AFGHANISTAN:Two Years After,Country's Biggest Woes Neglected

AFGHANISTAN: Two Years After, Country's Biggest Woes Neglected
Suvendrini Kakuchi - IPS 9/10/03

TOKYO, Sep 10 (IPS) - War-weary Afghanistan continues to suffer from stereotypical images about its political problems, but its biggest woes have to do with livelihood and economic issues that remain ignored, says a Japanese doctor who is a winner of the Ramon Magsaysay award, Asia's equivalent of the Nobel prize, this year.

Testu Nakamura accepted the award for peace and humanitarian work from the Manila-based Ramon Magsaysay Foundation this month, the same month that marks the anniversary of the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that led to U.S. military campaign that ousted the Taliban in November that year.

But Nakamura says that Afghanistan's real problems -- beyond the reports of U.S. troops' search for Taliban remnants -- seem to have been forgotten in the nearly two years since the military raids made in retaliation for the attacks in the United States blamed on Osama bin Laden.

Nakamura, who runs a hospital in Peshawar in neighbouring Pakistan and clinics in Afghanistan with 140 staff, most of them local, says he does not want to get involved in politics.

But drawing from his more than two decades' experience in the region, he says that the western and Japanese media focus too heavily on political and cultural aspect of the invasion of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.

This often gives the wrong picture of what life is like on the ground, says the doctor who is well-respected in Japan for his independent views on development aid.

"Drought is the biggest problem now facing the people in Afghanistan and the international community must be more concerned about this than the political images of war," he explained in an interview with IPS.

More than half of Afghanistan's 20 million people have been affected by the drought, which has also been affecting Central Asia to China, India, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq.

Nakamura cites estimates that 4 million Afghans are on the verge of starvation and one million might starve to death in the near future. ''It is said that 90 percent of livestock in Afghan villages died two years ago,'' he recounted.

''In some areas of Afghanistan, we have seen people walk several kilometres for water, sometimes for a whole day. Outbreaks of gastro-intestinal infections such as dysentery, amoebiasis and typhoid hit the area too,'' he said in his lecture accepting the award in Manila last week.

''So many children died,'' he said, adding that many get ill from drinking contaminated water. ''We have seen many children expiring in their mothers' arms in outpatients' waiting rooms at our clinics.''

''It may not be appropriate for a doctor to say this, but, at one point, I couldn't care less about treating diseases, because the situation had become so desperate that simply staying alive itself became very difficult,'' he added.

Nakamura's Peshawar Association runs a 70-bed hospital in Peshawar that handles leprosy, a clinic in northern Pakistan and three clinics in Afghanistan. More recently, it has turned to a 15-year effort to helping communities survive in drought conditions.

In the last three years, it has been working to Afghans dig wells - at times using landmines that are a legacy of decades of conflict to dig the holes and using help from former Taliban, anti-Taliban and even U.S. troops.

In March, the association started building a 16-kilometre canal in eastern Afghanistan. It is expected to irrigate up to 2,000 hectares of agricultural fields that had been turned into desert by the drought, enabling 150,000 farmers to stay alive.

Amid all these, Nakamura points out that 70 percent of the aid from western donors to Afghanistan has gone to foreign non-government organisations and U.N. groups, leaving the government with little to contribute to pressing needs identified by the local people.

He adds that continued military action by U.S. troops against the Taliban - just this week, U.S. officials were quoted as saying Taliban members were going across the border into Afghanistan from Pakistan -- has created war zones nearly two years after that ruling militia was ousted.

This, he points out, has added to the already large number of people who need priority help in Afghanistan.

"Western countries and Japan are aiding violence in Afghanistan by ignoring these urgent needs,'' he argued. ''The solution is to share the local concerns and uplift the lives of 20 million Afghans by pouring money into stopping the drought and saving lives if they want to eradicate the Taliban," he said in the interview.

Already, Afghans are saying they feel let down by foreign governments after the Taliban's ouster and the achievement of the military and political objectives in the U.S.-led 'war against terrorism'.

"We want the Americans to do something constructive for the Afghan people," opposition politician Ishaq Gailani was quoted by the British Broadcasting Corp as saying. "All they are interested in is their pursuit of al-Qaeda - which is basically a military objective."

The Peshawar Association's track record is also reflected in the fact that it was able to work when Afghanistan was under Soviet occupation, through the Taliban's rule, during the U.S. attacks on the country and afterwards.

Nakamura says his work in Afghanistan has also made him a campaigner for a greater understanding of Islam, at a time of what he calls growing discrimination against members of the faith. "The award encourages me and boosts my energy to carry on with my work,'' the doctor told IPS. The award ''is also an important tribute to the growing need to accept Muslims as ordinary people and negate suspicion and eradicate growing discrimination against them'' as a violent group.

Nakamura's work is also important for Japan, says Izumi Aizu, director of Asia Network Research and a consultant to the government on aid to Afghanistan.

''Nakamura's work has highlighted two important points for the Japanese. He has shown that Japanese people can contribute to effective humanitarian aid without public funds,'' he said. The Peshawar Association does not get funds from Japanese government but from donations from 12,000 members.

''By working independently he has maintained his own vision without Japanese govt interference and that is highly applaudable,'' Aizu said.

Given the case of Afghanistan, Nakamura says, the U.S. government would do well to review the policies behind its occupation of Iraq.

"What I am trying to do is to show the side of the weak people, such as people in Iraq who are suffering as a result of American bombing,'' he said. ''It is important that the American government does not pursue a violent policy against Iraq.''

Nakamura was born in Fukuoka, studied medicine in the Kyushu University and started his career, but was drawn to Afghanistan by his love for mountain climbing.

In 1964, he volunteered for the Japan Overseas Christian Medical Cooperative Service in Peshawar, headed the hospital's leprosy-control unit -- and began what would lead to decades of work in the region.