Drought and hardship forcing Afghans home

Eager to return to Afghanistan, Shahjahan said that she and her family would leave without UN assistance if they did not receive help soon. Although the Afghan mother of four has lived in the Loralai Afghan refugee camp, 250 km outside the southern Pakistani city of Quetta for 21 years, she now prayed to go home. “We have had enough,” she said, weeping. “Our men have been forced out of work because of the drought.” Asked how she would cope with the strict rules imposed on women by Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, Shahjahan insisted that her life would still be better in her homeland. “I will live how they want me to live. I just want to go home.” But Shahjahan is not alone in her despair. Other refugees at the camp complain of a lack of food and deteriorating conditions since the severe ongoing drought in Pakistan began over a year ago. One woman said her son had been earning about US $40 a month, but was now getting paid less than US $15. “How can we survive on this?” she asked. With a population of 4,500 families, Loralai is the biggest and oldest Afghan refugee camp in the western province of Baluchistan. Established by the UN after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when thousands of refugees poured into Pakistan, Loralai today is a self-contained settlement, comprised of six villages, the same number of schools and four clinics. But residents are now increasingly ready to leave. Since UNHCR resumed its repatriation programme this July, more than 500 families have done just that. “Since last year, refugees have been queuing up outside our offices demanding to go home,” William Sakataka, the head of the UNHCR sub-office in Quetta, told IRIN. “There has been panic among the refugees since the drought started, and we are doing our best to facilitate them.” He added that Afghans would only be sent to areas unaffected by the ongoing civil war and severe drought. Under the UNHCR-facilitated programme, those returning voluntarily receive US $90 and 150 kg of wheat donated by WFP on arrival in Afghanistan. Further assistance inside their homeland comprises materials for building shelter, and a further 250 kg of wheat on completion of the building. However, the refugees have to pay for their own transport home on an uncomfortable eight-hour journey from Loralai. The cost of each truck is around US $80, and it is shared between five and six families travelling together. Sitting in the back of a truck together with 10 family members on their way back to the southern Afghan province of Zabol, Habibullah told IRIN that he could not wait to get home. “We are better off in our homeland,” this resident of Quetta of 16 years standing said. “I’m very happy to be going back, there is no work in Pakistan for us,” he maintained. Habibullah explained that many Afghans had been working in fields, but, due to the drought, landowners were forced to lay off workers, leaving them without any means for survival. The only facilities provided in the camp now are medical and educational, as food supplies were stopped in 1995. Sat Bibi, on the same truck, but bound for the southern province of Helmand, said her family’s food intake had been reduced by more than half as a result of the drought. She complained that her children had fallen ill due to soaring temperatures, and that she could not to afford to pay for medicine, let alone hospital treatment. “Afghanistan is our motherland, and we want to go back now,” she said, clutching her four children as the overloaded truck drove off. Despite having lived in Loralai for nine years, Sat Bibi was not sad to be leaving. But the journey home is not an easy one. The refugees complain of harassment by Pakistan authorities on their way to the Chaman crossing, which borders the southern Afghan province of Kandahar. One truck driver told IRIN he was harassed for money at various checkpoints, even though UN staff had driven ahead of his vehicle to inform the authorities. “This is a common problem,” Zahida Shahidi, UNHCR’s repatriation assistant in Quetta, told IRIN. “The police are always trying to get money out of the refugees, and then deny it,” she added. Questioned about the incident, Pakistani officials said they knew nothing about it. But some refugees are determined to leave drought conditions behind in Pakistan no matter what. According to statistics on spontaneous returnees provided by Pakistan’s border security, over the last three months, more than 4,200 refugees returned to Afghanistan unassisted. Once back in Afghanistan, however, the refugees face a bleak economic situation and an increasingly worsening humanitarian crisis. Given limited resources to cope, aid workers are concerned over how long the returnees would stay before trying to make their way back to Pakistan. “We are not denying that some refugees are coming back, but it is probably a very small amount,” Sakataka said. “Those most likely to return are able-bodied men looking for work in other parts of Pakistan,” he added. Sakataka explained that the refugees still had relatives in their homeland with whom they had kept in touch. They were well aware of the conditions there, he maintained. Meanwhile, security at the Chaman border-crossing point, comprising representatives from Pakistan’s intelligence service, police, military personnel and officials from the Commission for Afghan Refugees, has yet to deter some refugees from returning. “The border is completely open, and Afghans can cross over through the mountains,” Jamaluddin, representative of the Commission for Afghan Refugees, told IRIN. According to the UN, there are some two million Afghan refugees in Pakistan, 13 percent of whom live in Baluchistan. Despite the huge numbers of Afghans now leaving Pakistan, there are still new arrivals from Afghanistan. UNHCR recorded more than 8,000 who crossed into Pakistan this year. “We are monitoring 12 mosques in Quetta city for new arrivals,” Shahidi said. She explained that the mosques were the first port of call for many Afghan refugees. At a mosque in the Brewry district of Quetta, the watchman reported that some 40 Afghan families had arrived over the past fortnight. One refugee from Zabol at the mosque spoke of his struggle to find shelter and work: “There is no war here, but the food, work and water situation is the same as in Afghanistan.” Asked if he would return home, the refugee answered, “I don’t know where to go - only God can help us now.”