From the Guardian...

[barbara100 at jps.net]

Front page of the Guardian today.  I don't read the news much, but I wonder if this story landed in any American newpapers...


http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,629653,00.html

Afghans eat grass as aid fails to arrive 

The resurgence of rival warlords is 
stopping relief supplies reaching 
desperate communities in remote 
northern mountain settlements 

Ravi Nessman in Bonavash, 
northern Afghanistan 
Wednesday January 9, 2002 
The Guardian 


The village of Bonavash is slowly starving. Besieged by the Taliban and crushed by years of drought, people in this remote mountain settlement have resorted to eating bread made from grass and traces of barley flour. Babies whose mothers' milk has dried up are fed grass porridge. The toothless elderly crush grass into a near powder. 

Many have died. More are sick. Nearly everyone has diarrhoea or a hacking cough. Many are too weak to stand. Others cannot leave their homes. Some children have soft bloated bellies. When the pain becomes unbearable, their mothers tie rags around their stomachs to try to alleviate the pressure. One man has grown so weak he cannot move. Last week, he went blind. 

"We are waiting to die. If food does not come, if the situation does not change, we will eat this... until we die," said Ghalam Raza, a 42-year-old man with a hacking cough, pain in his stomach and bleeding bowels. 

Bonavash is the most accessible village in the remote northern mountain region of Abdullah Gan, where about 10,000 people live. People in even more distant reaches, days away by donkey, are worse off, according to aid workers and Bonavash residents who have been there.  They describe people who do not even have barley to mix with the grass, and who simply eat it straight from the ground.  People whose stomachs are rock hard from hunger. People who
died in front of them. 

"If we cannot get aid within the month, we will be as bad as they are," said Dawood, the commander in Bonavash, who like many Afghans uses one name. 

The Abdullah Gan region is "a humanitarian crisis," said Ahmed Idrees Rahmani, the International Rescue Committee's acting coordinator in northern Afghanistan. 

Hundreds of thousands more are also living in desperate conditions in the mountain regions along the former front lines between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, Mr Rahmani said.

[...]

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