wfn.org | Afghan refugees will wait for peace before going home

[NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.ORG>]

Nov. 29, 2001   News media contact: Linda Bloom7(212)870-38037New York
10-71BP{560}

NOTE: This report is accompanied by a sidebar, UMNS story #561, and
photographs. For related coverage, see UMNS stories #541, #543 and #551.

By Paul Jeffrey*

SHAMSHATOO REFUGEE CAMP, Pakistan (UMNS) -- Everywhere you look in this
refugee community, life is a brown monochrome.

The simple brown mud walls and mud houses rise from the brown earth, and
brown dust swirls in the air, coating everything. It would look hopeless
were it not for the occasional flashes of color, including the bright blue
tent-like burkas of Afghan women walking to their homes.

Hope can also be seen in the white kite that 7-year-old Abdul Maruf flies
above the brown village. Maruf's family left their drought-ravaged farm in
the Afghan countryside a year ago, moving in with relatives outside
Mazar-e-Sharif.

Yet three months later, when the war with the ruling Taliban threatened to
overtake their village, Maruf's parents fled to safety in neighboring
Pakistan. Soon after arrival, Maruf put together a kite, one of many
pleasures banned by the Taliban. He said his biggest complaint about the
camp is a lack of wind, and he runs through the street kicking up dust as he
struggles to get his kite airborne.

"I like it here, but I liked it better at home," he said. "If peace comes, I
want to go back home. And I'll take my kite with me."

Maruf lives in Shamshatoo, a 2-year-old community of more than 75,000 Afghan
refugees that sprawls over treeless hills an hour outside Peshawar in
northwestern Pakistan. It's one of about 100 refugee camps in Pakistan. Some
of them are old enough that they look like settled villages more than tent
cities. Just down the road is Old Shamshatoo, an Afghan refugee settlement
started more than 15 years ago.

The more than 2 million Afghan refugees living in Pakistan arrived in
several waves: fleeing the Soviet invasion in 1979, fleeing a brutal civil
war after the Soviets withdrew a decade later, fleeing the Taliban who took
power in 1996, fleeing a 3-year-old drought, and, most recently, fleeing the
U.S. war against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.

Mohammed Qasem is one of the newest arrivals, having come to Shamshatoo in
October after living as an internally displaced person -- an IDP in the
lingo of aid workers -- for several months near Herat. He's happy his
11-year-old daughter Gulalai can attend school in the camp, something not
possible under the Taliban, but he longs to go home. 

"One day we will go back. The foreigners will leave our land and the war
will stop and we will build our country again," Qasem said, with the
optimism typical of new arrivals.

Overwhelmed by refugees

More than 100,000 new refugees have entered Pakistan since the U.S. bombing
began on Oct. 7. No one knows the exact numbers. Although officially closed
by Pakistani authorities, the porous border has hundreds of trails used by
smugglers and drug traffickers. Refugees pass across easily.

Although Pakistan has long hosted the largest concentration of refugees in
the world, the international community has been less than generous in
lending a hand. In 1981, when Afghanistan was at center stage in the Cold
War, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spent $109
million for refugees here. In 2000, the total had dropped to barely $17
million. Donor fatigue combined with shifting geopolitical priorities left
Pakistan almost alone with the burden of refugees, until Sept. 11 and the
subsequent war thrust Afghan refugees back into the limelight.

Many of the refugees are crowded into already packed Pakistani cities like
Peshawar, where local residents complain about the social impact. "Afghans
are cheaper workers than the Pakistanis and that has driven down local
wages," explained Geir Valle, director of operations here for Norwegian
Church Aid, a member of Action by Churches Together (ACT), an international
network of church relief and development agencies. "And they're ambitious
entrepreneurs. They've taken over transportation services and other
important sectors of the economy in the border area."

 With Pakistan's economy suffering hard times from canceled factory orders
and reduced travel in the wake of the September terrorist attacks in the
United States, the tension between the two nationalities has grown. Afghan
refugees make handy scapegoats for local problems.

The Pakistani government is uncomfortable with the negative publicity being
given to the refugee camps. While journalists are reluctantly allowed into
Shamshatoo, they are refused entry into Jalozai, an even more squalid camp
for newly arrived refugees just a few kilometers down the road.

The government has also refused to let most nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) near Jalozai. Gul Wali, the coordinator of Catholic Relief Services
in Peshawar, said government refugee officials argued to him that taking
food aid to Jalozai residents "would be a disincentive to move."

According to Valle, the government "has permitted very little aid to get
into Jalozai, only enough to avoid a complete disaster."

'A one-way ticket'

Pakistan wants UNHCR to relocate the people in Jalozai to a string of 11
camps in remote areas near the Afghan border. While the isolated camps will
provide food and shelter to the refugees, what aid workers term a "pull
factor," the location will take the refugees away from day jobs and markets
where they earned extra money. And there will be no turning back. The trip
to the new camps "is clearly a one-way ticket," said Kjell Helge
Godtfredsen, director of Norwegian Church Aid's emergency program with
Afghan refugees.

In the first week of the relocation campaign, 3,388 refugees accepted the
UNHCR bus ride to Kotkai, the first of the new camps to be occupied. All the
residents at Kotkai are ethnic Pashtuns, Afghanistan's largest ethnic group.
By early December, the UNHCR hopes to begin busing ethnic Tajiks, Hazaras
and Uzbeks off to other new camps along the border.

The U.N. agency also wants to convince some of the so-called "invisible
refugees" to take up its offer of relocation. These are refugees who have
recently entered the country secretly and live with relatives in Peshawar's
urban neighborhoods or hide out in one of the mud-walled family compounds
inside Shamshatoo.

There are too many to be truly invisible, and yet the government has
discouraged NGOs from getting involved in helping them. The UNHCR has
insisted, however, and in late November launched a low-profile program to
give one-time food assistance to 25,000 "invisibles" living in Peshawar.
Norwegian Church Aid is one of four NGOs that will work with the UNHCR in
identifying needy families and distributing food.

In Quetta, 600 kilometers to the southwest of Peshawar, the government
prohibits any support of unofficial new arrivals. "The government won't let
any of the NGOs help the invisible refugees. If the government learns
someone is unregistered, it picks them up and pushes them back into
Afghanistan," said Shalim Kamran, a disaster response coordinator with
Church World Service, an ACT member helping refugees in Pakistan and
internally displaced families inside Afghanistan.

The refugee camps in Pakistan traditionally served as rearguard bases for
mujahadeen fighters. Refugees were once required to affiliate with a
particular religious party in order to move into a camp. Aid workers said
that has changed recently, especially in light of the October crackdown on
Islamic fundamentalist movements by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's
president. In addition, the drought-provoked diaspora is reportedly a less
politicized group than earlier waves of refugees.

Bleak conditions

Ethnic tensions, as the world is witnessing among Afghanistan's current crop
of military victors, also exist in the camps, and scarcity exacerbates such
tensions among neighbors. Jawzjar, who like many Afghans goes by just one
name, is one of a group of Uzbek refugees living at one end of the camp. He
complained that his Uzbek neighborhood was the last section to get water in
the camp.

"It was bad enough that we had to flee hungry and thirsty from the drought,"
he said. "When we came here we lived in the open for a long time, and some
children had to die before we got tents. Getting water took another long
time."

Jawzjar and his family earn some extra money by weaving carpets. A carpet
that takes three months to produce may fetch about $90 for the family, he
said.

Although some refugees in Pakistan have grown wealthy, relatively speaking,
most are as poor as Jawzjar, and talk wistfully about returning home some
day. They are a bit skeptical, however, that conditions inside Afghanistan
will soon permit that. The country's recent history affords little hope that
the warlords and ethnic leaders gathered in Bonn will figure out a formula
to return Afghanistan to sanity. 

"We are a country with lots of mullahs and mujahadeen, but very few
politicians, and politicians are what we most need now," said Barry Salaam,
an Afghan aid worker for an NGO funded by ACT-Netherlands.

Even if the conference in Germany produces a halt to the fighting, aid
workers in Shamshatoo don't expect a quick return home. The drought lingers,
and unexploded cluster bombs from the U.S. air war have only added danger to
every step in a country that may have as many as 10 million land mines.

# # #

*Jeffrey is a United Methodist missionary serving as an information officer
in Pakistan for Action by Churches Together.

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United Methodist News Service
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