The United Nations High Commission for Refugees has started its aid distribution for winter throughout remote far-flung areas of the country. The program is targeted for returnees who recently repatriated from neighboring Pakistan and Iran, internally displaced people and the poorest at risk of harsh winter calamities. There are over 460,000 internally displaced people due the on-going insurgency and military operations in parts of the country. These people are living in deplorable conditions in camps and other temporary settlements across the country.

Winter brings a calamity for IDPs and remote areas where people live in deplorable conditions. Every year hundreds of people die because of lack of food and isolation due to heavy snowfall in far-flung inaccessible villages. This year’s snowfall has already started in parts of the country, but the government machinery though with acute resources is always late to act, or rather unprepared.

As usual, concerned authorities of disaster management make excuses about the so-called early-snowfall saying they did not expect it, which is a ridiculous escape from their responsibility, with the prior knowledge of kind of disaster repeated every year. Villages and roads get blocked. Transport becomes at standstill. Farmers are worst victims as they cannot transport their fall production to markets.

Prices of food commodities go skyrocketing. In most areas the government has no machinery to reach and help people, therefore masses help themselves. But dozens die every year just from causalities of passenger vans getting blocked under snow in remote areas.

In January this year, dozens were killed in Badakhshan alone because of snow avalanches. In one village, 72 houses came buried under snow.

The disaster management authorities and other concerned quarters must be prepared for winter disasters this year. Emergency team should be put on alert from now, so that they are ready to evacuate people and open the blocked roads at any emergency call from any part of the country. In a poor country like Afghanistan where thousands of children die because of malnutrition ever year, it is a shame that stories of corruption of our rulers make headlines every day. Millions of dollars have been smuggled out of country in western banks.

Ordinary people should realize our plight of their countrymen due to natural catastrophies and help with the meager means. When our elite and ruling class is all corrupt and careless about society, it is always the ordinary poor to feel for those in need.