Long Neglected, Camps in Kabul Get a Deluge of Aid

By ROD NORDLAND


The 6,000 refugees living in the Charahi Qambar camp did not object when American soldiers came by Saturday to deliver 1,100 blankets for the families there. Nor did they mention that the day before, an Afghan aid group, Aschiana, had also made a delivery of blankets, and was planning to come back on Sunday with clothing — at least the third such donation in a few days, the others coming from businessmen.

And two Afghan aid groups financed by the German government brought about $187,000 worth of charcoal, milk and hot water bottles on Sunday, while the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees planned to give each family three more blankets on Thursday.

The Charahi Qambar site is one of the camps where shortages of food and fuel have led to young children dying of the cold during severe weather over the past month, and news coverage of the deaths has galvanized the aid community and the government here, as well as donors abroad. There are 40 camps in Kabul housing repatriated refugees and other displaced Afghans.

But the response has been chaotic and disorganized, with some camps receiving little aid and others being deluged with duplicated aid. “We don’t know who’s done what and where; it’s mad,” said Federico Motka, whose organization, Welthungerhilfe, a German aid group, has had a long-term presence in the camps.

“We have to do something about the duplication,” acknowledged Mehr Khuda Sabar, an official with the Afghan government’s disaster relief and development agency.

Much of the disorganization is a result of many new agencies joining the effort that had not worked in the camps before, said Aidan O’Leary, the head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “People are anxious to do something and that’s all very, very positive,” he said.

Despite the Afghan government’s early skepticism that any children were dying of the cold, last week President Hamid Karzai asked embassies and donors to provide emergency aid. Relief agencies that had previously not been involved rushed out winter emergency programs, including the United States. Emissaries of the Afghan president visited Sayid Mohammad, a father who recently lost the eighth of his nine children, this one to the cold, promising to bring him to the presidential palace for an audience, Mr. Mohammad said.

On Sunday, two deaths were reported in the Parwan-e-Do camp, housing refugees from northern Baghlan Province, as were two more in the Parwan-e-Se camp. The victims were all 2 or younger, according to the parents and camp leaders. In all, The New York Times has confirmed the deaths of 28 children in the camps since mid-January.

Charitable groups working in the camps confirmed a major increase in donations. “People are writing from all over the country wanting to send their winter clothing and baby sweaters, etc. to us,” said John Bradley, head of the Lamia Afghan Foundation in the United States, which moved quickly to deliver warm clothing it had already shipped to Afghanistan on military transports. The Afghan aid group Aschiana, which has the largest full-time presence in the camps, reported raising more than $17,000 in a few days from small donors in the United States through its American branch.

Individual Afghans pitched in as well. Ramazan Bashardost, a member of Parliament and well-known gadfly, visited the Nasaji Bagrami Camp, where 16 children died of cold, and handed out 1,000 Afghanis (about $20) to each of the 250 families there. He was shocked by the conditions of the tent-and-mud-hut camps, most of them within Kabul and many next to comparatively well-off neighborhoods. “It is not a life for a human, it is a life for animals,” he said.

The turnabout among government and international agencies was drastic, though all had explanations for why they had not previously paid attention to the camps. The United Nations refugee agency said it had focused on providing winter aid to 200,000 people in rural and remote areas. The World Food Program said its Kabul programs targeted the most vulnerable: widows and disabled people. And the American military does not normally distribute humanitarian aid in the camps; this one, however, was organized by the chaplain’s office at headquarters in Kabul.

The United States aid agency, U.S.A.I.D., by far the largest aid donor in Afghanistan, said that its winter efforts in have been in remote areas like Badakhshan Province, where winters are very harsh. “Being prepared for a disaster is one of the most difficult things to do,” said S. Ken Yamashita, the agency’s director in Afghanistan, “because by definition you do not know when a disaster will strike.”

Mr. Yamashita declined to say where those distributions would take place because the groups providing aid on behalf of the agency did not want it known in which camps they were working. In addition, he confirmed that the aid was not being identified as coming from the United States, in case it might pose some risk or discomfort to the recipients.

Lane Hartill, a spokesman for Save the Children, which delivered some of the American agency’s assistance on Saturday, said the organization preferred to distribute aid without identifying the source. “Our ability to provide help in a place like Afghanistan relies on us being neutral and being perceived as neutral,” Mr. Hartill said.

Aid groups with experience in the camps found the extra attention a mixed blessing. Mr. Motka, with the German aid group, said the increased donations had enabled his organization to schedule a second distribution of firewood to all the residents in 17 camps, which should take place in the next few days and should get them through until March.

On the other hand, he said, he was concerned that focusing on the humanitarian emergency would distract attention from the need for long-term solutions, such as finding the displaced Afghans land and adequate housing.

The outpouring of aid “will keep them alive,” Mr. O’Leary, of the United Nations, said. “But we can’t afford to lose sight that there has to be a better solution going forward, so we are not dealing with this situation every time winter comes about.”

Aid workers in the camps were confident that the worst of the crisis was past. “It is enough now that no more children will die,” said Mohammad Zahir Haslam, who was supervising the German charcoal aid delivery.

Many of the camp residents said they were not so sure. Mr. Mohammad, whose 3-month-old son, Khan, died Wednesday, was contemptuous of the clothing distribution he received from the Afghan Red Crescent — much of it consisting of thin scarves and summer blouses, some so gossamer they were culturally inappropriate, and none very warm.

With many of his neighbors, Mr. Mohammad spent Sunday worrying about another snowstorm, currently under way and expected to last through Monday, with temperatures predicted to drop even lower — to 5 degrees Fahrenheit — than the historic lows of the past month.

“What can we do?” Mr. Mohammad asked. He did not mention that he and everyone else in the camp had just received a bag of the German charcoal; on the other hand, they apparently had little or no food.