5. Violations of Humanitarian Access

The military defeat of the Taliban was expected to provide a more secure environment to support the massive relief program necessary to avert a humanitarian tragedy in Afghanistan. But many agencies are reporting that access to at-risk civilians has become even more difficult in terms of both food delivery inside Afghanistan and protection of refugees and internally displaced persons at the border areas.³⁷

The collapse of the Taliban and reduced US bombing of cities has enabled aid agencies to transport greater tonnage of food into major population centers. However, with the Northern Alliance assuming control throughout Afghanistan, there has been a return to the local factionalism that characterized the 1992-96 period, when the country was torn apart by infighting.³⁸ This means that secondary distribution to towns and villages in more remote areas – the critical step for getting food into the hands of those who actually need it – has become even more difficult in the face of increasingly localized violence and looting. The following examples illustrate this problem:

• Shortly after the fall of Kabul, the BBC reported: “Since the Taliban were removed from areas around the main road between Pakistan and Kabul, hardly any food aid has got in because the route is so unstable.”³⁹
• Factional fighting among the Northern Alliance again forced aid agencies to withdraw their international staff from Mazar-i-Sharif on 3 December.⁴⁰ A refugee analyst reported that: “In the first two weeks following the US-backed Northern Alliance’s capture of Mazar-i-Sharif and most of northern Afghanistan, delivery of humanitarian assistance dropped by more than half.”⁴¹
• Oxfam America reports that: “large areas of the country are now riven by factionalism, war, looting, banditry and fear – a situation that is preventing food aid getting through… Three quarters of the trucking routes into Afghanistan are currently suspended… On 20 November, armed men stopped food convoys traveling from Kabul to Bamyan in the central highlands, as they tried to extort ‘taxes’.”⁴²

The situation for Afghan refugees and IDPs has also deteriorated. Neighboring states have closed their borders to scores of civilians fleeing war and hunger, restricted their access to relief aid and organizations, and denied to those who do enter their territory the legal protections of refugee status, in contravention of the 1951 Refugee Convention’s requirement to “provide asylum to refugees, irrespective of their mode of arrival.”⁴³ Such policies trap at-risk civilians in inhospitable areas “with cases of malnutrition and disease on the rise because essential, life-saving conditions such as access to food, clean water and medicines cannot be provided.”⁴⁴ Rather than press for humanitarian access and free movement in accordance with international law, the US sent the FBI to help states tighten border controls.⁴⁵

• The Uzbek government continued to close its only bridge to Afghanistan even after the fall of the Taliban and restricted use of barges for transporting food aid, making it “impossible to increase the traffic of humanitarian aid that is of such vital importance to the populations of North Afghanistan.”⁴⁶
• Iran has established several new camps inside Afghanistan with very limited access to international relief agencies. This policy removes any recourse for refugees and IDPs to international legal monitoring and protection.⁴⁷
• Pakistan is relocating 70,000 Afghan refugees from Jalozai camp to new sites closer to the Afghan border. Médecins Sans Frontières has criticized this “utterly inhumane policy and practice… Moving them so close to the border not only puts their lives at risk, we also fear that it will make it easier for them to be pushed the last couple of kilometres back into Afghanistan in the near future.”⁴⁸

Violations of the right to humanitarian access – by the Northern Alliance inside Afghanistan and the border states in connection with Afghan refugees and IDPs, with active US support – has placed significant numbers of civilians at risk of starvation and disease. Oxfam America has unequivocally condemned these policies:

The breakdown of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law inside Afghanistan, and the collapse of the international refugee asylum system in the region, amount to a profound failure by the international community to uphold those measures introduced in the aftermath of the Second World War to ensure that massive abuses of human rights would never be allowed to happen again.⁴⁹