By Huw Owen of the Disasters Emergency Committee
As a former broadcast journalist for many years, I have long been aware of the vagaries of the news agenda, the unpredictability in the prominence given to the stories that we all care deeply about – how they come and go so quickly from the television headlines or leader columns in publications like this.
We perhaps understand more than ever at this moment how the news agenda can also become fixated on the minutiae of political dramas playing out at Westminster or Holyrood to the seeming exclusion of the wider challenges facing this country and the world.
In my current role with the Disasters Emergency Committee, there is often frustration for me that clear matters of life and death for so many people can so quickly disappear from view as the daily news agenda sweeps forward in what can seem frustratingly haphazard ways at times.
However, the crisis unfolding in Afghanistan right now seems different. There is no doubt that the sheer number of people affected – more than 22 million people desperately short of food, eight million on the brink of starvation – demands our attention.
There is also, of course, a general recognition that ever since the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York over 20 years ago and the US-led response, this country and its future has been central to the foreign policy reputations of Britain and its allies.
Against this backdrop, earlier this week an incredible piece of television news brought many of us to a shocked, tearful stop. ITV correspondent John Ray and his committed team working in obviously difficult conditions brought the agony of the people of Afghanistan right back to us.
His report showed young children out cleaning shoes in freezing Kabul streets in the hope that it might at least give them a chance of a piece of bread to eat. Even more upsetting were the images of badly malnourished babies clinging on to life in chronically delapidated hospitals.
During my years at the BBC, I, like many colleagues, had my own coping mechanisms to deal with shocking news like this, developing a dispassionate “thick skin” as some kind of comfort blanket to distance yourself from the agony so clear to see in the images you were preparing to share with the public.
I was one of the first journalists to witness the huge smoking crater left by the wreckage of the Pan Am jet that smashed into Lockerbie in 1988,.I helped co-ordinate the BBC’s coverage of the Dunblane shootings eight years later. But despite witnessing these tragedies I can’t ever recall having cried at work.
True desperation
THAT changed earlier this week. As I watched John’s lengthy report, tears rolled down my face and my body shook in response to the agony so visible in those young faces, and the desperation and understandable lack of hope etched on so many parents’ faces.
As I write this, I feel the emotions pulsing again at the realisation that so many people have no food in Afghanistan right now with more than eight million on the brink of famine.
Years of conflict, poverty and the unchecked spread of Covid-19 were already taking their toll on the people of Afghanistan.
Combine that with the worst drought for nearly 30 years and then the recent change of government, and you can maybe understand the catastrophic fall of this country and the consequent rise in hunger.
One million children under the age of five are at risk of dying in the weeks ahead unless help reaches them. They can’t wait, we mustn’t.
Thirteen of the 15 member charities across the UK, generously supported by the public, aren’t waiting. Knowing that DEC funds are on the way they have been able to scale up their supply operations and are now reaching at least some of the millions most in need who are desperately waiting for some kind of help in freezing winter conditions.
That financial support is helping local partners to provide emergency food and malnutrition treatment for children and their families, and shore up hospitals decimated by years of conflict and neglect despite the dedication of often unpaid staff.
It is also delivering simple but obvious comfort through warm clothing and blankets to tens of thousands of people who have had no choice but to leave their homes in the depths of winter.
As my understanding of humanitarian issues moves beyond generating news headlines as it may have done in the past, it is getting ever clearer that Afghanistan’s plight is all too typical of the world’s most vulnerable countries.
Millions suffering
MY expert colleagues are talking increasingly of the “deadly 3 Cs” – that is the combination of long-term conflict, the ongoing and uncontrolled Covid pandemic and now, of course, the increasing impact of the climate emergency, driving millions and millions of people around the world closer to the brink.
As the Afghanistan crisis came to wider attention before Christmas, the United Nations’ co-ordination centre for humanitarian action, OCHA, was warning that 2022 will yet again be a year of record need globally, revealing that 274 million people will need urgent humanitarian assistance this year at an estimated cost of £30 billion.
That’s a 17 per cent increase on last year’s record total.
Against the odds, DEC member charities and their incredible national and local partner staff will continue to work tirelessly to tackle what can at times seem like an impossible challenge.
Here, alongside colleagues, I will continue to play my part in bringing often upsetting imagery and commentary to your attention in the hope that we can maintain attention on the precarious lives of malnourished children and their desperate families – and encourage the wider public that they could and should help. As global citizens, our humanity demands that attention and compassion.
Huw Owen is the external relations manager for the Disasters Emergency Committee in Scotland and formerly a journalist with BBC News for 25 years.His role is to raise awareness about the DEC’s work and encourage you to respond to the world’s worst humanitarian disasters
You can donate right now to the DEC’s Afghanistan Appeal at dec.org.uk
- £10 could provide treatment to a child suffering from malnutrition for three weeks
- £100 could provide emergency food to a family [who have lost their home] for three months
If you want to follow how the DEC is helping the people of Afghanistan when the news agenda moves on, please follow updates on their work on Twitter @DECScotland
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