Community | November 28, 2009 | 14 comments

Afghan children 'die from neglect'

Vierotchka
Afghan refugees who fled the war-torn south have claimed they are so neglected by government in Kabul that their children are dying from hypothermia for want of the most basic supplies.

Families that left Helmand, Kandahar and other southern provinces to escape the fighting between US-led forces and a resurgent Taliban say the cold is much more lethal.

Living in a make-shift camp on the edge of Kabul, residents told Al Jazeera's James Bays that no government official has ever come to see how they have been forced to live.

The claim comes as UN officials say Afghan children are suffering disastrous levels of abuse and deprivation.

Rights of the child

At a news conference marking the 20th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child this week, officials said children’s rights were being neglected despite vast flows of Western aid into the country.

“Afghanistan has the highest infant mortality rate in the world," said yCatherine Mbengue, country representative for the UN children’s fund Unicef.

“Seventy per cent of the population has no access to safe drinking water. Thirty percent of children are involved in child labour. Forty-three per cent of girls are married under-age,” she said.

More than one in four children born in Afghanistan die before the age of five, according to Unicef estimates.
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    Community,   Current Tonight,   Human Rights,   Afghanistan News
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    News and Politics Politics War Children 13 more
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14 comments // Afghan children 'die from neglect' // Video

  • courage
  • samthesixth
  • WhiteNoise
    • 0
      WhiteNoise  
    • Now that would be telling ;)

      ...but what about heroin & big banks laundering that generated money ?
      ...what about the military industrial complex spending spree ?
      ...what about them pesky afghan women, kids & proles hating our liberties ;)

      A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies. And we are dying now. We will either wake from our state of induced childishness, one where trivia and gossip pass for news and information, one where our goal is not justice but an elusive and unattainable happiness, to confront the stark limitations before us, or we will continue our headlong retreat into fantasy. - Chris Hedges * Empire of Illusion / The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

      " The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group or any controlling private power. " : President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

      Back to where we never left....

      "To maintain this position of disparity (U.S. economic-military supremacy)... we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming.... We should cease to talk about vague and... unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standard and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.... The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better." - George Kennan [Director of Policy Planning U.S. State Department 1948]

    • 2 years ago
  • cynker
  • samthesixth
  • joy85
    • 0
      joy85  
    • So sad. More people need to realize how much war effects so many more people than just the ones fighting it(soldiers).

    • 2 years ago
  • CalPal
  • WhiteNoise
  • WhiteNoise
    • 0
      WhiteNoise  
    • Image
    • I'm afraid saving humans its not as glamor or a priority !

      ...nah, this is the nitty gritty...

      Americans Are Deeply Involved In Afghan Drug Trade

      The U.S. set the stage for the Afghan (and Pakistan) war eight years ago, when it handed out drug dealing franchises to warlords on Washington's payroll. Now the Americans, acting as Boss of All Bosses, have drawn up hit lists of rival, “Taliban” drug lords. “It is a gangster occupation, in which U.S.-allied drug dealers are put in charge of the police and border patrol.”

      “U.S.-allied drug dealers are put in charge of the police and border patrol, while their rivals are placed on American hit lists.”

      If you’re looking for the chief kingpin in the Afghanistan heroin trade, it’s the United States. The American mission has devolved to a Mafiosi-style arrangement that poisons every military and political alliance entered into by the U.S. and its puppet government in Kabul. It is a gangster occupation, in which U.S.-allied drug dealers are put in charge of the police and border patrol, while their rivals are placed on American hit lists, marked for death or capture. As a result, Afghanistan has been transformed into an opium plantation that supplies 90 percent of the world’s heroin.

      An article in the current issue of Harper’s magazine explores the inner workings of the drug-infested U.S. occupation, it’s near-total dependence on alliances forged with players in the heroin trade. The story centers on the town of Spin Boldak, on the southeastern border with Pakistan, gateway to the opium fields of Kandahar and Helmand provinces. The chief Afghan drug lord is also the head of the border patrol and the local militia. The author is an undercover U.S.-based journalist who was befriended by the drug lord’s top operatives and met with the U.S. and Canadian officers that collaborate with the drug dealer on a daily basis.

      The alliance was forged by American forces during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and has endured and grown ever since. The drug lord, and others like him throughout the country, is not only immune to serious American interference, he has been empowered through U.S. money and arms to consolidate his drug business at the expense of drug-dealing rivals in other tribes, forcing some of them into alliance with the Taliban. On the ground in Pashtun-speaking Afghanistan, the war is largely between armies run by heroin merchants, some aligned with the Americans, others with the Taliban. The Taliban appear to be gaining the upper hand in this Mafiosa gang war, the origins of which are directly rooted in U.S. policy.

      “It is a war whose order of battle is largely defined by the drug trade.”
      Is it any wonder, then, that the United States so often launches air strikes against civilian wedding parties, wiping out the greater part of bride and groom's extended families? America’s drug-dealing allies have been dropping dimes on rival clans and tribes, using the Americans as high-tech muscle in their deadly feuds. Now the Americans and their European occupation partners have institutionalized the rules of gangster warfare with official hit lists of drug dealers to be killed or captured on sight – lists drawn up by other drug lords affiliated with the occupation forces.

      This is the “war of necessity” that President Barack Obama has embraced as his own. It is a war whose order of battle is largely defined by the drug trade. Obama's generals call for tens of thousands of new U.S. troops in hopes of lessening their dependency on the militias and police forces currently controlled by American-allied drug dealers. But of course, that will only push America's Afghan partners in the drug trade into the arms of the Taliban, who will cut a better deal. Then the generals were argue that they need even more U.S. troops.

      The Americans created this drug-saturated hell, and their occupation is now doomed by it. Unfortunately, they have also doomed millions of Afghans in the process.

    • 2 years ago
  • artemis6
    • 0
      artemis6  
    • We did this . We should make it right . It the extra troops go to building shelters and helping these people , who's only crime is being born in the wrong location , then , I am alright with it . Do they train some soldiers to do that too ? I hope so .

    • 2 years ago
  • WhiteNoise
    • 0
      WhiteNoise  
    • Image
    • WAR
      Most Victims are Children
      As wars have developed in the twentieth century, the ratio of civilian deaths to military deaths has changed radically. One hundred years ago 5% of war casualties were civilians. In World War I civilian deaths were about 10%. In World War II, 65%. Tactics of modern wars have shifted casualties to 90% civilians. More than half of these civilian casualties are children less than 14 years of age.
      http://www.questionwar.com/children.html
      http://www.nomorevictims.org/

      One of the most barbaric and shameful acts of our government is the use by our military of cluster bombs, those packages of brightly colored mini explosives (often made to resemble toys or food packets) that are scattered by the dozens upon contact with the ground where they patiently wait to be picked up by curious civilians (usually children). The result is the loss of limbs, eyes, major injury and often death to the unfortunate and unsuspecting victims.There is no doubt as to the suffering and mayhem these devices are intended to cause.

      then there's the WAR CHILD
      http://www.warchild.org/

      "War, we must realize, is the massive and indiscriminate killing of human beings. War, is always fundamentally a war against children. And therefore, whatever just cause is presented to us, whether true or invented, whatever words are thrown at us about fighting for liberty or democracy or against tyranny, we must reject war as a solution." -- Howard Zinn

      "I hated my part in the charade of murder and horror. My efforts were contributing to the deaths, to the burning alive of children - especially the children. The photographs of young Vietnamese children burned by napalm destroyed me." : Ralph McGehee former CIA intelligence analyst

      “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty and democracy ? ” - Gandhi

      "The sugar coated bullets of the "free market" are killing our children. The act to kill is unpremeditated. It is instrumented in a detached fashion through computer program trading on the New York and Chicago mercantile exchanges, where the global prices of rice, wheat and corn are decided upon." – Michel Chossudovsky

      “Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought! Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder! Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings! Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction! Be heroes in an army of construction !” - Helen Keller

      FIGHT FOR PEACE !

      The fight for peace: a history of antiwar movements in America
      http://current.com/1bfjq4c#v

    • 2 years ago
  • Vierotchka
    • 0
      Vierotchka  
    • I have experienced winter in Kabul, and I can tell you that most of these people and probably all of the presently surviving children have not a snowflake's chance in hell of making it through this coming winter.

      Occupying forces have the obligation to protect the civilians in the country they occupy. The US, NATO, the UK and all countries participating in the occupation in Afghanistan are duty-bound and legally bound to address this situation immediately and provide decent shelter, clothes, food, potable water and safe heating to these refugees, at once. Winter is about to fall on Afghanistan.

    • 2 years ago
  • jkjkl56
    • 0
      jkjkl56  
    • So sad they already have enough to deal with now they get neglected because they survived/escaped the battle ruining their lifes. Dang there just children.

    • 2 years ago
  • RedPill_London
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