Violence a threat to Kabul trauma centre
Admins warn facility may close for staff ’s safety
KABUL • As the doctors tried to dress wounds of patients recovering from a terrible bomb blast, an antigovernment protest raged outside the surgical centre in Kabul’s diplomatic zone. Men with Kalashnikov rifles tried to scale the walls, but were turned back by guards.
That was four days ago. On Monday, protesters were still camped outside the gates of the Emergency Surgical Center for War Victims in Kabul, and the hospital administration is threatening to shut down operations because of the shaky security situation in the capital.
In a letter sent to authorities Sunday, the hospital’s program coordinator said the trauma centre “has been put on the front line” and that the staff “do not feel safe anymore continuing our job here in Kabul.”
If the hospital — which has treated 1,350 Afghans with war injuries so far this year — stopped operating because of violence, it would be the first time since Taliban rule ended 16 years ago.
On Monday, the hospital was an oasis of calm as protesters continued to shout their demands by the gates.
“We fear that the protests could become a target. Nothing is off limits now. They have attacked funerals, hospitals. There is no decency left in Afghanistan,” said Dejan Panic, the program coordinator for the centre, part of an Italian non-governmental organization that treats the injured in conflict zones around the world.
The group began working in Iraq in the 1990s and later expanded into Afghanistan. In 2000, Taliban leader Mullah Omar agreed to let them open a hospital in Kabul.
In 2010, they began treating only patients with war injuries, mostly civilians who are hit by shrapnel or bullets, or step on landmines. Afghan civilian casualties are at an alltime high, according to the United Nations, with nearly 11,500 killed or wounded last year, two-thirds by militants.
The staff has seen dangerous times before. In 2012, six Taliban insurgents dressed in burkas scaled a nearby building and waged an 18-hour gun battle with security forces. Gunfire ricocheted down into the hospital garden and across the lawn.
But a spokesman says the NGO has never stopped operating because of violence, although it has twice been shut down for political reasons when staff and an Italian journalist were kidnapped.
On Wednesday, the hospital was rocked by the massive blast of a bomb hidden in a sewage tanker just steps away. That explosion killed nearly 100 and injured more than 500. Around 120 of those victims ended up at the emergency centre.
In the protests that followed, another six people were killed.
Abdul Matin, 28, a farmer from Takhar, arrived with his son on Wednesday not long after the blast, winding his way through barricades. He was intent on only one thing: getting his son to surgery.
Fahim, 10, had been seriously injured the week before by an improvised explosive device that a relative had picked up off a road.
The violent protests that followed Fahim’s hospital admission only heightened his father’s anxiety, Abdul Matin said, as he wheeled his badly injured son around the hospital grounds.
“His mommy too is very concerned,” he said. “She calls and he can make little sounds now, and that makes her happy. She’s desperate that he come home alive.”
Medical coordinator Giorgia Novello said the staff — doctors, nurses, aides and guards — are more stressed than she has seen since she began working in Afghanistan in 2009.
“The guards are exhausted, the staff is exhausted. They are scared, too,” Novello said.
A spokesman for Afghanistan’s Ministry of Public Health, Wahid Majrooh, said he expected that the surgical centre would remain open and that they were trying to negotiate with the protesters to move to a different site. If the 120 patients were to be moved, there are 17 state-run hospitals in Kabul, five of which receive war or other trauma victims.
“We have seen better days,” Panic said. “After all these events it’s hard to believe Kabul will become safe again.”
THE GUARDS ARE EXHAUSTED, THE STAFF IS EXHAUSTED. THEY ARE SCARED, TOO.