending food and medicine to the Uzbek border town of Termez.

“We are stockpiling the supplies in Termez so that if and when it opens we are ready to roll,” said Rupa Joshi, a UNICEF spokeswoman in Tashkent.

The border city was linked to Afghanistan by Friendship Bridge, which the Soviets used to haul troops into Afghanistan during their failed occupation of the nation in the 1980s. Now the bridge is closed by Uzbek officials wary of incursions by Islamic militants trained and supported by the Taliban.

President Islam Karimov said more than two weeks ago that Uzbekistan was hoping to reopen the bridge to allow humanitarian aid to pass through. Uzbek officials have reiterated that desire in the last week. But they have not given a date for when the route might reopen and insist that the region must be stable before they do so.

In any case, even as the first UNICEF aid shipment left Tashkent last week for Termez, aid officials were making contingency plans to send food and medicine through Tajikistan or Turkmenistan if the Uzbek route fails to open.

Besides being a potential route for humanitarian aid into the impoverished nation, Mazar-e Sharif and the area around it is strategically important. The Taliban have reinforced defenses around the city and turned back a Northern Alliance assault that had brought rebel troops up to the city lines last week.

Now Northern Alliance officials in Tashkent say that Taliban forces had pushed the opposition back more than 4 miles from the city’s southern outskirts.

Tribune foreign correspondent Colin McMahon contributed to this report from Uzbekistan.