April 9, 2005

AFGHANISTAN: Country facing health disaster worse than the tsunami - minister
KABUL, 8 Apr 2005 (IRIN) - As Afghanistan marked World Health Day on Thursday, the country’s health minister, Dr Sayed Mohammad Amin Fatimi, said it was facing a disaster worse than the tsunami that hit Indian Ocean nations late in 2004 and killed more than 300,000 people.

“We are currently being faced with a silent emergency which is heartbreaking and a big tragedy, it is worse than the tsunami disaster,” Fatimi told IRIN in the capital Kabul.

The minister estimates that around 700 children under the age of five die every day in Afghanistan due to preventable diseases and one women dies every 20 minutes due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth.

Lack of resources and trained medical personnel, along with low levels of awareness and cultural factors, were the main reasons for the alarming figures in a country still recovering from nearly three decades of conflict and international isolation.

“Traditionally in rural areas people won’t let women to be checked by male doctors,” he said, adding that of just 3,000 doctors in the entire country, only one in six was female. “We need nearly 10,000 midwives and at the same time up to 10,000 female health workers,” the minister said.

“To stand by and allow a preventable disaster from occurring is unconscionable…. The long-term consequences for Afghanistan will overturn much of the progress made in recent years,” Ameerah Haq, the deputy Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General said.

According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Afghanistan has the fourth highest under five-mortality rate in the world. Diarrhoeal diseases are recognised as the main killer of children, caused by limited access to safe water, sanitation and poor hygiene practices.

“It is a very serious situation not only in terms of health but also because of its impact on socio-economic and development issues,” Edward Carwardine, a spokesman for UNICEF, told IRIN.

But despite the current problems, UNICEF believes considerable progress has been made. Reported cases of measles among children have fallen from more than 8,700 in 2001 to less than 500 in 2004.

“Nearly every province in the country now has a functioning emergency obstetric care facility and new programmes to train midwives and other female health workers are under way across the country,” Carwardine said.

The health ministry estimates that the country needs US $255 million to address health issues in 2005. “We are lacking $110 million and if that is not immediately covered, the country will face a more severe health crisis,” the minister noted.

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AFGHANISTAN: Reduced flood risk - UN
KABUL, 8 Apr 2005 (IRIN) - After serious flooding in southern Afghanistan in March, humanitarian workers in Kabul have told IRIN the worst is now over. “Most of the snow melt which we anticipated would cause flooding has now gone so the emergency that we thought might happen is less probable,” John Odea of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) told IRIN on Thursday.

After a very cold winter that killed hundreds of people unprepared for the severe weather, Afghanistan faced two serious floods last month, affecting thousands of people in the southern provinces of Ghazni, Oruzgan, Nimruz and Kandahar.

The most recent flood was in Ghazni when the Band Sultan dam burst due to a huge inflow of water from melted snow, killing at least 20 people, destroying hundreds of houses and displacing thousands.

The Afghan government, the United Nations and US-led coalition forces responded to the emergency by providing, food, shelter medical aid and evacuation by helicopter.

“The water has now decreased significantly and the situation [in Ghazni] is under control,” Ariane Qauentier a senior public information officer at UNAMA, told IRIN.

According to UNAMA, a number of working groups have been established to set up a coordination mechanism, identify high-risk areas and organise the pre-positioning of supplies in regions prone to flooding.

“Right now it is rather good news. We have not had any major floods since the flooding in Ghazni,” she noted, adding that a joint operation centre made up of members of the government and international organisations was in place.

However, there is concern that the Ghazni dam disaster could be replicated, given how old and poorly maintained many dams in Afghanistan are. “The possible risk of widespread flooding is still there, from another dam breach, for example,” Odea added.

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UK Offers to Host Donor Meeting in June
Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty
7 April 2006 -- United Kingdom has offered to host a meeting in London in order to enhance donors' policies as well as "firm up and increase commitments" to the Government of Afghanistan trust funds, according to the ADF UK statement.

The proposed date of the meeting is 22 June, the day before the G8 Foreign Minister’s meeting in London.

Hillary Benn, a Secretary of State for International Development, officially extended this invitation by sending official letter to Afghan finance minister Anwar Al-Haq Ahadi.

One of the purposes of the meeting in London is to “focus on increasing donor commitments, preferable multi-year commitments.”

The agenda of the meeting also reflects the efforts of the Afghan Government to strengthen its role in the reconstruction projects and development process as well as to increase government “systems and capacity” and be able to “reduce the transaction costs of a large number of bilateral projects,” the statement reads.

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Inside Guantanamo's secret trials
By Adam Brookes / BBC News, Guantanamo Bay Friday, 8 April, 2005
The legality of holding terrorist suspects in Guantanamo Bay is once again before the US courts.

Lawyers for an inmate at Guantanamo Bay, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, are arguing that his trial by military commission violates international law.

The case is part of a wrenching battle in the US courts that goes to the heart of the war on terrorism and its legality.

The Bush administration has argued that holding detainees without trial is imperative for national security, but lawyers for the Guantanamo Bay inmates argue that the detentions have no basis in law.

And they label as unconstitutional the procedures put in place in Guantanamo Bay to review the detentions and charge some detainees.

Some 540 detainees remain at Guantanamo Bay.

There they go through three procedures which the Bush administration and the US military argue provide them with sufficient protection of their rights.

A Combatant Status Review Tribunal decides if the detainee is an 'enemy combatant'.

An Administrative Review Board, or ARB, decides if a detainee should be released because they pose no threat to the US, or whether they should be detained for another year.

And a military commission will try those who are deemed to have committed crimes.

Different standards

The BBC observed an ARB - the first time journalists had been allowed to do so. We saw only the unclassified part of the proceedings.

Our military escorts took us into Camp Delta - where the detainees are held - to a prefabricated building.

Before the proceedings began, they briefed us on what we would see. One officer likened the proceedings to a parole hearing - even though the detainees have not been found guilty of any crime.

He stressed that this was not a legal hearing, and standards of proof and evidence normal for a civilian court would not apply.

The detainee whose review we would witness was a young man from Saudi Arabia, we were told.

Under no circumstances were we to publish his name, said our escorts, and we had to sign a piece of paper to that effect.

But the detainee was suffering from a stomach upset. We watched, on camera, as he was examined in an adjoining room.

A doctor questioned him gently through an interpreter, and decreed he was too ill to go ahead with the review board. The proceedings were postponed.

'Non-compliant'

The following day we returned. The detainee was apparently feeling better and the proceedings went ahead.

Three military officers sat on the board. None of them were lawyers.

Their job, as they described it, was to review the evidence and come to a recommendation as to whether the detainee constituted a continued threat to the US and should be further detained, or whether he should be transferred to his home country, or released.

The detainee was already sat when we entered the room. He wore an orange jumpsuit, signalling that he was a "non-compliant" prisoner.

His hands and feet were shackled to the floor. At a guess he was in his late 20s, a rangy young man with a thin beard and a shock of curly hair.

He looked rigidly at the floor, apparently to avoid any eye contact.

At the detainee's side was an "Assisting Military Officer". His role was to assist the detainee in presenting his case, but he appeared well short of legal representation.

Also present was a "Designated Military Officer", whose role was to present the evidence. He did not resemble a prosecutor. There was no adversarial argument.

After the board had been sworn in, they listened to a litany of allegations against the detainee.

'Rifles and trenches'

We were not permitted to record the proceedings, so the following is reconstructed from my notes.

We heard that he had travelled to Pakistan and Afghanistan. He had allegedly received weapons training in a camp in Afghanistan run by Lashkar e-Tayyiba, a group listed by the state department as a terrorist organisation.

In 2001, we heard, the detainee had fought on the front line in Afghanistan, alongside the Taleban during the retreat from Bagram, and there he had fired his Kalashnikov rifle. He then fled to a location near Jalalabad, where he "dug trenches and waited".

His name was found, the board heard, on the hard drives of computers seized during raids on al-Qaeda safe houses in Pakistan.

The sources of these allegations were never revealed. It was unclear to us if they came from his own testimony, or intelligence, or elsewhere.

No witnesses were called, and the detainee sat silent throughout the hearing.

During the interrogations that followed his capture, we heard, he had stated that he would follow any religious decree; that an attack on the US was necessary; that infidels should either convert to Islam, or pay a fee, or be killed.

He had also threatened to kill prison guards and their families.

In mitigation

The board then heard a list of "mitigating factors". The detainee had told his captors that he had gone to Afghanistan for sightseeing. He had gone to Pakistan to buy hashish. On hearing this, in his only visible show of emotion, a broad smile spread across the detainee's face.

He had said he had never picked up a weapon. And he had no knowledge of terrorist attacks against the US, nor did he have anything against the US.

Much of what came under "mitigating factors" stood in direct contradiction to what had gone before.

It was unclear to us what criteria the board intended to use to weigh these contradictory accounts of the young man's past.

Finally it was time for the detainee to speak (translated through an interpreter, a young Arab-American woman who appeared extremely competent).

"I don't have hostility to any person and I want the whole world to live in peace," he said.

He said he had gone to Pakistan "for a change of weather", and to get to know the country.

He was quietly spoken, calm, and brief.

The Assisting Military Officer weighed in. He went through the evidence against the detainee point by point and detailed which elements the detainee rejected as false.

True or false?

Next came questioning by three officers on the board. A good 10 minutes was taken up with the board trying to establish the correct spelling of the detainee's name.

The chairman asked what the detainee would do if he were released.

Detainee: "I would go back to my country. I don't know what I would do. I would live with my family."

Question: "Who did you fire your rifle at?"

Detainee: "I never fired a rifle."

Question: "Why were you firing?"

Detainee: "I never fired."

Question: "Why were you in Afghanistan?"

Detainee: "For a visit."

Question: "How do you explain the differences in the evidence?"

Detainee: "I can't."

Question: "How would you describe your behaviour with the guards here [at Guantanamo Bay]?

Answer: "If the guards treat me well and respect me, I will treat them well and respect them. If they are different from that, I will give them my back and not talk to them, because it will cause me problems and I don't want problems.

"The soldiers [the camp guards] lie about us a lot. They say an incident happened and it did not. They say we spit at them when we did not. They lie a lot."

Cursory questioning

There were questions regarding the detainee's health, and with that, it was over. The officers went into a classified session during which they would hear secret evidence.

And the detainee would never know what secret evidence against him existed.

We were struck by the cursory nature of the questioning, and the absence of an attempt to reconcile conflicting claims as to what the young, sullen detainee had actually done.

More than 60 of these boards have now taken place.

And on the basis of their recommendations, senior Pentagon officials decide if detainees remain in captivity or go free.

But the legal challenges to the procedures in place in Guantanamo Bay are mounting, and some judges are proving sympathetic to those challenges.

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Prosperous Afghanistan vital to regional stability: PM
Daily Times, Pakistan
ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said on Friday that a strong, stable and prosperous Afghanistan is not only in the interest of its people but also vital for the stability of the region.

Aziz was talking to an Afghan media delegation, who called on him at the Prime Minister’s House. Pakistan and Afghanistan are brotherly Muslim countries tied in religious, cultural, historic, trade and economic relations, he said. The prime minister said Pakistan had and would always stand by the people of Afghanistan as it was a sincere and true friend.

Pakistan, the prime minister said, had provided $100 million to Afghanistan to rebuild its infrastructure. Pakistan is interested in expanding road and air links with Afghanistan and is ready to extend technical training for its human resource development free of cost. He said that Pakistan had provided transit facility to landlocked Afghanistan for its exports and imports. app

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Rape of Afghanistan's forests bodes disaster
09.04.05 by Nick Meo The New Zealand Herald - Apr 08 10:07 AM
Before the outbreak of war in 1979, Afghanistan was famous for its unspoiled woodlands filled with wildlife. An unbroken belt of natural pistachio forest stretched across the north, giant 300-year-old cedars filled the mountain valleys of the east, and even the arid hills of the south were well-timbered.

Twenty-five years of war later, the extent of the country's environmental disaster is becoming frighteningly clear.

In 1977 satellite imaging found 55 per cent of Badghis Province was covered with woodlands. Now almost nothing shows up.

Desperate villagers stripped the mountainsides bare of trees to survive and, with no government authority to stop them, warlords found lumbering high-value trees such as walnut and cedar almost as profitable as the drugs trade.

Forestry experts believe the country has suffered an environmental disaster that has hardly been noticed by the outside world but is grimly apparent to villagers who are increasingly seeing their livelihoods destroyed by desertification.

The forests of the north - once famous throughout Asia for the pistachios they produced for export - have almost disappeared.

Sayed Bahram Saeedi, director of forestry at the agricultural ministry, estimates that half of Afghanistan's forestlands have been destroyed during the last 25 years of war and drought. In the east the figure may be higher than 70 per cent.

With government authority non-existent in many areas, the rape of the forests continues unchecked, and may even have been stepped up in the past three years as the end of fighting made it easier for timber mafias to operate.

Along the Pakistan border, huge areas of forest have been levelled. High-quality wood is exported to Pakistan's carpenters, who turn it into furniture for export to the Gulf. The rest is sold as firewood in Afghanistan - the dusty road from the border town of Khost to Kabul is constantly choked with convoys of trucks filled with wood.

In Kunar, a lawless province famous for giant 300-year-old trees, it is not the Taleban but the timber mafias who are blamed by United States troops for the majority of assaults on them. Warlords want to keep out the Afghan Government and its US supporters for fear that logging may be stopped.

Belatedly, some efforts are being made to slow the rate of destruction.

Reforestation projects are starting, such as one to re-plant pistachios - run by Afghan entrepreneurs in Samangan in the north.

American agro-forester Eddie Keturakis said that without tree cover to protect the land, gullies and canyons have been cut into the soil.

"Villagers are desperate to see the forest replaced, even though it takes eight years before pistachio nuts can be harvested," he said. "They cut most of the trees down to sell the wood to survive, and now they recognise what a terrible mistake that was."

A "Green Division" of 300 forest rangers is being trained and armed by the Afghan Government to try to protect what is left. They are to be stationed in the border provinces of Kunar, Paktia and Nuristan with plans to increase them to a force of 2000 by the end of the year.

Few think they will be a match for timber mafias armed with rocket-propelled grenades and machine-guns.

The warlords employ hundreds of men with dozens of chainsaws, bribing local officials to turn a blind eye and relying on giant camel caravans to move the wood over the mountains to Pakistan.

In the lower valleys of Kunar they have stripped mountainsides bare, leaving stumps where magnificent forests once grew.

Faqir Mohammed, a 70-year-old villager in the spectacular Yachina alpine valley, said the trade began about a decade ago when Pakistani merchants arrived with chainsaws. The trade had brought prosperity to his village, he said.

"It used to take a team of men two days to cut a tree with a handsaw," he said. "Now it can be done by one man in an hour with a chainsaw." Villages in the area had clubbed together to build a rough road into the mountains to truck the timber out. The surrounding mountainsides are still well-wooded.

But the old man admitted: "There are fewer trees than there were. I don't think there will be forests here for my great-grandchildren."

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Japan, Netherlands agree on need to help Afghanistan
Friday April 8, 2:41 PM
(Kyodo) _ The foreign ministers of Japan and the Netherlands agreed Friday on the need to help reconstruct Afghanistan while remaining apart over U.N. Security Council reforms, a Japanese official said.
Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura told Dutch Foreign Minister Bernard Bot that it is important to help Afghanistan hold elections planned for September.

Bot responded by saying that relevant countries should keep pace with each other in helping the country.

Japan is leading a project to promote disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of armed factions in Afghanistan, while the Netherlands is involved in the operation of the International Security Assistance Force.

Machimura also told Bot that Japan supports one of the reform plans presented by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to increase the number of permanent members on the U.N. Security Council to 11 from the current five, and that of nonpermanent members to 13 from 10.

Japan is seeking to win a permanent seat through the reforms.
 
But Bot told Machimura the Netherlands does not support any of Annan's reform plans.

Bot was also quoted as saying that the possibility of the European Union gaining permanent membership on the council should not be ruled out.

The Dutch foreign minister is currently in Japan on a four-day visit through Saturday.

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Meeting called to discuss gas pipeline security
By Khaleeq Kiani Dawn
ISLAMABAD, April 8: A three-nation ministerial steering committee on gas pipelines project will meet here on April 12-13 to discuss security situation in Afghanistan , underground gas storage capacity in Pakistan and certification of gas reserves in Turkmenistan's Daulatabad gas field.

A petroleum ministry official told Dawn on Friday that the meeting would be given four presentations relating to the construction of pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India.

The Turkmenistan government would give a presentation on the certification of Daulatabad gas field reserves. The steering committee involving Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan would then discuss the certification in detail.

Representatives of the Asian Development Bank would also attend the meeting. M/s Penspen, the consultant appointed by the ADB, would give a presentation on the project's feasibility study covering its technical, economic and legal aspects.

The Afghan representative would brief the participants about the security situation in his country in general and the pipeline's route areas in particular. The fourth presentation would be given by Sohfer gas, appointed by the government of Pakistan, on the prospects of utilizing the country's depleted underground storages to ensure uninterrupted supply in winter.

The sources said that gas supplies in summer were usually surplus and could be stored in strategic reserves in the old gas fields which had been depleted over the years.

The Daulatabad gas reserves certification and its authenticity would determine whether or not the $3 billion project is feasible. The committee has not met for the past 11 months owing to non-availability of this certification, though it is required to meet on a quarterly basis. Pakistan has been insisting for the past 20 months that certified reserves were a must for the progress of the project.

Sources said the gas pipeline politics had taken a new turn following advice by the United States to India not to pursue gas import plans from Iran. Following these statements by the US officials, Pakistan has started pursuing alternative gas import options from Turkmenistan and Qatar.

An official delegation would visit Doha on April 24-25 to attend a technical committee meeting with Qatar and Sharjah-based Crescent Petroleum to pursue the Qatar-Pakistan pipeline project. Pakistan has been asking Qatar to increase its throughput from 1.6 billion cubic feet (BCF) to 2BCF, but Doha has not given a commitment to this effect yet.

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Iranian president slams US use of violence
April 8, 2005
ROME (AFP) - Iranian President Mohammad Khatami accused the United States of resorting to violence and military strength to impose its will and criticized the US principle of "pre-emptive strikes".

"Unfortunately, the current US leaders, more than their predecessors, resort to violence, to military means, to impose their own will," Khatami told Italian daily Corriere della Sera in an interview.

"They believe in a principle that is absolutely dangerous which generates terrorism: the pre-emptive strike which provides a simple pretext to launch a military intervention," he said.

"In Iraq, there was the excuse of weapons of mass destruction: never found," he said.

"We are certainly not looking for a conflict with the United States. We are making efforts not to give (them) any reason. But we are making preparations on the political, military and economic level, based on our public opinion," Khatami warned.

"Iran is not Iraq or Afghanistan. Given what happened in Iraq, I would be surprised if the United States lacked wisdom and put itself in an even more complicated situation," the Iranian leader said.

Khatami meanwhile hailed European policy towards Tehran.

"We have welcomed very favourably the European proposal to open a dialogue with us. The progress has been slow but not disappointing," he said.

He reiterated that Tehran's nuclear programme -- a bone of contention with the United States and the European Union -- was not aimed at developing atomic weapons, but accused Israel of posing a threat to the Middle East.

"The entire region feels threatened by Israel which has the biggest nuclear arsenal in the region," he said.

Khatami, in Rome for the funeral Friday of Pope John Paul II, also paid tribute to the late pontiff.

"For me, it is very important to pay a full tribute to a John Paul II. He was a man of spirituality, ethics, justice. I hope that the road he paved will be pursued in the future," he said.