Afghan camps improve after cold snap

The situation in the five displacement and asylum-seeker camps scattered across the border close to the western Pakistani border town of Chaman and the southeastern Afghan town of Spin Buldak across the border is improving following the deaths of at least 12 children earlier this month during an unexpectedly harsh cold spell. "The population is protected against the recurrence of such weather," Jack Redden, the spokesman for the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told IRIN in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Monday. UNHCR distributed blankets and stoves among the 10,000 to 15,000 residents of displacement camps near Spin Buldak and more than 19,000 asylum seekers in the waiting-area camp in the no-man’s-land on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. During the Muslim festival of Id al-Fitr marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan from 4 to 6 December, at least 12 children died in the unexpected cold snap when the temperature dropped to -15 C. "We don’t know the exact reason for these deaths as there was no medical investigation into the incident," he said. His comments follow a Reuters report on Sunday stating that 41 Afghan children had died of severe cold in those camps this month. Following the US-led bombing campaign against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda last year and the worst drought in living memory in Afghanistan, thousands of Afghans, mostly nomads and farmers, started living in the four makeshift camps near Spin Buldak. Some of them returned into their areas of origin or to the Zarey Dasht displacement camp set up by UNHCR near the southeastern Afghan city of Kandahar, but thousands remained on the windswept plain. After the fall of Taliban, thousands of ethnic Pashtuns harassed in northern Afghanistan flocked to the waiting-area camp. While waiting for months at the border to be allowed to take refuge inside Pakistan, many of them also relocated to Zarey Dasht. With diseases, unhygienic conditions and a lack of basic services, the camps have remained a symbol of Afghan misery for a long time. "The situation has improved a little, but it’s not very good,” Jose Hulsenbeck, the project coordinator for the international medical relief agency Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Chaman, told IRIN from the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta. MSF provides Afghans in the camps with medical assistance "Shelter, food and access to medical care remain the key issues," she added.