Afghan refugees will wait for peace before returning home

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 made the decision to flee 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 two-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 more like settled villages than tent cities. Just down the road from here is Old Shamshatoo, an Afghan refugee settlement that dates back over 15 years.

The more than two million Afghan refugees living today in Pakistan arrived in several waves: fleeing the Soviet invasion in 1979, fleeing a civil war after the Soviets withdrew a decade later, fleeing the Taliban who took power in 1996, fleeing a three-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 (IDP) for several months near Herat. He's happy his 11-year old daughter Gulalai can go to 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.

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

Pakistan closed the border because its leaders feel overwhelmed by the incoming human tide. 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 US$109 million for refugees here, according to the agency's office in Islamabad. In 2000, the total had dropped to barely US$17 million. Donor fatigue combined with shifting geopolitical priorities left Pakistan almost alone with its burden of refugees, until September 11 and the subsequent war thrust Afghan refugees back in 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. And they're ambitious entrepreneurs. They've taken over transportation services and other important sectors of the economy in the border area," said Geir Valle, director of operations here for Norwegian Church Aid (NCA), a member of Action by Churches Together (ACT), an international network of church relief and development agencies.

The Pakistani government is also 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 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) near Jalozai. Gul Wali, the coordinator of Catholic Relief Services in Peshawar, said government refugee officials argued with 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."

What Pakistan wants to do with the people in Jalozai is to get the UNHCR to relocate them to a string of 11 camps located in remote areas close to 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 NCA'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 UN agency also hopes to convince some of the so-called "invisible refugees" to take up its offer of relocation. These are refugees who have secretly entered the country recently 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, according to Valle. 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. NCA is one of four NGOs that will work with the UNHCR in carrying out the identification of needy families and the distribution of the 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 official 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 mujahidin 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 in recent times, 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.

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 who live 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, an enterprise the whole family works on. He said they might earn about $90 for a carpet that takes three months to produce.

Although there are refugees in Pakistan who have grown wealthy, relatively speaking, most are as poor as Jawzjar, and talk wistfully about going back home some day. They are a bit skeptical, however, that conditions inside Afghanistan will soon permit that. "We are a country with lots of mullahs and mujahidin, 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 UN sponsored conference in Germany amongst the country's ethnic and militia leaders succeed produces a halt to the fighting, aid workers here 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 ten million land mines. Peace may not be enough of a "pull factor" for many refugees.

"Here, as difficult as it is, people have lights and schools and transportation. People know that back home they have few of those things. Is the international community going to help us develop Afghanistan or is it content to leave people waiting in Pakistan for conditions that will never come?" asked Mohammed Fazil, director of the ACT - supported Rural Rehabilitation Association of Afghanistan (RRAA). "And young people who grew up on a farm in Afghanistan but who have been urbanized here, what will they do when they go back to the Afghan countryside? What's to keep them on the farm? The future of the refugees, indeed the future of Afghanistan, depends on whether there will be work for them, whether they'll be able to fit in."

RRAA and other ACT-supported groups carry out a variety of programs in Shamshatoo, helping refugees improve the quality of their lives. Fawzia Kohistani was a math and physics teacher in Afghanistan before the Taliban ordered her out of the classroom. She those to leave the country. Today she works for the RRAA conducting training workshops on health and hygiene for other refugee women in Shamshatoo.

"The people of Afghanistan, especially the women, have many of the same problems as before. We just don't have to live under burkas anymore," she said. "Under the Taliban we had security, but no freedom. Now that the Taliban have been defeated we are free, but we have no security."

Kohistani predicts that the refugees here will wait a while, carefully observing events inside Afghanistan, and perhaps in six months start going home in sizeable numbers. "If peace really comes to Afghanistan, people in Shamshatoo will go home," she said. "They have fields and homes in Afghanistan. Here they have only tents."