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October
2, 2001
In Afghanistan:
Afghanistan's Only Modern Hospital
Treats Victims, Braces for War
By Patrick Cockburn
in
the Panjshir Valley
The Independent
Dr Gino Strada, the Italian surgeon
who succeeded against all the odds in building the only modern
hospital in Afghanistan its operating tables had to be
delivered strapped to the backs of camels shakes his head
in anger. He and Kate Rowlands, the hospital administrator,
from Northampton, are waiting for an influx of casualties from
the new war.
"I am frightened by the
Spaghetti Western rhetoric of George Bush about bringing back
America's enemies dead or alive," Dr Strada says. "Politicians
around the world, who could not find Afghanistan on the map,
now talk about whether the country should be the target of so-called
pinpoint or carpet bombing. The one certainty is that people
will be killed."
Dr Strada had just returned
from a five-day journey by four-wheel-drive and horse through
the mountains of Pakistan to his 120-bed Emergency Surgical
Centre for War Victims, which opened three years ago near the
village of Anaba, in the isolated Panjshir valley.
The hospital, a cluster of
pretty white buildings with red doors and window frames, is
an extraordinary achievement. A former police college, it was
rebuilt partly from abandoned Russian military equipment. Wood
from old ammunition boxes was used in the ceilings and pipes
from tanks in the sewage system.
Medical equipment must be brought
across the front line through the mountains on the backs of
pack animals. Some of it was transported in a convoy of 40 donkeys.
These animals abound in the Panjshir valley. The hospital, paid
for by the Italian charity Emergency is primarily for war victims.
Ms Rowlands is an intensely
energetic former nurse and a chain-smoker she has a large
notice on her office door reading "smoking allowed".
"Some 70 per cent of our
patients have war-related injuries," she says.
But because there are no other
fully equipped hospitals, the five surgeons and 24 nurses never
turn anybody away. Dr Strada says: "If you have a simple
eye cataract, here you go blind because there is no eye surgeon
in the whole of northern Afghanistan, though we should have
one soon. We are the only hospital in this area which has oxygen."
Most beds in the wards are
occupied by soldiers and civilians wounded in the latest fighting.
In one room, a physiotherapist
was exercising Hoja Sharif, a 40-year-old unemployed man from
Charicar, which is north of the capital, Kabul. His left leg
was torn off by a Taliban rocket.
In another bed,a tough-looking
man called Shir Aka had his leg covered in plaster. He had been
commander of a section of the front until 18 days ago.
"I was hit by shrapnel
when the Taliban attacked and captured part of our line,"
he says. Nearby was a captured Taliban soldier who had been sent
to the hospital from a prison camp when his wound became infected.
Not all of those injured as
a result of the war are soldiers.
Ms Rowlands pointed to a 15-year-old
boy named Sardarkhan, saying: "He has been in here twice.
Both times after ammunition he was playing with blew up."
Some patients have travelled
a long way to get to the hospital. Dr Strada showed an X-ray
of the head of a young man brought by helicopter from Dari Souf,
a besieged opposition enclave. "There is quite a piece of
metal inside here," he says. "Normally a sort of capsule
forms around it. We won't touch it unless we have to."
Almost all of Dr Strada's patients
come from areas controlled by the opposition Northern Alliance.
But he has been trying to open a hospital in Kabul, and for
three weeks earlier this year he thought he had succeeded.
He says that, of the 14 hospitals
in the Afghan capital, only one, a 400-bed military hospital,
really deserves the name of hospital.
His new hospital in Kabul had
120 beds, soon to be expanded to 300, and a staff of 250. But
soon after it was opened it was raided by the religious police,
or maroof, which has the task of "combating vice".
Ms Rowlands says: "They
beat the staff and threw three of them in jail for 10 days.
They said we had allowed men and women to eat together, but it
wasn't true. There was a screen between them."
Dr Strada has decided to close
the hospital, and says he will not reopen it until he has a
guarantee for its security from the Taliban authorities.
Dr Strada is still negotiating
with them.
Last week, a deputy minister
in Kabul told him there were only two weeks' supplies of drugs
left in Afghanistan. Ms Rowlands had asked her staff in the
hospital to see what drugs were in short supply. "We'll
ask our usual smugglers what they can do," she says breezily.
When he was asked if obtaining
medical supplies was difficult, Dr Strada replied: "Difficult?
It's a nightmare."
But he is grimly humorous about
the problems of running a hospital in Afghanistan. His rage
is reserved for the hypocrisy of those whom he believes are
about to inflict fresh suffering on the Afghans.
He blames the US and Pakistan
for sending the first religious fanatics to Afghanistan to fight
the Cold War by proxy, and thereby starting a process that eventually
produced the Taliban. "After 1979, you could go to any
Pakistani embassy in the world and, if you said you wanted to
fight in Afghanistan, they would give you a free ticket paid
for by the CIA," Dr Strada says. "It is they who created
Osama bin Laden." CP
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