UN chief calls for more aid to curb Tajikstan child mortality

By David Cronin

Date: 20/11/03

AN EU-BACKED goal of slashing childhood mortality in Tajikistan, the poorest of the former Soviet republics, will prove elusive if aid levels remain at their current level, a senior UN figure has warned.

William Paton, UN coordinator for Tajikistan, pointed out that the country was the only ex-USSR state which was subject to a special warning earlier this year. A UN report identified Tajikistan as one of 31 countries for which the international community will struggle to meet the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) without major increases in assistance; most of the other nations named are in sub-Saharan Africa.

The MDGs, to which all EU member states have signed up, are designed to reduce by half the proportion of the world's population that lives on less than a euro a day, to achieve universal primary schooling for all boys and girls and cut by two-thirds the number of children who die before their fifth birthday by 2015.

Speaking to European Voice, Paton said: "We had half-a-million cases of malaria in Tajikistan last year. Thirteen per cent of children die before their fifth birthday. At present rates [of aid], we are not going to get childhood mortality down by two-thirds by 2015. We are all going to have to do more to get childhood mortality down not just to 6% or 7% but to 1% or 2% where it belongs."

Canadian Paton was in Brussels yesterday (19 November) to launch the UN's humanitarian appeal for this year with Poul Nielson, the commissioner for development and humanitarian affairs.

He said he could not fault the EU for its overall donations to Tajikistan. The European Commission has provided around €10 million for Tajikistan this year, making it second only to the US as the biggest donor to the country. "All I can say to the EU and its member states is that this is an exceptionally poor country and I would like them to focus more on it."

Roughly 500,000 people died in Tajikistan during a five-year civil war which officially came to a halt in 1997. The country has subsequently been plagued by widespread drought in 2000-2001, triggering large-scale emigration. About one-in-four families now has at least one member working abroad, while 17% of the 6.5 million people remaining in Tajikistan are considered destitute.

Paton identified the rise in heroin smuggled from neighbouring Afghanistan as a major worry. As well as leading to an increase in intravenous drug use and AIDS infection, it is having a "corrosive and corrupting influence" on political authorities.

However, he applauded a recent undertaking by the government in Dushanbe, the Tajik capital, that information about bribery provided to it by international non-governmental organizations would be carefully studied.