By Xinhua
Kabul : While Afghan government has been doing its best to provide humanitarian aid to snow and cold-affected people in the country, the country’s parliament has accused the establishment of mismanaging assistance and warned to disqualify concerned ministers.
A report released by United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) Monday said that the cold weather and winter conditions have claimed the lives of 483 people.
It also added that some 147,880 heads of livestock had died due to the continued cold spell in parts of the war-torn nation.
Over the past two days, 37 persons including 20 children have lost their lives due to continued cold spell or cold-related diseases in Afghanistan’s southern Ghazni province, said spokesman of the provincial administration Abdullah Nashir Tuesday.
He also added that some 400 people, mostly students, had trapped in a mountainous pass in heavy snow on Monday and then police rescued them safely.
The unprecedented cold weather and snowfall began early last month. According to Abdul Mateen Adrak, the head of Anti-Disaster Directorate of Afghanistan, it has claimed the lives of more than 600 people.
Dozens of cold-affected people have been hospitalizing in hospital in western Herat province and so far 25 of them, according to Barakullah Mohammadi a doctor in the hospital, have got amputated their hands or legs, Afghan media reported Tuesday.
Afghan government and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have provided food items, warm clothes, medicines, plastic sheets and blankets to hundreds of the cold-affected families.
However, roads connecting villages with big cities have been blocked by heavy snow which refrain government and international communities from delivering emergency aid efficiently to the affected people in the continued cold weather.
Often the people in the war-torn Afghanistan’s countryside burn animal dung and wood to heat their mud houses.
According to local media, at least 3,000 people poured on to the street on Jan.27 in the northern border province of Jowzjan, asking government for assistance as soon as possible.
Afghanistan’s Wolesi Jirga or Lower House of parliament, which is unsatisfied with the response of government to the snow and cold-affected people as well with price hike in the country, summoned the ministers for Public Health, Rural Development, Agriculture and Commerce.
The war-wreckage Afghanistan is largely dependent on the international community’s assistance as almost all its national institutions including economic and transport networks had been destroyed or badly damaged over the past nearly three decades of war.
Government’s failure to adopt a pre-emptive strategy to deal with problems arising out of natural disasters has put the parliament in confrontation with the ministries and that was why it summoned the above ministers and sought explanation.
In response to criticism faced by the legislators, Minister for Public Health Syed Mohammad Amin Fatimi announced his resignation but the President Hamid Karzai, according to Public Health Ministry, did not accept Fatimi’s resignation.
To speed up efforts in dealing with the problems arising out of the continued freezing weather, Afghan government has constituted Emergency Committee consisted of some 10 ministries and independent bodies.
“We have enough reasons to call the ministries for explanations,” a parliamentarian Abdul Kabir Ranjbar said Monday.
If the explanation by the ministers, he added, came out to be unsatisfactory, the Lower House would decide on vote of no-confidence.
Moreover, Afghan Presidential spokesman Hamayon Hamidzada pointed out Tuesday that the government would spare no efforts to provide adequate assistance to the needy people affected by the continued snow and cold weather since last month in the country.