Stop the War - No To War - War is not a solution!

Afghanistan: Like A Scene Out Of Mad Max

THE THOUSANDS of Afghan refugees fleeing to Pakistan must be thinking: "what have we done to deserve this?"

According to the United Nations, Afghanistan has the highest rate of population displacement in the world. Some five million people (one-fifth of the population) are refugees driven out of their homes by war and the worst drought in decades.

Of these over two million are in refugee camps in Pakistan, one and a half million are in Iran and the remainder are 'internally displaced'.

Military action

Even before the US threat of military action against their country, 2,000 people a day were arriving in the tented refugee camps of Herat near the Iran border. There they endure conditions of searing heat, water and food shortages and inevitably disease. With the UN stopping its food programme and many of the foreign aid agencies pulling out their staff, these conditions can only worsen.

According to Oxfam (21/9/01): "Since last week, food has not been going in. You can imagine the scale that is required - 6,000 truckloads have to go in every month to keep those people going."

To say Afghanistan is a desperately poor country is an understatement. Statistics are hard to come by but at the time of the Soviet army withdrawal in 1989 the average annual income for an Afghan was only $200. Since then a constant civil war, which has destroyed much of the country's infrastructure, has compounded the poverty.

Devastated landscape

WHEN THE Soviet army withdrew from its occupation in 1989 the fighting did not cease. After the pro-Moscow regime of Najibullah collapsed in 1992 the opposition Mojahidin guerrilla groups engaged in internecine warfare. The capital city Kabul was largely reduced to rubble with thousands killed by indiscriminate shelling.

According to Times correspondent Nick Danziger who has travelled the country: "During the past 23 years more than one and a half million Afghans have been killed as a direct result of the wars that have taken place on Afghan soil. Most of those killed were civilians: children who were out on the street playing or in the mountains shepherding their animals, ordinary people like you and me. The local populace has never been spared - sometimes it was targeted in the belief that this would stop it harbouring the enemy."

"... Much of Afghanistan is like a scene from Mad Max or some futurist [post-holocaust] movie. Everywhere is the debris of war: Russian tanks and armoured personnel carriers with their turrets torn off; the wrecks of former clinics, schools and shops; razed walls; cratered and mined roads."

From The Socialist, 28 September 2001

War is not a solution

Afghanistan: Like A Scene Out Of Mad Max

Military action

Devastated landscape

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