Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-02-Speech-2-141"
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"en.20011002.6.2-141"2
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". – Madam President, the situation was already bad and now it is worse. I totally agree with what has been said this afternoon on the situation of the people in Afghanistan.
It is a far more difficult and demanding task to manage the convoys of new supplies coming in, given the internal situation that exists today.
Things are different in the north-eastern part controlled by the Northern Alliance and in the rest of the country. But from the humanitarian point of view it is quite evident that our activities must be targeted at the whole country. That is how it must be.
We are using three financial tools to fund the aid to the Afghan population. First – and this is to set the record straight – over the past ten years we have provided humanitarian aid of more than EUR 400 million to internally displaced persons in Afghanistan and refugees in neighbouring countries: ECHO funds, drought mitigation and response activities like food aid, agricultural rehabilitation, water and sanitation rehabilitation, assistance to internally displaced persons and to refugees in Pakistan, as well as prevention of displacements and support for returnees. So this is more than just food aid. ECHO and the organisations working with our money have managed to build up a portfolio of meaningful activities that they have been able to continue.
I add that one unfortunate international case is not representative of the situation of the 29 organisations that the Commission is funding. It is a difficult situation but it is important to note that the organisations we are funding cannot be accused of the same kind of activity. They were able to work with expatriates until 11 September and to build up a portfolio of activity, which I was very much looking forward to coming to see. I pay tribute also to my predecessor in this job for laying the seeds of this kind of good cooperation with the European humanitarian NGOs.
We have, this year, committed EUR 23 million to ECHO, channelled through NGOs and different UN agencies. As I said, this would have covered a continuation of this level of activity until the end of the year. Then this terrible act of terrorism took place. We reacted immediately with an additional EUR 4 million. This is committed for action through the World Food Programme, UNHCR, and the International Red Cross.
Now our response has to go beyond this. We will approach the budgetary authority in order to get the green light for accessing and using funds from the emergency budget reserve, as in earlier years when ECHO's normal budget did not cover the needs that arose because of terrible events. We announced EUR 25 million a week ago in the Commission. It will form part of this operation and be directed at the immediate situation of the refugees. We will be asking for more money. But this is covered by the normal procedure for accessing additional money.
The second line of support is EC aid to uprooted people. Here we fund activities creating environments conducive to a sustainable resettlement of returnees and activities aimed at persuading people to remain in their villages. This budget line will commit funds from October for a budget of EUR 19 million in Afghanistan, EUR 3 million in Pakistan and EUR 2 million in Iran. Funds are channelled through Afghan NGOs and UN agencies.
The third line is EC food aid and food security. Since the beginning of this year this line has committed 30 000 tonnes of food aid to the World Food Programme and 7 000 tonnes to NGOs. A further EUR 7 million is now being requested by the Commission for the WFP Afghan programme.
Let me address some of the questions that have been asked. Mrs Nicholson mentioned that we should do more through UNHCR and WHO to broaden the broad basis and improve the organisation of this assistance. In relation also to Mr Van den Berg's remarks, from a commercial management point of view, if you will, the operation in Afghanistan is a good case of cooperation between the UN organisations and those very professional and relatively big and specialised NGOs which, for some years now, have formed part of the operation. What we need now are operational plans for concrete action. We hear in the media now about a convoy getting through the Khyber Pass and going north. This is a ‘pilot scheme’, so to speak, which may also progress towards Kabul and on, to try to see what is possible. But there is no overall plan in place; this was a response to the UNHCR proposals in the discussion with donors for better planning so as to know what to do and not be burdened down with red tape, as Mr Knolle called it. This is not the problem. I would go as far as to say that in general this is not the problem with our work in the humanitarian aid area. Please keep in mind that the totality of ECHO's budget is used every year and this year we are coming to you asking for more because of this situation. The red tape here is minimal.
Protection was mentioned. Here we are in a terrible dilemma. We cannot push those voluntary organisations that work with our money into doing something that goes beyond what they want to do. On the other hand, we have a problem as a funder, for example if they want to do something very daring that may get them into trouble and we just do what we can on the issue of security, no questions asked. Chechnya is a case in point; the Russians are still denying our NGOs access to radios, and this is a real problem for the safety of the people there. This is a balancing act and the responsibility that we have as the funder of the activity goes far into the issue of security. Again, working with the UN is partly an answer to this, but working to deliver humanitarian aid now to the Taliban-controlled part of Afghanistan under some sort of armed protection is not an option.
We put Afghanistan on the list of so-called forgotten crises when we fixed ECHO's programme and priorities for 2001. We had a spending level of some EUR 23 million, which would have covered the continuation until New Year of the very last activity that we were funding there. In fact we had 29 European NGOs delivering humanitarian aid inside Afghanistan. They were all there on 11 September. On 11 September I was on my way to a mission to Afghanistan and to Pakistan. I was supposed to meet Dr Masood, the Taliban leadership and to go around the whole country seeing the work of these NGOs that we are funding. I had to cancel the trip. The morning after, we took the train back from London to Brussels but our luggage was already in the aeroplane for Islamabad.
There has to be a very open humanitarian mode of operation where suspicion about how one moves around in their country is not a factor. But this is extremely difficult. I agree with what Mrs Frahm and Mrs Bonino said about the situation of women. This is the most extreme version of a denial and violation of human rights apparent to us. It is part of the conflict that they are in the midst of, and one would hope that sanity emerges after what we are about to go through now.
Mr Belder mentioned the export of drugs. It should in all objectivity be noted that the Taliban has made an incredible effort to reduce the production of opium and this may be one of the best cases globally that we have seen where they have done what the international community would like to see done. It reflects a totally different agenda, but has in fact taken place, and so I believed I should mention it.
As regards Mr Morillon's reference to the deceased leader of the Northern Alliance, Ahmed Shah Masood, we have no better answer than the one very well presented by Commissioner Patten as our view of the need for a comprehensive sort of basis for shaping the future of Afghanistan. This is the line to take. Mr Morillon also asked me if I had the determination and the means to do what must be done. We are relying on the international aid organisations to do what needs to be done on the ground. We have not been hesitant in mobilising funds and are actively participating in the region with the people representing ECHO who are permanently stationed there. We are participating in the debate on how to organise things and to understand the situation as much as possible.
In response to Mr Staes, consideration for the countries in the Central Asian region bordering Afghanistan to the north will be part of the package I mentioned and we are discussing resources in addition to the EUR 25 million that we have publicly mentioned. In respect of the dialogue with the budgetary authority, we are not releasing figures other than this EUR 25 million, but this will be an element in that package which we will be coming back to quite soon.
Thank you for your patience. This is an extremely demanding situation. I see this as something that demonstrates to us that, looking back on the history of our own experiment in Europe, we got organised to do what needed to be done in Europe after the Second World War and we did it. The problem we are discussing here today and the challenges it involves tell us that Europe now needs to get organised and find a way of achieving what the world needs to achieve.
Now, as I said, the situation is worse. Winter is approaching. Winter is such a dominating feature of reality there that even in normal years military fighting more or less stops simply because getting around is so difficult. So humanitarian aid now faces a really scary challenge.
The international staff of the different aid agencies and NGOs have all been withdrawn from the country. However, it is very encouraging to see that the local staff is continuing to distribute food – if the food has not been taken over by the Taliban – and is still running health clinics and providing education where it is possible. Obtaining real, true information is extremely difficult, but we can see that they are trying to keep these activities going even in this situation.
Of course the threat of an outside attack has resulted in large movements of population. This also has the effect that we cannot rely on people accessing the different storage centres for food as they used to, because they have fled into the countryside in their millions and lost the access to food they had in the cities. So the internal situation is extremely bad and the people who make it to the border look even weaker than they did before. Some six million Afghanis are considered to be totally dependent on food supplies from the outside.
If no planting is possible before the winter sets in – and this is most probable – we are in for a very serious threat within less than half a year, even if things work out well in terms of stability. The very logistics of what is needed down the line, even on the basis of the best case scenario, pose a formidable challenge.
We have supported the different UN organisations very actively, and participated at the meeting of the Afghan support group in Berlin on 27 September. The UN has launched a UN-donor alert in support of emergency assistance. The alert calls for some USD 580 million from now until March next year to ensure that delivery of humanitarian assistance and the protection of what is estimated to be around 7.5 million Afghans. USD 120 million is required immediately. Funding of this appeal would, in fact, seem to be less of a problem than the overall question of accessibility to internally displaced people and refugees.
There are conflicting views in the discussion as to whether emphasis should be placed on keeping the additional migratory flows within Afghanistan or on encouraging Pakistan and Iran to open their borders, as the UNHCR intends to do. My personal analysis of this is that we are only able to influence the choice of these people to a very small degree. Things may happen and we will have to be very flexible in order to be able to do what we need to do as things develop.
We have never had to draw up a contingency plan with so few given elements and so many unknowns. The need to keep food aid going was central to the discussion at this Afghan group meeting. Everybody agreed on the urgency, but concurred that the prospects for actually delivering such aid were quite poor. Most participants argued that food-aid distribution without the presence of expatriates could expose Afghan partners to undue risk. My earlier reference to Afghan local staff continuing to do what they did before the expatriates had to leave relates to deliveries of existing food and other stocks."@en1
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