EuropaWorld 12/1/2001 Children Dying of Cold in Afghan Camps

Seven Afghan children were reported to have died this week from hypothermia in the dismal surroundings of an overcrowded transit camp for refugees on the rugged Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The cold winter weather has now set in but refugees continue to pour out of Afghanistan, fleeing the fighting there or simply the victims of food shortages, at the rate of 250 every day. More than 60,000 new Afghan refugees fled to Pakistan in the last four months of 2000 according to UNHCR, the Geneva based refugee agency, which is struggling to find the resources to build new camps to house and feed the new arrivals properly.

Even larger numbers remain, displaced from their homes, inside Afghanistan with 150,000 homeless on the provinces of Heart and Badakhshan alone.

The agency is also extremely concerned about 10,000 Afghans - mostly women and children - who have been stuck for weeks on a string of islands on the river Pyandj separating Afghanistan from Tajikistan. Tajikistan has so far refused to allow them in, despite UNHCR's interventions. Meanwhile the islands have come under sporadic shelling preventing the delivery of any substantial amount of aid.