BESIEGED Kabul residents face a catastrophe unless food supplies reach the freezing Afghan capital soon, a senior UN official said yesterday. We want to alert the world community to a serious human tragedy," Mr Martin Barber, co ordinator for UN Humanitarian Assistance to Afghanistan, told reporters.
He said food stocks would run out in two weeks time and UN programmes in Kabul were in danger of coming to a halt.
Mr Barber was speaking 11 days after disputes within the opposition Hezb i Islami faction closed the road linking Kabul with Pakistan, the last remaining supply route into the city.
Roads to the south and west have been cut since October by fighting between forces loyal to President Burhanuddin Rabbani and the rebel Islamic Taleban militia. The road to the north has been shut by conflict between the government and another opposition leader, Gen Abdul Rashid Dostom.
"This threatens the whole UN assistance programme for winter," Mr Barber said. He ruled out an airlift to the beleaguered city on grounds of cost. "There is no alternative to opening the routes. Otherwise, people here face an imminent disaster."
UN officials say prices have soared about 60 per cent in the past week. They had said earlier that more than half of Kabul's estimated 1.2 million people could not afford to feed themselves adequately.
Kabul is suffering its coldest winter for four years, with temperatures sinking as low as minus 23 C.
Aid agencies fear that the extreme cold, combined with the rising price of food and fuel, will have a devastating effect on Kabul residents who have already suffered years of deprivation and almost constant rocket and artillery attacks.
"The closure of the road is a revolt against God," a shopper said. "In this (Muslim fasting) month of Ramadan, everyone is starving."
Mr Barber said the response to a UN appeal launched in October for humanitarian relief had been quite encouraging.
"However, this assistance was never enough to meet all the needs. Even with the best conditions we were struggling to get people through winter. Now, with the blockade, the situation could be catastrophic. The situation of the general population is worse than in any comparable winter," he said.
Most of Kabul's food and fuel had been coming from Pakistan via the eastern city of Jalalabad. The road is now open only to travellers. Aid and trade convoys are held up east of the town of Sarobi, controlled by Hezb i Islami.
Aid workers in Kabul say a renegade Hezb i Islami commander known as Lewanai is refusing to comply with orders that tax collection along the route be confined to a single checkpoint at Jalalabad, 52 miles from the Pakistan border.
Richard Lloyd Parry adds from Tokyo: The efforts of international agencies to prevent a full scale famine in North Korea are being hampered by the obstructive attitude of the South Korean government, according to western diplomats and UN officials.
North Korea had severe floods last summer which inundated homes and rice fields in rural areas of the isolated communist state. An international appeal by the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) has drawn a disappointing response, generating only $1.5 million (£1 million) of the $8.8 million necessary to feed half a million of the most vulnerable victims through the coldest part of the winter.
Widespread malnutrition among pregnant women and young children threatens to escalate into a famine, according to Mr Trevor Page, the WFP's director for North Korea.