Closure of refugee village creates tough choices

Painda Muhammad, a 60-year-old Afghan refugee, faces one of the toughest choices of his life. Kacha Garhi, where he lives, one of Pakistan’s oldest refugee camps in the northwestern city of Peshawar, will soon be closing. “I don’t want to leave my home here. It’s beyond my means to establish another house elsewhere,” he told IRIN on Friday. But Muhammad has few choices. He can either go back to his beleaguered country and to his land in the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar, receiving some assistance from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), or move to a few newly established makeshift camps in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas bordering Afghanistan, and live there on food aid. Conversely he could stay in Peshawar and rent a house for his wife and five sons. But, working as day labourers, they can barely feed themselves, so they cannot even think about renting. “Nothing will be easy for us,” he said. Ever since he left Afghanistan in 1980 following the Soviet invasion, a four-roomed mud house has been home to Muhammad’s family in Kacha Garhi. According to UNHCR, some 60,000 Afghans living in Kacha Ghari have difficult decisions ahead, as the Pakistani government needs the five square kilometres of land on which the camp is sited on the outskirts of Peshawar, for redevelopment. The government wanted to evacuate the camp by 30 March, but a visit to it showed that it might be an optimistic deadline, with thousands of families still living there. Aid workers, however, believe that all the refugees might leave the camp within a few months. Home to many since it was established in 1980, leaving is not a happy prospect. Twenty-three-year-old Muhammad Nadir told IRIN that if the residents could choose, they would not leave the camp. “There is no security or employment in Afghanistan, and building another house here is also expensive,” he said. Such attitudes were echoed across the refugee village.

Muhammad Nadir would prefer to stay

According to Abdul Hafeez, a project director for repatriation with Pakistan’s Commissioner for Afghan Refugees (CAR), Kacha Garhi’s land belongs to the military, and the government now wants to reoccupy and develop it. He agreed that numbers of people in the camp were quite settled, having lived there for a long time, with jobs and businesses in the city. “It’s natural for people to resist a change in their residence,” he told IRIN, noting that Kacha Garhi residents had last year been given six-month notices to evacuate the camp. Kacha Garhi will be the third such refugee community to be evacuated and demolished among some 200 refugee camps throughout Pakistan. Last June, Nasir Bagh refugee camp in Peshawar was officially closed down. The Emirates camp close to the border town of Chaman in southwestern Balochistan Province bordering Afghanistan was also shut down. Hafeez maintained that no other camps were on the CAR’s list for similar evacuations. “We hope that all Afghans will return to their homeland and all the camps come to an end,” he said. Earlier this month, UNHCR began its assisted repatriation drive from Pakistan with the aim of helping some 600,000 Afghans this year. This process is expected to focus on some 1.5 million Afghans still living in Pakistani camps, as last year the majority of returnees left from the country’s cities. Recently, the agency and the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan also signed a tripartite agreement to repatriate an estimated two million Afghans from Pakistan over three years. Since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, about two million Afghans have gone home. Explaining the background to the move, Shahnaz Parween, a repatriation official with UNHCR in Peshawar, told IRIN that over the past year many people in the city had had to move to make room for the ongoing widening of roads and other infrastructure development projects, and Kacha Garhi was another such case. “Refugees are also subject to the laws of the host country,” she said. Parween added that the refugee agency would assist Afghans to move from Kacha Garhi and resettle in the new refugee camps in the Tribal Areas. “We are already helping those who are repatriating out of their own free will,” she said, adding that a number of Afghans who could manage their own housing could go to any area of their choice in Pakistan. Meanwhile, for 65-year-old Abdul Rahman, leaving Kacha Garhi remains a bleak prospect. “I hope people understand that establishing oneself in a new place is a very hard task,” he told IRIN. While running a shop in the Kacha Garhi bazaar, he is well settled and happy in his mud house at the camp. “This is a foreign country and we can’t really bargain much. However, we want a life that is secure and we have food,” he said.