Afghan village forced to eat grass

Afghan village
forced to eat grass

By Ravi Nessman
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
January 8, 2002

Bonavash, Afghanistan - The village of Bonavash is slowly starving.

Besieged by the Taliban and crushed by years of drought, people on this remote mountain have resorted to eating bread made from grass and trace amounts of barley flour.

Babies whose mothers' milk has dried up are fed grass porridge. The toothless elderly crush grass into almost a powder. Many have died. Nearly everyone has diarrhea or a hacking cough. When the children's pain becomes unbearable, their mothers tie rags around their stomachs to try to alleviate the pressure.

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

Bonavash is the most accessible village in the remote mountain region of Abdullah Gan, where about 10,000 people live. People in more distant reaches are even worse off, according to aid workers.

Thousands of bags of wheat flour meant to save the people of Abdullah Gan sit stacked in a compound in the small town of Zari, 4 1/2 hours away by donkey along mountain trails and the nearest outpost accessible by road. The World Food Program spent two weeks trucking 1,000 tons of flour to Zari but never told the aid organizations that were to distribute it, residents said. When aid workers learned the flour was there, they rushed to the area to try to figure out the logistics of distribution. The wheat is improperly stored. If it rains or snows, much will be damaged.

UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said in New York that the World Food Program has "managed to get record amounts of food into Afghanistan, but then getting it from depots to remote villages where it is most needed has not been easy."

"With different warlords controlling different roads, there are some areas where we just can't go," said program spokeswoman Abby Spring. "We have the food, the cash, the trucks, but what we don't have is the security, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to provide food to some communities."

Abdullah Gan is a proud region whose people are Hazaras, the small ethnic group of Shiite Muslims who were strongly opposed to the hard-line Sunni Taliban regime. Throughout the war, the Taliban laid siege to the region, and villagers caught trying to bring food up from Zari were beaten. For about six months, the villagers fled Bonavash and the Taliban controlled it, but after repeated guerrilla attacks, the conquerors returned to Zari and its supply road.

Now, Bonavash is a shell. Nearly half its 650 families fled the war, drought and hunger.

Khadabaksh, once a farm laborer, looked in despair at his four young daughters. "In the summer, when there are softer grasses, we feel a little better," he said. Three weeks ago, his children had a mother and a baby sister. Both have died. Khadabaksh begs his neighbors for pinches of their small amount of home-grown barley so his family can make grass bread. If they were to move away, he says, there is no guarantee of finding anyplace better.

"It is better to die in our house," he said, "not in some strange place with strange people."

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