IRIN Focus on desperation of displaced in Mazar

It is rare to see Afghan men break down and cry but in abandoned Soviet barracks, outhouses and holes in the ground on the outskirts of Mazar city, in the northern province of Balkh, those displaced by conflict and drought can barely talk about how they are coping without shedding tears. Hundreds of families here live in appalling conditions. An estimated 30,000 internally-displaced people (IDPs) have arrived in Mazar in the last four months and, with labour markets saturated, many have resorted to begging for food. Weak from chronic malnourishment and exposed to the winter cold, many children have died. Many others will struggle to make it through winter. But these families are unlikely to receive nearly enough support: local community resources are exhausted, the authorities claim they are unable to help and international relief agencies are prioritising what limited aid they have for rural areas, in an attempt to keep people on the land and discourage further influxes into the city. In Herat, western Afghanistan, 80,000 IDPs have been gathered into camps to facilitate relief assistance. But agencies in Mazar have chosen against establishing camps, as this might lead to further mass migration from the surrounding villages. As a result, the displaced are scattered throughout the 10 districts of Mazar and its outlying areas. Conditions can vary enormously between the displaced groups and it is extremely difficult to have an accurate grasp of their conditions or to ensure that aid is reaching the most vulnerable. Tenant labourers displaced to drab buildings in the Chimtal district, less than 20 km from Mazar city centre, are among the worst affected. In a dark room, a mother of four, Sara-gul, told IRIN how she had lost her seven-year-old daughter last Thursday. “She started to vomit after eating some carrots and a few hours later she died.” With only two small loaves left, Sara-gul said the family had now started to beg. “We have not eaten meat or oil for six months now. Look, I’m so hungry I’m trembling,” she said. A short walk beyond was a settlement of 23 families of ethnic Hazara origin, who had escaped from fighting in Dar-e-Souf [in Samangan Province, northern Afghanistan] four months earlier. Ishmael, a father of four, had also lost a child in the harsh conditions. He told IRIN they had sold nearly all their animals. “We’d go back tomorrow if the fighting stopped. There’s no work for us here and people will not give anything no matter how hard you knock on their doors. My children spend their day digging for roots to put in the pot,” he said. Although some aid had been received, there is an unwillingness to make conditions too comfortable for the displaced. According to agencies, increasing aid to Mazar will merely draw more people off their land and into greater dependency on relief assistance. Head of the ICRC delegation in Mazar, Reto Stocker, told IRIN that their priority was to focus on the conflict-affected areas of Ghor and Dar-e-Souf to the south. “Apart from ad-hoc deliveries, we are avoiding giving more aid to the displaced in Mazar. Our aim is to provide assistance to the worst affected areas to discourage people from leaving their homes,” he said. They local authorities say the number of displaced people outside their offices has increased dramatically in the last two months. The head of the local Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Molavi Fazelrab Shirzad, told IRIN the situation was so bad in Mazar now that local recipients of the WFP bakery project had collectively given their bread to help recently displaced families. “They come to this office but we are not in a position to help, our salaries are not so high. So we send them to the UN offices instead,” he said. Perceptions among relief workers as to the real conditions of the displaced in Mazar are strikingly different. Thomas Hoerz, head of the WFP Mazar sub-office, said that IDPs in Mazar had access to relief aid, including a WFP bakery, food for work projects, health clinics and a Medecins sans frontieres (MSF) supplementary feeding centre. Mazar city had also received over 40 kg of wheat per person last year, 10 times higher than the volume distributed since the start of the rural programme in July, he said. Hoerz said that the conditions of the displaced in Mazar had to be considered in the context of the region. “We are trying to provide food for one million people in the northern areas. We’re not trying to feed the entire population. This is intended as a supplement to what they already have.” Comparatively, it would appear, the displaced in Mazar are generally in better condition than elsewhere in northern Afghanistan. But the response of some aid workers suggests otherwise: confronted with acute misery and starvation, international and national staff of humanitarian agencies have resorted to buying food and supplies for the displaced with their own money. Afghan UN national staff members told IRIN they had rushed to the market and bought what they could when they first discovered displaced families living in such dreadful conditions. During a visit in January, UN gender adviser for Afghanistan Maysoon Melek was so shocked to find children dying of cold in the Soviet barracks that she mobilised over US $2,000 worth of food and supplies for some 300-odd families. The distribution of supplies last Wednesday almost turned ugly when thousands of IDPs from the district converged on the barracks, she said. “We were swamped by the crowds outside as we tried to leave. I have never seen such desperation. Women were clutching me shouting that they hadn’t received anything. At one moment I was terrified. We were placed in an awful position and I felt as though I was abandoning them as we drove off,” Melek told IRIN. “People are so desperate that I am worried one day they will become angry and lash out at us when we next visit these camps,” a local Afghan worker added. The situation has never been so bad, according to Afghan nationals, and it has become increasingly clear that the scale of the crisis is far surpassing the capacity of relief agencies to cope effectively with their limited resources. In recent months, this has forced relief workers into making uncomfortable decisions as to who receives aid. Hoerz agreed that some families were starving. “Not starving to death yet, I would not go so far as to say that, but definitely starving.” “I must admit, driving in every morning and seeing these people pressed up against the car windows crying for help makes you feel terrible in your skin.”