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U.N. Prepares for Massive Humanitarian Crisis in Afghanistan
ISLAMABAD, Sept 24 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The United Nations has launched an unprecedented operation to prepare for a "massive crisis" in Afghanistan as people scramble to escape imminent U.S. military strikes, a U.N. spokesman said Monday.
U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spokesman Peter Kessler told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that an emergency contingency operation in neighboring Pakistan was the biggest in the agency's history.
Crisis management specialists and equipment to help the agency deal with hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees were continuing to pour into Pakistan, on Afghanistan's eastern border, amid reports that more than a million people could try to flee in the event of U.S. strikes, AFP reported.
"It's fair to say that never before have we needed an operation so large ahead of a possible crisis," Kessler said from the UNHCR's headquarters in the Pakistani capital.
"We are following our long experience in northern Iraq, the Balkans and Kosovo," he said.
"The situation inside Afghanistan is so precarious that if it deteriorates it could become a massive crisis if we're not prepared," Kessler added.
Hundreds of thousands of people are on the move inside Afghanistan as the United States builds a formidable strike force via land, air and sea platforms around the landlocked country, AFP reported.
There are already some 3.5 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran, left over from the last Afghan struggle against the 1979-89 Soviet invasion and occupation, which resulted in a humiliating withdrawal for the Red Army.
Another 900,000 Afghans have become homeless due to civil war and a severe drought.
The U.N. has warned of famine following the pullout of foreign aid workers due to security concerns following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.
Half the population of the Taliban's southern stronghold of Kandahar, or some 100,000 people, reportedly fled the city and headed for the relatively safer countryside or the Pakistani border some 120 kilometers (74 miles) to the east.
The exodus has been repeated from other major cities such as the capital Kabul and Jalalabad in the east, U.N. officials said, AFP reported.
Local officials and aid workers have said they are planning for the arrival of more than one million Afghans in Pakistan, and 300,000 in Iran to the west.
"Millions of Afghans have been refugees in the past and they know where the exits are," Kessler said, adding that U.N. experts feared the current trickle of refugees could quickly become a flood.
He said the UNHCR had received the "green light" from authorities in Pakistan's southwestern Baluchistan province to start registering and caring for asylum seekers already waiting at the Chaman border crossing.
No figures of the numbers of people waiting opposite Chaman were available, but Kessler said "there should be thousands" even though Pakistan closed its borders to Afghan refugees last week.
"We are guarding ourselves for perhaps a major flow of people if the situation worsens inside Afghanistan. There is no sign of improvement at this point, which is why the UNHCR is making these preparations," he said.
UNHCR Commissioner Ruud Lubbers on Thursday urged Afghanistan's neighbors and countries farther afield not to turn their backs on Afghan refugees.
"If there is to be a military coalition, there should also be a humanitarian coalition to really share the burden," AFP quoted Lubbers as saying.
The Geneva-based U.N. refugee agency has asked for "temporary protection" status for Afghans fleeing their homeland, and has issued an initial appeal to donors for six million dollars in emergency funds.
Commenting on the escalating crisis in Afghanistan, the U.K. daily The
Independent's reporter Robert Fisk described the U.S.'s imminent strike on Afghanistan as "one of the most epic events since the Second World War."
"I am referring," said Fisk, "to the extraordinary, almost unbelievable preparations now under way for the most powerful nation ever to have existed on God's Earth to bomb the most devastated, ravaged, starvation-haunted and tragic country in the world. Afghanistan, raped and eviscerated by the Russian army for 10 years, abandoned by its friends - us, of course - once the Russians had fled, is about to be attacked by the surviving superpower."
"Instead of helping Afghanistan," continued Fisk, "instead of pouring our aid into that country 10 years ago, rebuilding its cities and culture and creating a new political center that would go beyond tribalism, we left it to rot."
And now, "America wants its own version of justice, a concept rooted, it seems, in the Wild West and Hollywood's version of the Second World War," Fisk added. "President [George W.] Bush speaks of smoking them out, of the old posters that once graced Dodge City: 'Wanted, Dead or Alive'."
"Bush's threats have effectively forced the evacuation of every Western aid worker," said
The Independent's reporter. "Already, Afghans are dying because of their absence. Drought and starvation go on killing millions - I mean millions - and between 20 and 25 Afghans are blown up every day by the 10 million mines the Russians left behind."
"Pakistan has closed its border with Afghanistan. So has Iran. The Afghans are to stay in their prison … and die," Fisk concluded.
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