EuropaWorld 9/11/2001 Humanitarians Must Do What Humanitarians Must Do

Speaking to the European Parliament this week Poul Neilson, the European Commissioner in charge of Development and Humanitarian Aid, said that it was ten times more dangerous to be a humanitarian worker, these days, than to be a peacekeeper. Delivering humanitarian aid is a risky business with more than a remote possibility of being arrested, kidnapped, robbed, attacked and in the worst cases murdered. But mostly the humanitarians don't think about such things; they just get on with their jobs.

They were getting on with their jobs again this week in Afghanistan, delivering food, yes, although this is becoming ever more of a problem. The UN say that almost two months have passed since they last managed to deliver food in and around Kandahar. That is partly as a result of the security situation - like most people humanitarians prefer to work in areas not the subject of almost daily bombing attacks - and partly it is due to the ever increasing restrictions and obstructions with which the Taliban regime bites the hand that feeds it.

Indeed so acute has this problem become that it has even reached the ears of the Security Council, encouraging them to warn this week that the underlying cause of the country's dire circumstances could be laid at the door of Taliban misrule.

"Virtually all of our offices, warehouses and vehicles in Kandahar have been taken over and are in fact being used by the Taliban," said Kenzo Oshima, the UN's Emergency Relief Co-ordinator, noting that the security situation in other areas had also been 'volatile'. Clearly the clerics of Kabul prefer to see their soldiers fed rather than their flocks.

Yet despite this dismal picture the humanitarians are not deterred from launching the second leg of this year's campaign to eradicate the crippling polio virus from central Asia. UNICEF insists that Afghanistan and Pakistan accounted for more than 30 per cent of the world's polio cases in 2001, making the region a priority for the Polio Eradication Initiative.

This week the second of two National Immunisation Days took place (the first was in September). Led by UNICEF, the World Health Organisation, Rotary International and others, the UN encourages national and local authorities to eradicate polio by giving all children under five oral polio vaccine.

Who knows whether the Taliban will co-operate? "Neither WHO nor UNICEF have control over the Taliban," a spokesman for UNICEF said but "from all indications …..the local health authorities for the Taliban-controlled areas intend to go ahead."

Bombing permitting, of course.