Return to Transcripts main page

CNN Live At Daybreak

United Nations Ships 100 Tons of Humanitarian Aid to Herat

Aired November 14, 2001 - 05:36   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: Catherine over to you.

CATHERINE CALLAWAY, CNN ANCHOR: Right now we're going to go to the Uzbekistan-Afghanistan border and talk with CNN's Alessio Vinci about the humanitarian aid effort.

Alessio, I know you weren't able to hear our guest just a moment ago, but we spoke with the head of Doctors Without Borders. He says that despite all the changes in Afghanistan on the ground on the military front, the humanitarian effort has not changed much. What is the situation there?

ALESSIO VINCI, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well we actually are witnessing here a significant change, Catherine. I am on a tugboat on the Amu-Daria River, which is a river that separates Uzbekistan from Afghanistan, and we are following a barge loaded with some 100 tons of U.N. humanitarian relief assistance that has been sent from Termez in southern Uzbekistan to the city of Herat in northern Afghanistan.

This is the first time that the U.N. aid agencies are able to ship desperately needed aid into Afghanistan from neighboring Uzbekistan. It is a first step for the U.N. and if all goes well, more barges will be leaving in the coming days. We have -- are leaving the port of Termez. The World Food Programme had already loaded two additional barges with, each, 200 tons of wheat to ship to northern Afghanistan as soon as possible.

The cargo today includes some 2,000 blankets, 50 metric tons of wheat, 10,000 winter jackets and more than 1,000 pair of shoes for kids and some 10,000 water containers. (AUDIO GAP> port of Herat in northern Afghanistan, this shipment will be manually unloaded and stored in warehouses for future distribution. About half of the 3.4 million people living in northern Afghanistan depend on this kind of humanitarian assistance to survive and some of these -- and out of those 3.4 million people, half of them have been internally displaced by the recent fighting.

Security, of course, in northern Afghanistan remains a huge concern. The situation there remains volatile and the U.N. officials want to make sure that the aid actually reaches the people in need. Catherine.

CALLAWAY: All right, CNN's Alessio Vinci reporting to us from Uzbekistan-Afghanistan border. Thank you Alessio, big change there. Barges all that -- all of that food equipment ready to go and hasn't been able to leave, on its way now.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com