MSF suspends activities at southern IDP camp

The international agency Medicins Sans Frontieres Holland (MSF) announced on 6 December that it would suspend its activities in the Zhare Dasht camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) near the southern city of Kandahar, in the wake of recent attacks on aid workers in the south of the country. "The whole build-up of incidents made us decide that it was no longer safe to travel on the 30-km road from Kandahar to Zhare Dasht IDP camp. If we look at the incidents in the south, the majority have taken place while travelling, therefore we decided not to take that road and suspended our activities," Nelke Manders, the MSF head of mission, told IRIN in Kabul on Monday, stressing that the measure was temporary and that MSF was still operating in Kandahar and other parts of the country. The Zhare Dasht camp, home to around 40,000 IDPs, is situated in the desert approximately 20 km from Kandahar and requires constant supplies of food, medicine and the like. According to MSF, the residents of the camp are mostly nomads displaced by last year's drought, and Pashtuns who fled northern Afghanistan due to discrimination and harassment by other ethnic groups. MSF said the Zhare Dasht IDPs were completely dependent on external assistance, warning that the mounting threats to aid workers in southern Afghanistan and the resulting lack of access to health care would leave these people facing increased suffering and danger. The agency cared for an average of 7,500 patients in the camp each month and recently helped control a major diphtheria outbreak. With winter approaching, the incidence of chest infections among camp residents, including cases of pneumonia, is dramatically on the rise. "In addition to the absence of basic medical services, with MSF's withdrawal, the population has lost access to maternal and neonatal health care and vital immunisation services for children and pregnant women, as well as a feeding programme for malnourished children in the camp," said MSF in a statement issued at the weekend. MSF's decision follows a series of serious incidents involving aid agencies and UN organisations over the last weeks in the south of the country. On 11 November, a car bomb attack took place at the regional office of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan in Kandahar. The most alarming, however, was the murder on 16 November of a UN staff member, Bettina Goislard, a 29-year-old French national working for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Ghazni. Recent days have seen the abduction of five workers (two Indian, two Turkish and one Afghan) working for two construction companies on the Kabul-Kandahar highway and southeast of Kabul, according to Afghan interior ministry officials. Most NGOs have already been restricting their activities to a rapidly shrinking area in and around Kandahar city. "There is a necessary and absolute restriction of NGOs activities in and around Kandahar due to the threats that exist in those areas," Nick Downie, a security coordinator for Afghanistan NGO Security Offices, central region, told IRIN on Monday.