USCR warns against sole focus on Afghanistan

"The international community at this moment is fixated on the possibility that hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan might flee their homes in coming weeks. It is a legitimate concern, but more than a half-million people have already fled their homes in Central Africa and the Horn of Africa in recent months because of wars that are already happening," said Jeff Drumtra, senior Africa policy analyst at the US Committee for Refugees (USCR), on Tuesday, 2 October. A vast number of these uprooted people in Africa received little or no humanitarian assistance, or had experienced cutbacks this year in the modest amounts of relief aid they were receiving - even before the heightened concerns about Afghanistan, he said. "International diplomats like to boast that peace negotiations are progressing in Congo-Kinshasa [the Democratic Republic of Congo], Sudan, and Burundi, but for too many families there the terror and daily misery have not changed a bit," Drumtra added.

An estimated 600,000 people are in dire need of food and supplies, according to a recent report from UNICEF. The humanitarian situation within the drought belt had deteriorated since January 2001, when the 2001 Consolidated Appeal was revised in light of the drought situation in western, central and southern Sudan, it said. A large-scale humanitarian crisis was continuing as the lives of the drought-affected entered a more difficult phase, it added. [For more details, click here ]