Afghan refugees begin coming in

Despite the official closure of the border with Afghanistan, Afghans are crossing into Pakistan with desperate tales of conditions at home, prompting fears of a massive exodus in the near future. Bolstered with the promise of fresh international aid, Pakistan, once hostile to the idea of new refugee camps, is again bracing itself for a large influx of Afghans. International donors have pledged or committed up to US $737 million towards the humanitarian crisis. However, of the US $301 million pledged in response to the UN’s donor alert, only US $38 million has actually been received. In Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), which borders on eastern Afghanistan, newly arrived refugees spoke of their harrowing journey and of the situation they had left behind. "People are running. They are scared and want to get out," a recent Afghan arrival, Nur Zaman, told IRIN. Now in the Bara Khosran camp, 25 km from Peshawar, he had already been a refugee in the 1990s, in the central Punjab Province of Pakistan. He returned to Afghanistan in 1997 to build a new home in Khost Province. But last week he left it all behind. Together with his wife and two children, he returned to Pakistan once again, after an exhausting journey of several days. He was now in Peshawar, but moving on to the nearby district of Mansehra, where his brother was running a junk shop, he said. Obadollah, 29, left his home in Konar Province, northeastern Afghanistan, last week. He told IRIN he had hitchhiked and walked south to the northeastern city of Jalalabad, where he stayed for one night. The Afghan carpenter then crossed over a river on wooden planks into Inayatkalli, in the Mohmand Agency, NWFP. After a truck journey to Peshawar, he finally reached his destination, the Akora Khattak camp, some 45 km from Peshawar, where he was to stay with relatives. "I felt isolated in Afghanistan, that is why I left. Thank God I have family in Pakistan," he said. Obadollah was now going to try and find work in the bazaar. He said he was scared in Afghanistan, and there was no way he would go back now. According to the UN, there are two million Afghans in Pakistan, although the authorities maintain the figure is closer to three million. Islamabad has long contended that it simply cannot cope with the burden alone, and there were official proposals to send refugees back earlier this year, by which time little international aid had materialised. The country has also been struggling to cope with its own economic problems, including the knock-on effects of a three-year drought, which has left 350,000 Pakistanis in the eastern province of Baluchistan in need of food aid. Pakistan’s Minister for Kashmir Affairs, Northern Areas, States and Frontier Regions, Abbas Sarfaraz Khan, recently released a statement reiterating the lack of support Pakistan had seen from the international community with regard to Afghan refugees. "For the last decade, we have received very little help from the international community to sustain these refugees: about US $8 per year, per refugee. Almost half of these three million have spread into our towns and cities, creating economic, social and political problems for our country and people," Khan said. One senior Pakistani official told IRIN he found it sad that it had taken the events of 11 September for the world "to wake up and help the Afghans". However, now that the world has "woken up", preparations are under way to cope with the latest potential influx of up to a million, according to UNHCR estimates. On 11 October, the UN refugee agency announced it had been able to resume work at the Malkana village in the NWFP, one of the proposed camp sites, after four days of anti-US protests had stopped aid workers from entering the area. The refugee agency has earmarked 32 sites for camps in the NWFP and four in Baluchistan. However, seven were withdrawn as they were considered inappropriate or insecure. Many of the sites are in barren hills in the Tribal Areas, where sympathies for the Taliban can often run high. The UNHCR spokesman in Islamabad, Yusuf Hassan, said talks were taking place with government officials to identify more sites.