Children safer in Kabul than New York: NATO official

Kabul: NATO's senior civilian representative here provoked criticism from children's advocates on Monday after he said Kabul is safer for children than Western cities.

"In Kabul and the other big cities, there are very few of these bombs. The children are probably safer here than they would be in London, New York or Glasgow or many other cities," Mark Sedwill told an interviewer for a BBC children's television program which was broadcast on Monday. "It's a very family-orientated society. So it is a little bit like a city of villages."

"Unicef continues to regard this as being one of the worst countries in the world to be a child," said Peter Crowley, the agency's Afghanistan representative. "Afghanistan has the highest infant mortality rate in the world and one in five children dies before the age of five."

A spokesman for Mr. Sedwill, Christopher Chambers, said Mr. Sedwill's remarks "had been unfairly mischaracterized" in the media.

"He was speaking in the context of family and children, that's how it was meant. It was about the crime level generally, it wasn't, full stop, children are safer, and it was Kabul, not Afghanistan," Mr. Chambers said.

Mr. Sedwill served as the British ambassador here before taking over as NATO's top civilian official in January.

As word of his remarks spread around Kabul, he said in an e-mail statement: "I was trying to explain to an audience of British children how uneven violence is across Afghanistan."

"In cities like Kabul where security has improved, the total levels of violence, including criminal violence, are comparable to those which many Western children would experience," Mr. Sedwill said. "For most Afghans, the biggest challenges are from poverty -- the absence of clean water, open sewers, malnutrition, disease -- and many more children are at risk from those problems than from the insurgency."

But his comments seemed to disturb some Afghans.

At the Aschiana Children's Shelter in downtown Kabul, which provides schooling and social services to homeless and street children, 277 children mostly under 12 share three unheated classrooms, using floors for desks. The shelter used to provide meals for them but can no longer afford to do so.

"More than 60 to 70 percent of these children are victims of the war in different ways," said Raziya Forogh, a teacher who was teaching math to 25 boys Monday. "And they have all been victims of crimes. Here everything is possible to happen to a child when he is working on the streets. To say they are no worse off than children in London is illogical."

Another teacher at the shelter, Abdul Bari Daad Khan, who had a class of 35 girls, said that Western children would in most cases not have heard bombs going off in their neighborhoods, which has happened to his children repeatedly. "When suicide bombers hit the shopping center near here, all of the children were screaming and two of them fainted," he said.

Eleven-year-old Naziya said she has heard explosions "many times," but is much more bothered by the frequent beatings she gets from shopkeepers, angry at her for selling plastic shopping bags for about 10 cents apiece in front of their businesses.

While levels of insurgent violence are much lower in the capital than other parts of the country, crime is a severe problem in impoverished neighborhoods.

Bismullah, a seven-year-old boy who sells chewing gum on the street, stood up in class and recalled the time he was attacked by an older boy, who stole his earnings, about $4. "I asked an old guy for help and he caught him and beat him, but then he took my money."