Afghan children dying despite available resources

Relief organisations, despite having the resources to assist some 80,000 Afghans camped out in the open Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP), say their hands are tied and fear the makeshift settlement of Jalozai may turn into a death camp. "The tragedy is that these people could be assisted very quickly," UNHCR regional spokesman Yusuf Hassan told IRIN on Friday. Relief efforts are being hampered by the Pakistani authorities who remain uncompromising in not wanting Jalozai, a temporary settlement 35 km southwest of NWFP capital Peshawar, to become an official refugee camp. Even if access were permitted, aid workers say overcrowded conditions there make it impossible for humanitarian assistance to be rendered. "We don't necessarily need a new camp to house these people. We have some space available in Shamshatoo [refugee camp, some 30 km southeast of Peshawar] where we could relocate a proportion of the people," Hassan said. So while the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has allocated US $4 million to assist the new arrivals, the death toll at Jalozai continues to rise. More than 20 people, mostly children, have died recently in what UNHCR calls "preventable" circumstances. "The environment is a cause for disease. Children are dying mainly due to respiratory diseases such as lung and throat infections from exposure to cold. We are also seeing more water-borne diseases such as diarrhoea and typhoid," Hassan said. Health workers fear that the situation will worsen as hygiene conditions deteriorate further, despite the end of winter being in sight. UNHCR, WFP and their NGO partners have mobilised resources to meet the urgent humanitarian needs of the new arrivals in Pakistan, and the assistance community is in a position to address the needs of the new refugees but complain that the desperate and overcrowded conditions in Jalozai prevent them from doing so. "It is virtually impossible to provide assistance without provoking a possibly life-threatening stampede. The site does not have enough latrines or adequate water," Hassan told IRIN. The Afghan population in Jalozai includes many victims of war and war-related conditions who fit into the international legal definition of a refugee, and who UNHCR says should be considered refugees. Meanwhile, Pakistan has asked 70,000 Afghan refugees to leave their homes in a 20-year-old settlement in Nasirbagh, an urban area of Peshawar, to make way for a housing development. NWFP Home Secretary Mazhar Ali Shah told IRIN on Friday that he understood all those who had been asked to relocate were legally registered and had refugee status in Pakistan. The government of NWFP has given them up to mid-July to find alternative accommodation, he said. "I want to stress that we are only taking action against those Afghan refugees who are not registered and who are found in suspicious circumstances and cannot explain their status. We have no plan to evict those who are registered in Pakistan with the Afghan commissariat," Shah added. According to UNHCR, Pakistan has received over 170,000 new Afghan refugees since September, making this influx the largest since the capture of the Afghan capital, Kabul, by the ruling Taliban Islamic Movement in September 1996. Pakistan estimates that there are already some two million Afghans in the country, severely burdening an economy already marked by chronic unemployment and extreme poverty.