IRIN interview with UNICEF head Carol Bellamy

As the humanitarian crisis continues to unfold in Afghanistan, the plight of its children was highlighted this week when UNICEF executive director, Carol Bellamy travelled to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Bellamy went to the Afghan capital, Kabul, a number of refugee sites in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP), and the southwestern city on Quetta, where the UNICEF office was destroyed in October. Speaking to IRIN on the last day of her five-day mission to the region on Tuesday, Bellamy warned the crisis was far from over. QUESTION: What was the main purpose of your visit to the region? ANSWER: Now that we are able to restore more regularisation to some of our activities within Afghanistan, I wanted to see the situation on the ground. We never left Afghanistan so I wanted to thank our national staff for the extraordinary work they have done. Even at the time of the bombing, there was a polio immunisation campaign going on. But now we have international staff back in Kabul, Herat and Faizabad. I wanted to see how we were focusing on firstly, the immediate survival needs, which is our number one priority for kids right now and secondly, what we could start doing beyond the immediate survival needs to help, particularly in the areas of education and health. Q: What was your initial impression of what you saw in Kabul during your visit? A: Kabul, in my view, seemed relatively calm. But clearly you could see some results of the recent bombing. In addition, Kabul has been so heavily mined, even driving from the landing field, we had to do several detours for demining activitites going on. This was a reminder of the war going on. But I also saw in Kabul a great deal of activity and bustling in the street. I was told by the head of our office there, who only returned a week and a half ago, it was totally different when she had come back. It was very quiet and now the stores were open again, people were out in the streets and kids were playing. It isn't a question of normality, but clearly the security situation seems to have improved in Kabul and there were real opportunities to try to respond to people's needs. Q: How would you compare the status of children in Afghanistan with other troubled areas of the world? A: I remind people that the problems of Afghan children didn't start on 11 September. One of the reasons the situation is so bad is that Afghanistan has been at war for more than 20 years. There is no question that conflict or social unrest have terrible consequences, particularly for civilians. The face of war has changed. It's not military anymore, it's civilian and it falls harshly on women and children. Systems, for example education and health, simply stop functioning. That being said, I would say the picture of children in Afghanistan is very severe. We know from official statistics that outside sub-Saharan Africa, the condition of children in terms of under five mortality, the condition of women in terms of maternal mortality is about the worst in the world. Q: Speaking of 11 September, how have UNICEF's operations changed since then? A: They have changed in the sense that we continued to function inside of Afghanistan. Pursuit to appropriate review by the UN, we removed our international staff. This meant a reduction in our activities, but not a stopping of our efforts. It meant we had less communication with our staff in the country because there was an edict, at least in the Taliban areas. It meant a more insecure situation in some of the areas where we had offices. This also applied to our national staff and I'm talking about Mazar, Kandahar and Jalalabad. Security very much affects our ability to do work. Those are all the negative sides. The one change I would say post- 11 September that may prove positive are the potential opportunities that now exist. For example, we have been supporting these home schools as we were concerned that girls were denied an opportunity to go to school. We have been supporting some activities for women to be social mobilisers because we were concerned they were denied the right to work. +-Perhaps now there will be more opportunity for girls and women. We are certainly going to work to support that. Q: What is your main priority at the moment? A: Priority one, two and three is survival. The world shouldn't think everything is wonderful now just because some bombing has stopped in parts of Afghanistan. Conditions are very severe. In many parts of Afghanistan, people have left their home communities. They haven't necessarily become refugees, but they've moved somewhere else.Kids were already in bad health. There was serious malnutrition. Women were already not in good health. It's a country of widows. It is a very poor country and now many of them are displaced somewhere else. They're exposed and it's winter. So the number one priority is survival and for UNICEF that means working with for example the World Food Programme (WFP) which is bringing in food. We try to bring in items such as blankets and medical kits and things for clean water. Beyond that we will work on trying to get some things going, but the number one priority is survival. Q: What immediate steps are you going to take to revitalise education? A: We have been already providing materials and books, pencils and slate boards - things you need for a classroom to function. For the home schools we're going to stockpile some of that so we'll have it available for the public schools if they can get up and running. They're supposed to start up in Afghanistan on 21 March. Secondly, we are going try to identify teachers. Many of the people, mostly women, working in the home schools are trained teachers. We have already spoken to some women while I was there. Would they can go back and work in the public school system? Third we are prepared to assist with others in providing modest rehabilitation of some of the schools. Not building new schools. It might be repair work or assuring that there are sanitary facilities, plastic for the windows, heat or there is a proper roof on the facility. Fourth, I think in the short term we are going to go to donors and try to get them to agree to allow for some modest coverage of partial salaries for teachers. I think ultimately this is something the government has to do. But in the short term, as we did in East Timor, some modest subsidising of teachers' salaries is important. When we talked to the teachers in the home schools, they said they wanted to go back to teaching in the public school, but if they weren't going to get paid, they said they might as well stay in the home schools... Q: Do you see home based education expanding? A: No, I think it is more important for the public school system to get going again. But what I do think is very important to understand is the role - a very important role - that the home based schools have played over the past few years. Girls were prohibited from going to school and in many cases boys couldn't get much of an education either as most of the trained teachers in the country were women and weren't allowed to work. We will continue to look for ways that we can provide some assistance to the home schools - at least during this transitional period which will take some significant time. Again, UNICEF is not going to take over education, but we are going to try to help the new government get its education system going. Q: How do you see the education system evolving? A: Regarding previously held Taliban areas, there is still some kind of modest civil service infrastructure. But probably the area it exists in the least is education. I think a great deal of rebuilding is going to have to go on in the area of education by the government that leads the country. I don't have a crystal ball, but I do think it is going to require many things. It's going to require some significant investment in infrastructure and training. There hasn't been teacher training going on for the last several years. There are teachers in the country, as well as the diaspora. I think part of it will be trying to recruit some of the teachers from the diaspora back. It will require not only getting the primary school going again, which UNICEF will focus on, but also the universities. They also haven't functioned to some degree and they are necessary...you are going to need leaders in the future. It's going to be a comprehensive approach. I think UN agencies can assist, but it will have to be led by the government. Q: In terms of health care now, what are your plans and what are your priorities? A: This is an area where there is at least a little infrastructure still in place. Not a great deal, but in fact the immunisation campaign that took place even during the bombing, was largely run by the ministry of health officials. The World Health Organisation (WHO) and UNICEF helped in getting the vaccines in, etc, but it was run by the people in the country. As I said, our immediate priority is survival. But also in targeted areas, trying to make sure there are not things like measles outbreaks. It's really to help get the system start getting a routine immunisation programme going again. The question of access to clean water. Water distribution systems have been disrupted in the fighting. Although it would not be an immediate thing, trying to do some kind of nutritional surveys as we know Afghan children are severely malnourished. Additionally we have the issue of maternal mortality. This country has one of the worst incidence of women dying in pregnancy and child birth. I know together with the United Nations population agency, we will be working a lot on trying to reduce the incidence of maternal mortality. Q: How does the reconstruction of the health care system in Afghanistan compare to what we had in somewhere like Mozambique? A: I didn't live through the Mozambique one so it is harder. Nonetheless, I'm not sure that this is so different from other places. You've had war and fighting for so many years. You've had a period of time when the heath clinics didn't function very well, where they were not modestly stocked with supplies and where there wasn't a tradition of the people coming and using the health facilities. Over the past couple of years, women were even almost denied access except in limited places. But, it wasn't just in the last five years of deterioration. It's going to mean everything from the physical repairing of infrastructure, and I would emphasise preventive care at this point for the large part, as well as restocking of at least very basic medicine and medical supplies. In addition, advocacy in the community about some of the different health interventions. Q: What message would you like to bring to the international donor community? A: We mustn't forget that we are still dealing with a very significant humanitarian crisis - even more so this winter. Whether its with the refugees, the displaced, along the borders with Pakistan and Iran - that the humanitarian emergency hasn't gone away. Even if the bombing and fighting were to stop tomorrow, and it's stopped in a number of places, the humanitarian crisis is still very much with us - even when you are talking about reconstruction. Secondly, security is still a very big issue in this country. But a great deal of thinking and work has to be put into trying to determine how. Hopefully, if they come up with some kind of multi-representative government - that might help towards better security. We can't reach a lot of people now because of it. Q: So do you think security is the biggest challenge now? A: I think survival is the biggest challenge right now, but I think it is totally complicated by security. Maybe security is the biggest challenge, but if we could deal with security, we might be able to confront survival. They're really two sides of the coin. Q: Given what you have seen in the past few days, what is your overall prognosis? A: My prognosis is that the Afghan people are a very energetic, enterprising people. They have a lot to offer and a lot to give. They have really experienced terrible years. While not being overly optimistic, I think if they had an opportunity as human beings to get back to their lives, not always being impacted by fighting, it could be a vital country, but it will take many years. Do not assume that this is a crisis that disappears in 15 or 30 minutes of fame that the country has...I leave being aware of the huge job that remains ahead, but also thinking that there is some opportunity to see a more stable and healthier region.