ISLAMABAD, Jan 22 (APP): Prime Minister Imran Khan Saturday once again called upon the international community to provide immediate humanitarian relief to the millions of Afghans who were facing an imminent starvation.
In a tweet, the prime minister also reminded that providing immediate relief to the impoverished Afghanistan was also obligatory under unanimously adopted UN Principle of Responsibility to Protect (R2P).
“There is urgency for the international community, as well as their obligation under the unanimously adopted UN principle of Responsibility To Protect (R2P), to provide immediate humanitarian relief to millions of Afghans on the brink of starvation,” the prime minister posted on Twitter, a popular social media platform.
“One pillar of R2P is to help protect people from mass scale humanitarian crisis left in the wake of a prolonged conflict. Right now millions of Afghan people are in danger of starvation. It is duty of international community to provide humanitarian assistance.”
The prime minister also tagged a news story published in the Guardian daily, UK, carrying excerpts from an article written by former British premier Gordon Brown to UK foreign secretary, Liz Truss, calling on her to help convene a donor conference to raise $4.5bn (£3.3bn) for Afghanistan.
Brown, in his article, had warned that more than 23 million people were at risk of starvation if aid did not materialize.
The former UK prime minister said: “We are witnessing a shameful but also self-defeating failure to prevent famine,” adding that the UK should urgently take a lead in resuming the delivery of aid dramatically halted after Taliban announced their government.
The UN agencies had launched a call for $4.5bn in aid for 2022, its biggest ever international appeal. The US responded with a donation of $308m, to be channeled through independent humanitarian organizations.
Brown said that was not enough. “The 35-country, American-led coalition that ruled Afghanistan for 20 years under the banner of helping the Afghan people has still put up only a quarter of the money that would allow UN humanitarians to stop children dying this winter.”
Brown further wrote that he had written to Truss and to the European Commission’s president, Ursula Von Der Leyen, to ask them to host an international donor conference “in January or at the latest in February” to break the impasse.
“The devastation the world was warned about months ago is no longer a distant prospect,” Brown said, adding, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator Martin Griffiths, Brown wrote, “forecasts that if we do not act, 97% of Afghans will soon be living below the poverty line”.
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