UN appeal push targets displaced

The United Nations is planning to back up its US $229 million Consolidated Appeal for the year 2001, launched in November, with an initiative to encourage donors to pledge money quickly to meet burgeoning emergency needs in the country. “We are very concerned about the IDPs scattered across Afghanistan,” the spokesperson for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance to Afghanistan, Stephanie Bunker, told IRIN on Tuesday. “Due to inadequate shelter, many of the displaced people are suffering from exposure due to severe cold. They are in immediate need of shelter, clothes and warm blankets,” she said. Bunker made particular mention of those internally-displaced people (IDPs) in the western city of Herat, where some 80,000 people have recently arrived fleeing severe drought in the adjacent provinces of Ghor and Badghis.