GENEVA, Switzerland — The
UN said Tuesday it needed $5 billion in aid for
Afghanistan in 2022 to avert a humanitarian catastrophe and offer the ravaged country a future after 40 years of suffering.
اضافة اعلان
In its biggest-ever single-country appeal, the UN
said $4.4 billion was needed within Afghanistan, while a further $623 million
was required to support the millions of Afghans sheltering beyond its borders.
The UN said 22 million people inside Afghanistan and
a further 5.7 million displaced Afghans in five neighboring countries needed
vital relief this year.
“A full-blown humanitarian catastrophe looms. My
message is urgent: don’t shut the door on the people of Afghanistan,” said UN
aid chief
Martin Griffiths.
“Help us scale up and stave off wide-spread hunger,
disease, malnutrition and ultimately death.”
Since the Taliban
hardline Islamist movement seized control in mid-August as the US ended its
20-year war in Afghanistan, the country has plunged into financial chaos, with
inflation and unemployment surging.
Washington has frozen billions of dollars of the
country’s assets, while aid supplies have been heavily disrupted.
Afghanistan also suffered its worst drought in
decades in 2021.
Without the aid package, “there won’t be a future”,
Griffiths told reporters in Geneva.
‘40 years of insecurity’
The Taliban authorities said
the aid appeal for suffering Afghans was “very needed”.
“But at the same time I would like to say the need
is for all this assistance approved in the past to be delivered during this
harsh winter,” senior Taliban leader
Suhail Shaheen, the group’s designated UN
representative, told AFP.
He said the inflow of funds would also help in the
functioning of the now dilapidated banking system, adding that any cash coming
into the country will help rein in the inflation.
“The banks are not working properly so there is also
a need to control the inflation and that can be controlled when dollars ...
hard currency come to Afghanistan,” Shaheen said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said
injecting cash into the economy was critical to get the wheels of the economy
turning again and avoid a further slide into deeper pain and poverty.
Griffiths said the appeal, if funded, would help aid
agencies ramp up the delivery of food and agriculture support, health services,
malnutrition treatment, emergency shelters, access to water and sanitation,
protection and education.
An estimated 4.7 million people will suffer from
acute malnutrition in 2022, including 1.1 million children with severe acute
malnutrition.
Griffiths said that without humanitarian aid,
distress, deaths, hunger and further mass displacement would follow, “robbing
the people of Afghanistan of the hope that their country will be their home and
support, now and in the near term”.
However, if international donors come forward, “we
will see the opportunity for an Afghanistan which may finally see the fruits of
some kind of security.”
The US, saying it “remains committed to helping the
people of Afghanistan”, pledged an initial $308 million to provide life-saving aid
for the most vulnerable in the country this year.
Fear of implosion
Griffiths said the security
situation for humanitarian organizations in Afghanistan was probably better now
than for many years, adding that the staff in the ministries in Kabul largely
remained the same as before the Taliban takeover.
The money will go to 160 NGOs plus UN agencies
delivering aid. Some will be used to pay frontline workers such as healthcare
staff — but not via the Taliban administration.
UN refugees chief
Filippo Grandi said the aid
package’s goal was to stabilize the situation within Afghanistan, including for
internally displaced people, thereby preventing a further flood of migrants
fleeing across the country’s borders.
“That movement of people will be difficult to manage,
in the region and beyond, because it will not stop at the region,” he said.
“If those efforts are not successful, we will have to ask
for $10 billion next year, not $5 billion.”
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