TOKYO: War-weary Afghanistan continues to suffer from stereotypical images about its political problems, but its biggest woes have to do with livelihood and economic issues that remain ignored, says a Japanese doctor who is a winner of the Ramon Magsaysay award, Asia’s equivalent of the Nobel prize, this year.
Testu Nakamura accepted the award for peace and humanitarian work from the Manila-based Ramon Magsaysay Foundation this month, the same month that marks the anniversary of the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that led to US military campaign that ousted the Taliban in November that year.
But Nakamura says that Afghanistan’s real problems — beyond the reports of US troops’ search for Taliban remnants — seem to have been forgotten in the nearly two years since the military raids made in retaliation for the attacks in the United States blamed on Osama bin Laden.
Nakamura, who runs a hospital in Peshawar and clinics in Afghanistan with 140 staff, most of them local, says he does not want to get involved in politics.
But drawing from his more than two decades’ experience in the region, he says that the western and Japanese media focus too heavily on political and cultural aspect of the invasion of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.
This often gives the wrong picture of what life is like on the ground, says the doctor who is well-respected in Japan for his independent views on development aid. “Drought is the biggest problem now facing the people in Afghanistan and the international community must be more concerned about this than the political images of war,” he explained in an interview with IPS.
More than half of Afghanistan’s 20 million people have been affected by the drought, which has also been affecting Central Asia to China, India, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq.
Nakamura cites estimates that 4 million Afghans are on the verge of starvation and one million might starve to death in the near future. “It is said that 90 per cent of livestock in Afghan villages died two years ago,” he recounted.
“In some areas of Afghanistan, we have seen people walk several kilometres for water, sometimes for a whole day. Outbreaks of gastro-intestinal infections such as dysentery, amoebiasis and typhoid hit the area too,” he said in his lecture accepting the award in Manila last week.
“So many children died,” he said, adding that many get ill from drinking contaminated water. “We have seen many children expiring in their mothers’ arms in outpatients’ waiting rooms at our clinics.”
“It may not be appropriate for a doctor to say this, but, at one point, I couldn’t care less about treating diseases, because the situation had become so desperate that simply staying alive itself became very difficult,” he added.
Nakamura’s Peshawar Association runs a 70-bed hospital in Peshawar that handles leprosy, a clinic in northern Pakistan and three clinics in Afghanistan. More recently, it has turned to a 15-year effort to helping communities survive in drought conditions.
In the last three years, it has been working to Afghans dig wells — at times using landmines that are a legacy of decades of conflict to dig the holes and using help from former Taliban, anti-Taliban and even US troops.
In March, the association started building a 16-kilometre canal in eastern Afghanistan. It is expected to irrigate up to 2,000 hectares of agricultural fields that had been turned into desert by the drought, enabling 150,000 farmers to stay alive.
Amid all these, Nakamura points out that 70 per cent of the aid from western donors to Afghanistan has gone to foreign non-government organizations and UN groups, leaving the government with little to contribute to pressing needs identified by the local people.
He adds that continued military action by US troops against the Taliban — just this week, US officials were quoted as saying Taliban members were going across the border into Afghanistan from Pakistan — has created war zones nearly two years after that ruling militia was ousted.
This, he points out, has added to the already large number of people who need priority help in Afghanistan.
Already, Afghans are saying they feel let down by foreign governments after the Taliban’s ouster and the achievement of the military and political objectives in the US-led ‘war against terrorism’.
Nakamura says his work in Afghanistan has also made him a campaigner for a greater understanding of Islam, at a time of what he calls growing discrimination against members of the faith.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.
