Death hovers over Jalozai refugee camp

For Juma Khan, the makeshift refugee camp at Jalozai, near the northwestern provincial capital of Peshawar, has become a living hell. Forced from his home after heavy fighting in the central Afghan province of Kapisa, the ethnic Tajik farmer has spent each day since January under a thin plastic sheeting with his wife and five children waiting for assistance that never comes. As UN officials and Pakistani authorities continue to wrangle over what to do with Afghanistan’s newest refugee influx, Khan waits. “What else can I do?” he asked IRIN. “Waiting for assistance is one thing, but dying is another,” he laments. The UN continues to await full access to these Afghans, many of them sick, hungry and literally dying. Given the present standoff between the UN and Islamabad, the prognosis looks bleaker than ever. “The conditions are very bad here. We have nothing to eat, no water and no shelter,” Khan says. “All I have is what is on my back. I just want some help to survive,” he says. According to UNHCR spokesman Kris Janowski in Geneva on Tuesday, despite repeated appeals from the agency, and an apparent agreement reached two weeks ago between UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Pakistan’s Chief Executive General Pervez Musharraf that agencies would help Afghans inside Afghanistan as well as the recent arrivals in Pakistan, Islamabad has yet to facilitate the delivery of adequate assistance by relief agencies to meet all needs in Jalozai. “Children are suffering and dying unnecessarily at Jalozai, where deaths are recorded daily,” Janowski said. He warned that the Pakistani authorities had allowed UNHCR and other agencies to deliver “only a minimum of services and assistance” to those in need. This was echoed by aid workers on the ground, who are overwhelmed with the misery and suffering of the camp’s 70,000 inhabitants. “This situation is out of hand. We are only providing the basics in terms of water, sanitation and health,” Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) project coordinator Willemiek van den Broek told IRIN. “Shelter is nonexistent and food distribution is not taking place, because there is no registration of the people by the authorities. The Pakistani government has to give the permission, and UNHCR has to register them.” Describing conditions there are as “deplorable” and “inhumane”, UNHCR is particularly concerned over an outbreak of epidemics following recent rains that left much of the camp and latrine facilities flooded. According to Janowski, the paths in the camps “have been reduced to cesspools, with flies breeding among the flimsy shelters, and the smell of human excrement pervasive throughout the site”. Meanwhile, “at least one person a day dies here”, MSF Doctor Assad Menapal told IRIN. “We are facing a very serious problem in terms of diseases due to the water and sanitation situation.” He warned: “Things could escalate quite quickly here, and with more rain I expect to see more cases of typhoid, malaria, cholera, diarrhoea other infectious diseases.” Pakistan’s UN ambassador on Wednesday dismissed UN criticism of his country’s policy toward Afghan refugees, saying the country was already saddled with over a million refugees and cannot cope with any new influx. According to an AP report on Thursday, Ambassador Shamshad Ahmad blamed the current refugee crisis on UN sanctions imposed on the Taliban in an effort to secure the extradition of Saudi militant Usama bin Ladin, wanted in connection with the bombing of two American embassies in East Africa in 1998. “Let those who are making the most noises ferry the poor suffering Afghans from Afghanistan to their own countries, which have plenty of resources,” Ahmad said. “This is the easiest solution.” More than 170,000 have fled to Pakistan since September, adding to the more than 1.2 million Afghans already in the country. This latest influx is the largest influx since the fall of the Afghan capital, Kabul, to the Taliban Islamic movement in September 1996.