Climate change, women’s rights, displacement, poverty: Afghanistan remains a priority since it faces overlapping crisis, said UN Head of Help, Tom Fletcher AFP On Wednesday, deploding “brutal” help budget.
“We have identified 17 crises worldwide where our commitment is more urgent, more vital. Afghanistan is at the top on that list,” said the United Nations Deputy Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs in an interview with AFP During a visit to the province of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan.
Fletcher’s visit occurs after the decision of the president of the United States, Donald Trump, to reduce foreign aid, sent shock waves worldwide.
Washington had been the main donor of Afghanistan, after spent $ 3.71 billion in humanitarian and development aid since the Taliban returned to power in 2021.
“We are in a period in which we have to prioritize massively, make brutal decisions … Literally life and death options, where to operate and what lives to save,” said Fletcher.
“You can look at Sudan the scale of the crisis, you can look at Gaza the intensity, the ferocity of the murder there,” he added. “Afghanistan is a different type of challenge, but it is a great challenge anyway.”
Climate change is hitting the country “particularly hard” and “will boost needs even more than the conflict in the period ahead,” he said. “You have combined it with the existing levels of poverty and these decades of instability and conflict.”
‘Dialogue’ on women’s rights
The situation of women’s rights in the country adds to the layers of a “crisis construction on the crisis,” Fletcher added.
The Taliban authorities have imposed restrictions on women that the UN has denounced as “gender apartheid.” Women and girls have been expelled from education beyond primary school, as well as many work sectors and public spaces.
“I think this particular dynamic around women and girls is something that can surely even go through the hardest and most cynical transactional politician at this time,” said Fletcher.
After meetings with Taliban officials this week in Kabul and the Taliban heart of southern Kandahar, Fletcher pointed out the need for “dialogue to try to change the mentality” in women’s rights.
“It is encouraging for me that people were willing to have the conversation and not have it in a purely defensive way,” he said.
Afghan women are particularly affected by humanitarian aid cuts, especially in the health sector, which has depended largely on foreign support.
In Afghanistan, the 620 maternal mortality rates per 100,000 births and infant mortality rates of 55 children under five per 1,000 births are among the highest in the world, according to UNICEF.
“I challenge anyone who celebrated the help cuts to sit with a woman who has lost her son because she had to ride a bicycle for three hours while working to get the attention she needed,” said Fletcher, after having met Afghan women in a mobile health center.
‘Humanitarian restoration’
When A Amina, a 28 -year -old housewife, fell ill, walked for an hour and a half to get to the center in the rural field.
“There are no clinics, or doctors who come here, nothing close. We don’t even have electricity,” she said AFP.
The small installation, supported by the local non -governmental organization Jack and the UN agencies, is under tension.
Already overwhelmed, now he has to accommodate patients of the United States clinics who had to close, as well as the Afghans who have been expelled from Pakistan since the beginning of April.
“The reality with the cuts was that we did not see the impact immediately,” said Fletcher. “It is now that we are really understanding how brutal these cuts will be.”
Under these conditions, he said: “We are in the process of a massive humanitarian restart.”
“We have to rediscover that feeling of coexistence and care of the most vulnerable people on the planet. I don’t think it has disappeared just for some electoral results,” he said. “I don’t think you can put tariffs on humanitarian action,” he added, referring to the commercial war recently launched by Trump.
