Thank you very much indeed, Mr. Chair.
I would very much like to echo the sentiments of Mr. Aylieff in congratulating the special parliamentary committee of Canada for being engaged and consulting with us on this day on this extremely critical issue.
My name is Patrick Hamilton. I'm the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross's delegation to the U.S. and Canada.
To be clear, the International Committee of the Red Cross is the founding member and founding body of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, incorporating all of the national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies globally including the Canadian Red Cross.
We are a Swiss private organization with our headquarters in Geneva, with a mandate derived from the Geneva Conventions, the laws of war to protect and assist victims of conflict and violence around the world. We have a very strong relationship with the evolution and implementation of those laws of war around the world.
We are an organization of some 20,000 staff working in 100 contexts around the world, the vast majority of our focus being in those contexts of intense conflict, which have included Afghanistan for an unbroken period of the last 35 to 37 years. We have a very long-standing history with Afghanistan and have been there over the last numerous decades, as has WFP, in terms of trying to provide humanitarian responses to Afghans affected by the numerous rounds of conflict and violence that have so sadly affected the population over that period.
We still have some 1,800 staff based in Afghanistan today. They, like the WFP, have remained in country throughout the last months since the seismic events of August and have continued to focus on bringing a humanitarian response to the population of Afghanistan, where we have focused in particular on the provision of health services, and where we are currently providing support to some 28 provincial-level hospitals all around Afghanistan, support that incorporates everything from the payment of salaries through to the running costs and medical provisions.
We have stepped in to provide such systemic-level support to these Afghan hospitals as something that is really beyond precedent, as far as our normal modus operandi is concerned, because of the gravity of the situation today in Afghanistan.
Here I would very much also echo Mr. Aylieff's sentiments that we feel that considering all of the concerns that have gone with those 37 to 40 years of conflict and suffering in Afghanistan, the ICRC has never been more concerned about the population of Afghanistan than it is today. We feel that the Afghan population is really on the brink of catastrophe and that the centre of that catastrophe is, indeed, the situation of economic paralysis and the total absence of liquidity today in the Afghan market.
Our director of operations was speaking earlier today about a visit he made to Afghanistan back in early November. He said that when he arrived at Kabul airport and then was driving around Kabul, at first glance he had the impression that there was material in the markets, that there were people out in the bazaars, and so he said to his colleagues, “This looks relatively normal”, and they responded, “Look again. Look closer. Do you actually see anybody buying anything?” He couldn't.
In the further trips he did around the country, he really saw an economy and markets that have ground to a halt because nobody has any money. This is really having a major impact on the lives of millions of Afghans all across Afghanistan today.
Through the hospital program we have engaged in, we see the impact of this in particular with severely malnourished patients who are arriving at these hospitals, in particular young children, many of whom are being forced to share space, sometimes two, three or four to an incubator at a time, because there are not the numbers of incubators to be able to cope with the numbers of children being brought in, or the heating apparatuses and other things that would go to ensuring that the conditions in the hospital are adequate to deal with the scale of the caseload that is coming in.
What made this situation all the more devastating for our director of operations when he was there was seeing how many of these children were spending a month receiving treatment in these hospitals, going home, but then returning a month later because they were not receiving the food that they so desperately needed back home because there was no food and there was no money.
Of course, these circumstances arrive on top of multiple years of severe drought in Afghanistan, the broader COVID impacts, including the economic impacts of COVID, and then obviously these cumulative decades of conflict.