Afghanistan has had no lasting peace since 1978. Amid conflicts, hunger and humanitarian crises, the NGO Action Against Hunger outlines the situation and tells the stories of the population.
After years of decline, hunger in the world has begun to rise again: in 2017 the number of people suffering from food insecurity increased to 821 million, roughly one in nine people worldwide. More than half — 492 million — require urgent humanitarian action. These are the figures from the latest State of Food Insecurity (Sofi) report by the FAO, which also confirms violence as the main cause of the worrying reversal of the positive trend achieved in recent decades.
The resolution adopted by the United Nations Security Council last May recognises the close links between hunger and war. "Our experience in more than 45 countries has provided us with extensive evidence of the two-way relationship between war and hunger: on the one hand, wars destroy markets and livelihoods and produce massive displacements that trigger a high risk of malnutrition; on the other, food insecurity and competition for natural resources or food lies at the root of many of the 46 active conflicts in the world today," explains Manuel Sánchez-Montero, advocacy director at Action Against Hunger.
The proliferation of numerous conflicts around the world, which drag on without any long-term solution, only increases the number of people suffering from hunger as a result of violence — 74 million of whom suffer from its worst form, when it is so severe as to constitute an immediate threat to life or livelihoods.
Among all countries at war, Afghanistan holds a grim record: forty years of conflict have profoundly affected Afghan civil society and have wrapped the fabric of the country in a shroud of violence. Subject to the whims of coups by successive regimes and international influence, since 1978 Afghanistan has been torn apart by multiple crises.
The vast majority of the Afghan people (34 million inhabitants) have never known their country at peace. And life in a country at war often means one thing alone: absolute precariousness. Nearly 40 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line; access to basic services is very difficult, work is scarce and security is extremely volatile.
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Forty years of conflict have also created 1 million internally displaced people in the country, and an estimated 1,100 people flee their homes every day. In 2014, Isis entered the scene, aggravating the ongoing conflict between the government and various Taliban factions. Attacks in cities are increasing and terror is spreading. As a consequence of all this, today 8.7 million people have urgent needs and 3.3 million people — one in ten — require humanitarian assistance.
In 2018 the conflict intensified, and Afghanistan was reclassified from a post-conflict country to a country at war. Civilians are the worst affected. 278,000 Afghans were forced to flee their homes and 263,000 were displaced by natural disasters. The drought of 2018 affected more than two-thirds of the entire country and 3 million people, causing the agricultural sector to collapse. This year, 670,000 people returned from Iran and 43,000 from Pakistan. Access to healthcare and psychological support remain among the primary needs, as do food security, shelter and access to water.
Particularly fragile is the condition of women, who are made doubly victims by the conflict. The findings of a gender analysis conducted by Action Against Hunger in the province of Ghor, in the western part of the country, found that one of the main drivers of violence against women in the region is hyper-masculinity, exacerbated by decades of war.
Eghlima is 40 years old and comes from Taibara, from where she fled with her family following her daughter's divorce. "Their marriage didn't work out. They cast my daughter aside and separated her from her daughter. Out of desperation we came to Chagcharan. We couldn't go on living there: if we had stayed, there would have been fighting and someone could have been killed." Enghlima had given her eldest daughter in marriage in order to pay for treatment for her second daughter, who had a burned arm. Now that her daughter is divorced, she lives with her.
Eghlima herself married very young, when she was just 14 and her husband was already 50. "No one asked me whether I liked my husband or not. My father pointed a gun at my head, his finger on the trigger. I was crying, but he told me that if I refused to go to his house he would kill me. That is how it is in Afghanistan."
"In Afghanistan," she continues, "they give women no freedom. The freedom to move around the city, to go to villages, to have a job, to go to work. In Taibara, where I come from, they don't allow girls to study. Without an education you can do nothing, no matter how capable you are."
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Enghlima's story is emblematic of the situation of countless Afghan women, who, if asked about their lives, would say as she does: "There is nothing that makes me happy or makes me feel good. I cannot remember a single happy day in my life. But the worst day was my wedding day. My husband used to beat me, but he can't any more because he is too old. If I could change one thing in my life, it would be my husband."
Action Against Hunger, like all humanitarian organisations, cannot solve the root cause of stories like Enghlima's, cannot stop the war. But for more than twenty years we have been present in Afghanistan to respond to the most immediate needs, providing food, drinking water, psychological support, training in food security and livelihoods.
The Emergency Response project (Erm), for example, continues to respond to the immediate and vital needs of those affected by armed conflicts and natural disasters. In Kabul, 48,881 people received nutritional assistance. In Ghor we developed multisectoral projects at health centres close to communities to prevent maternal and child mortality and morbidity. In Helmand our nutrition, hygiene and water projects treated 1,608 severely malnourished children and distributed 1,173 menstrual kits. In the province of Badghis we are helping people affected by drought.
In carrying out its activities, Action Against Hunger faces considerable challenges, as humanitarian workers have now become an easy target. In 2017, across the world, there were 313 attacks against humanitarian workers: 139 were killed, 102 were injured and 72 were kidnapped. Violence not only increases humanitarian needs but makes it far more difficult for workers to carry out their work safely and to reach the population with the aid it so desperately needs.
As the conflict in Afghanistan disappears from the political and media agenda, now more than ever it is necessary to raise public awareness of the situation in this country, before it falls definitively into oblivion, and to mobilise the attention of citizens in support of this forgotten conflict, in order to give its victims back a voice.