Refugees suffer for lack of aid funding

Up to 100,000 Afghan refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) face an uncertain future due to lack of funding for aid agencies. Water and food are already in short supply in the IDP and refugee camps in Spin Boldak and Chaman refugee camps along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

"Everything will be jeopardised by lack of funding," Melita Sunjic, a spokeswoman for the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told IRIN on Thursday in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. "We will be bankrupt if we do not receive the funding towards the end of the month."

The French news agency AFP reported on Wednesday that more than 1,000 people in a camp close to the southern Afghan town of Spin Boldak had not received any food for the past three weeks, and drinking water was in short supply. The Arab donors who had established the camps had suspended their aid for unknown reasons, the report added.

Following the start of the US-led coalition's military campaign in October last year, hundreds of thousands of IDPs from across southern Afghanistan assembled in makeshift camps near Spin Boldak and across the border in Chaman in Pakistan. Many of them were farmers and nomads whose livelihoods had been devastated by the worst regional drought in living memory. Initially, Arab and Islamic aid organisations had provided them with relief supplies.

After the fall of the Taliban, ethnic Pashtuns fleeing persecution in northern Afghanistan poured into these camps. The worst of the camps is on a site in no-man's-land, or waiting area, on the Pakistani-Afghan border, which accommodates more than 30,000 people.

In most of the camps situated in the wind-swept border areas, sanitation is a major problem. Water for drinking and cleaning falls short of requirements. Most of the camps have only meagre health-care facilities. "Food", in the words of the World Food Programme (WFP) spokesman, Khalid Mansour, "is sufficient to keep the population afloat."

"Water is our number one concern," Cassandra Nelson, the information and press officer for the international NGO Mercy Corps, told IRIN. She said even under the relatively better conditions in camps inside Pakistan, on average, every person was getting up to 10 litres of water a day, which was much less than the standard 15 litres.

While WFP and its partner NGOs had started a new distribution of food on Thursday, an aid worker maintained that the people in those camps did not have a permanent food supply.

Sunjic warned that UNHCR's whole operation for Afghan IDPs in Afghanistan and refugees in neighbouring Pakistan and Iran would be affected by the lack of funds. UNHCR has already assisted more than a million Afghan refugees in going home from neighbouring countries. Moreover, it has helped more than 160,000 IDPs to return to their areas of origin.

WFP has already suspended some food-for-work projects in southern Afghanistan. Moreover, it is not expanding school feeding programmes. The 150 kg of wheat which every Afghan being repatriated was receiving has been cut down to 50 kg.

"We have funds, but we don't have enough funds to meet the requirements," said Mansour.