LONDON: The strawberry jam and butter that dropped out of Afghan skies after those Tomahawk missiles will do little good to the famine-struck people of Afghanistan, aid workers in Britain say. “It is not an effective way of providing aid,” Nick Gutmunn of Christian Aid said. The US dropped 37,500 packets of ration boxes in an area where seven million people need food, he said. “It’s a tiny, tiny, tiny drop in the ocean.”
And not quite the right-drop, he said. “Dropping butter and strawberry jam is not appropriate in this situation,” he said. ”People need pulses, wheat, oil and sugar. Only that is what will persuade them to stay on in the villages, and that is where they need to be over the winter if we are to avoid a very difficult situation.”
That taste of America for a few will make no difference to the crisis situation, aid workers say. “Any aid given in a crisis situation is better than none,” Kaye Stearman from Care International said.
“But this is hardly the best way,” she said. “Afghanistan needs massive aid. There is no guarantee that such aid will carry to the target and it might be dropped where it is not needed; if it falls where it is needed there is no guarantee it would be distributed among the needy.”
Such aid invites grabbing and is hardly likely to get to children, women and the elderly, she said. “Such aid can prove actually lethal to many,” she said. “Afghanistan is heavily land-mined and these landmines can explode if people walk across to pick up these packets.” Thousands have been injured in Afghanistan already by landmines scattered around the country, she said.
Aid workers say the only way to get food into Afghanistan is by road. “All parties must agree to open up their corridors to get supplies through,” a spokesperson for Save the Children said. ”Aid will be far easier to distribute if we can set up an infrastructure for it.”
Aid workers are demanding immediate opening of land routes. Fiona Fox from CAFOD said the time had come for the US and British alliance “to pressure neighbouring countries to open their borders. If neighbouring countries are worried about the long-term financial impact, then they must be given the funding they need.”
Most aid workers seemed to fear that the launch of military strikes would make it much harder for aid to reach the needy within Afghanistan. “It is not for us to take a political position on the military strikes,” the spokesperson of a leading charity said. “But it’s a real setback that these strikes should have been launched without any thought for looking after the innocent people who will be uprooted.” With winter just weeks away, aid workers said that the crisis was acute. “If access is denied for another few weeks, it could get too late,” the spokesperson said. “We are talking here of millions of lives.” —Dawn/InterPress Service.