On loan from another agency in Kosovo to help coordinate movement of UNICEF supplies to Afghanistan, Kumba says the biggest concern is what happens after U.N. agencies take the aid across the border.

"This is a country that is being drawn into anarchy," said Kumba, who is from Tanzania. "When the situation becomes so disorganized, it becomes very risky for humanitarian work. You don't know if the people on the ground will be receptive or not. The risks increase."

At this town in southern Uzbekistan, on the closed and mined border with Afghanistan, relief workers are preparing for the river port to reopen to barges that will carry aid they hope will help avert a humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.

Workers are piling blankets and mattresses to the ceiling in warehouses. Road crews are rolling fresh asphalt over the potholes in the road leading to the port, which has been closed for four years. Officials have checked the barges and inspected the facilities at the Termez airport in anticipation of moving thousands of tons of supplies to help an estimated 6 million Afghans that the United Nations says are in need of humanitarian aid because of drought and war.

"We inspected the facilities. Everything is ready to go," said Murad Kuchinkinov, a field officer for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, as he watched mattresses being unloaded from a truck from Tashkent on Saturday.

Not quite ready.

There still are no humanitarian food supplies in Termez, despite the approval given last week by Uzbekistan's president, Islam Karimov, to allow barges to take food and other supplies across the border. Officials from the U.N. World Food Program say they still are working to cut through the red tape that is the principal impediment to the relief missions.

"Maybe we will move after one week. Maybe after two weeks, maybe a month," Kuchinkinov said.

The complications arise on both sides of the border. The government of the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan moves at what relief agencies say is a frustratingly slow pace.

But more crucial is what will happen when the barges cross the Amu Darya to the Afghan port of Khairaton, about 10 miles upriver. That area is controlled by the Taliban, and U.N. agencies hope their local employees in Afghanistan will be allowed to unload and transport the supplies to needy people.

"We are impartial and independent. We talk to whatever authorities are in control of the region," Kenzo Oshima, the U.N. undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, said before a visit here last week. "It's not going to be easy. Nothing is going to be taken for granted."

"It's always difficult to deliver assistance when you have an ongoing military activity," added Ramiro Lopes da Silva, the worldwide director of transport and logistics for the World Food Program. "You have risks involved. When things go totally wrong, you have to be fast enough to suspend the operation until things are stable."

The U.N. agencies have experience working in war conditions, but they have large handicaps in this situation. International aid workers have been withdrawn from Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan. Communication with the remaining Afghan staff is irregular because the Taliban has declared that anyone talking by phone to the outside is a spy. U.S. bombs have caused thousands of Afghans to flee cities, and some bombs have struck aid stockpiles. Three Red Cross warehouses were reportedly destroyed by U.S. bombs Friday.

In addition, Taliban forces have seized U.N. warehouses and supplies, though some goods have been returned.

Officials are concerned that the Taliban and those under its control may regard the U.N. agencies as being too closely identified with the West. More than half the food and other aid distributed by the agencies comes from the United States.

"It's important that the people we want to reach should see us as donors of aid, not as bombers," said Kumba. "It has to be handled very tenderly."

But there is no doubt the movement of humanitarian goods will be watched closely by military strategists. Just as Termez offers humanitarian agencies the best corridor to the northern half of Afghanistan, it also would be a strategic route for military movements. Soviet troops poured over the sturdy bridge here when they invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and limped back over it in retreat 10 years later.

The bridge was closed when the Taliban took control of the area on the Afghan side in 1997. Uzbekistan has refused to reopen it, even for one-way humanitarian convoys, for fear the Taliban will try to use it. Barge traffic can be more closely controlled, the Uzbek government says.

But this town of 120,000 is hoping a combination of war and the humanitarian effort will bring a reopening of the bridge and a resumption of the once-lively trade between Uzbekistan and Afghanistan.

"If the war stops and the road opens up, this will become a more industrialized city," said Ramazen Ashurov, a Termez city hall official. But he cautioned, "sending humanitarian aid on barges doesn't mean the war has stopped. I don't see the road reopening."

For now, Termez continues to be divorced from the river on which it was founded. A long electrified fence snakes along a dirt pathway patrolled by Uzbek soldiers, bundled against the cold and dust storms they call the "Afghan wind."

The pathway stands between Termez and the riverbank. No one can use the river for catching the carp-like fish that are so popular here, for swimming in the blistering summers, or for the boat traffic that once connected the city with three neighboring countries: Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.

"I can remember swimming in the river," said Rudmilla Kim, 49, one of the many ethnic Koreans whose family came here from eastern Russia during the Stalinist purges beginning in the late 1930s. "It was wonderful. And we used to come and go to Afghanistan at will."

"Sure we want to have the border and the bridge open," said Khader Pardive, 43, who was born in Termez. "They should reopen it if they are sure it will be quiet."

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

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