Afghanistan News Wire

Aid agency quits Afghanistan over security fears

July 29, 2004

The Guardian, Thursday July 29, 2004

Ewen MacAskill, diplomatic editor

One of the world’s leading frontline aid organisations, Médecins sans Frontières, is pulling out of Afghanistan after 24 years because of a deterioration in security.

MSF, a neutral group which depends primarily on private donations, has a reputation for sending medical staff into troublespots regarded by other agencies as too dangerous. This is its first pullout from any country since being founded 33 years ago.

The organisation, which worked in Afghanistan through the Soviet occupation, the civil war and the Taliban, said yesterday that the US-led coalition put aid workers at risk by blurring the line between military and humanitarian operations.

The surprise withdrawal is a setback for the Afghan government and the US in their attempts to persuade the international community that security in the country is improving in the run-up to the twice-delayed presidential election, now scheduled for October. A UN election worker and a person registering to vote were killed yesterday in a bomb attack in Ghazni, south of Kabul.

Thirty-two aid workers have been killed in Afghanistan since March last year. Five MSF workers were killed at Badghis, in the north-west of the country, on June 2.

Before the attack, MSF had 80 expatriate staff in the country and 1,400 local staff, covering 13 provinces. The remaining 15 expatriate staff are leaving and the local staff are being made redundant. MSF aims to be out of Afghanistan by the end of August.

Vickie Hawkins, who returned to Britain two weeks ago after leading the MSF mission in Afghanistan, said yesterday: “While the security situation has deteriorated over the last year, what is a new feature is this targeting issue which has never happened before in Afghanistan and this is what makes us take the situation so seriously we felt we have to withdraw.” She said the line between aid and the military had been blurred since US soldiers, after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, dressed in civilian clothes and drove around in the white Land cruisers favoured by aid agencies.

More recently, the Pentagon was forced to apologise for leaflets dropped on villages which threatened to withhold aid unless information was forthcoming about al-Qaida and the Taliban. Britain has distanced itself from this campaign.

Introduction by Nato of provincial reconstruction teams, which are joint military-civilian bodies, had added to the confusion. She said the British military in particular was pursuing these operations.

MSF was unnerved by a Taliban accusation that its members were spying for the US. Another factor in the decision was the Afghan government’s failure to act after an inquiry into the murder of the MSF workers, which, Ms Hawkins said, had identified a local warlord rather than the Taliban as being linked to the killings.

Afghanistan is not MSF’s biggest programme but it is symbolically important. MSF’s reputation for working in almost any condition arose, in part, from pictures of staff travelling into Afghanistan in the early 80s with medical equipment on donkeys.

Ms Hawkins said MSF would only consider returning to Afghanistan if the Taliban withdrew the spying charge, the Afghan government made a serious effort to hold accountable those responsible for the MSF killings, and there was a reduction in the targeting of aid workerss.

On the row over blurring of the line between aid and the military, Britain says the blame should be on the Taliban and al-Qaida for targeting aid workers.

The Foreign Office said: “We regret MSF’s decision … but we understand individual agencies have to make different decisions on security.”

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