EuropaWorld 5/10/2001 Mountains Face the UN's New Man in Afghanistan

With an optimistic eye to the longer term, UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, has signalled his intention to re-appoint Mr Lakhdar Brahimi to the position of Special Representative. His role will be to oversee all the UN's political and humanitarian work in Afghanistan including initiating preparations for the development of plans for the rehabilitation of the country. The message was conveyed in a letter to the President of the Security Council.

Mr Brahimi will need to oversee negotiations for safe and unhindered humanitarian access to all populations in need, while arguing for the rights and protection of affected populations. His role will also be to 'facilitate a fully representative, multi-ethnic and broad-based government' according to a statement issued from the United Nations.

An Algerian, recently known for his report on the reform of the UN's peacekeeping activities, Mr Brahimi previously held the post of Special Representative in Afghanistan until 1999 when the post was 'frozen.'

There can be little doubt of the mountainous scale of the task that faces him. Last week a meeting of the Afghan Support Group in Berlin, a meeting that embraced UN aid agencies, representatives of the donor community and NGOs, issued a 'UN Donor Alert' calling for $580 million by March 2002 to feed and shelter up to 7.5 million Afghans. About 20 per cent of these funds are needed immediately, it said.

Given the history of UN appeals, whether for Afghanistan or elsewhere, there seems little likelihood of this total being even approached, let alone met, although this is not apparently the view of the EU's Development and Humanitarian Aid Commissioner, Poul Neilson.

Speaking to the European Parliament this week, Neilson said that funding of this appeal seemed to be less of a problem than the overall question of accessibility [of aid agencies] to displaced people and refugees.

All the aid agencies are increasingly worried about the effect of the oncoming winter and the difficulty of distributing food to rural areas once the country is snow-bound from mid-November. Neilson's concern was rehearsed by Carolyn McAskie, the UN's Deputy Emergency Relief Co-ordinator.

"We are extremely worried that the situation inside Afghanistan is going to deteriorate rapidly as winter comes on," she said in New York. Drawing attention to the sheer scale of the logistical operation, she noted that a single food convoy was capable of delivering up to 500 metric tonnes of supplies, but, she said, "you have to juxtapose that with an assessment that 50 to 52,000 metric tonnes per month that will be needed to feed 6 million people."

In order to stave off the present crisis she estimated that it would be necessary to pre-position between 100,000 and 200,000 tonnes of supplies before temperatures dropped and snow enveloped the country. "After that, it is going to be ……difficult to get supplies in," she said.

But logistics apart it still seems difficult to see how all this food and shelter is to be paid for. The European Commission itself certainly shows, at this stage, no sign of reacting on a scale commensurate with the Donor Alert, although its budgets are limited when compared with the resources potentially at the command of member states.

The Commission's Humanitarian Aid Office -ECHO- is making available another EUR 4 million in emergency aid to aid on top of the EUR 23.3 million it has already provided to Afghanistan and Afghan refugees. This week it decided to ask for a further EUR 25 million from the EU's budgetary reserve.

The UK by contrast has been able to provide some EUR 60 million from its development aid budget and has just advanced a further EUR 18 million in aid to Pakistan for the purpose of helping those regions of the country accommodating a large refugee influx.

But beside the call for $580 million (EUR 640), these sums clearly fall a long way short. What is clear is that Lakhdar Brahimi faces mountains in his new role, which he will need superhuman qualities to surmount.