Nasir Bagh’s Afghan community faces uncertain future

Hanife Nuriye is an Afghan widow. In keeping with Afghan hospitality, the conservatively dressed woman beckons her visitors in, offering them tea brewed on a makeshift stove outside her one-room home in Nasir Bagh, a densely populated community of 120,000 Afghan refugees in Peshawar. She ignores the flies buzzing about from the open sewer outside her door, and smiles her welcome. Like all residents, Hanife has a story and, like those of most Afghans, it is heart-rending. Hanife has very little left in her life other than her dignity and her home, but that too may soon be lost. She has been ordered by the Pakistani authorities to vacate by 30 June or be forcibly evicted. “Where to go? What to do?” Hanife cries. “Why did they put me in this place if they were going to send me away? I am a widow. I have nothing.” Hanife looks much older than her years, and with good reason. “We used to have a beautiful house in Afghanistan, but after the war we are forced to live like this,” she told IRIN, gesturing to the four simple mud-brick walls of her home. A picture of her husband hangs on the wall. It is the one reminder of the life she once had in Afghanistan. She lost him in 1981. Left to care for her two young sons, she worked for the government as a civil servant in the capital, Kabul. Life then was a day-to-day struggle, but she endeavoured to provide for her children as a single parent. Tragedy, however, struck again in 1992 when a rocket attack levelled her home, killing one son and leaving the other permanently brain damaged. Abdul Jalil, now 22, looks blankly at his mother as she tells her story. He does not understand why his mother is crying. When the Taliban took over Kabul in 1996, women were quickly barred from employment, so she lost her job. She escaped to the eastern city of Jalalabad in search of assistance, but found none. One day, the Taliban authorities “invited” Hanife together with 35 other widows to a local mosque, where assistance was to be provided. Once they were inside, the doors were closed and a Koranic prayer read. The Taliban officials then declared that henceforth no one should hear the voice of a woman except other female family members lest they be damned to eternal hell, Hanife recalled. “The Taliban say the voice of woman should not be heard, because it corrupts men’s minds. Not even the clicking of their shoes,” she added. Hanife and her companions were told to remarry immediately. Instead, she escaped to Pakistan with her son. That one room in Nasir Bagh has been Hanife’s home since the beginning of 1997. It cost her US $120 - a staggering sum for someone with no financial resources. Being resettled in Nasir Bagh gave her the chance to rebuild a life for herself and her son, despite the fact that aid assistance to the camp had long since evaporated. Besides a daily bread ration, she has hardly anything to live on. Hanife makes bricks from a pool of mud outside her home. It takes her about 20 days to prepare 1,000 bricks, and if she manages to sell them, she earns about US $8. Located in the provincial capital of Peshawar in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), Nasir Bagh is one of the oldest refugee communities in the town. First established in the 1980s, most of the refugees residing in the camp arrived following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. The camp is divided into four sectors each named after the ethnic origin of its residents: Kabul, Jabarkhail, Arabian and Khogiani. These four are broken down further into numerous sub-sectors. Today, Nasir Bagh is no longer a camp at all, but a close-knit community comprising about 12,000 families. There are some 100 schools and teaching centres, accommodating an estimated 25,000 students. There are also 150 mosques, four medical clinics and hundreds of small shops and stalls, where residents work to eke out a living. The poverty is so intense that residents have to collect money from their neighbours to bury their dead. Asked what would happen to the large cemetery located in the Kabul district of Nasir Bagh once the settlement was razed, Mohammad Zaher Baburi, editor of the Afghan weekly ‘Afghanan’, asked IRIN: “Why do you care so much about the dead, when they are tossing out the living?” A reasonable response to what must have seemed to him an absurd question. On 30 June, none of this will matter any longer. In a recent announcement, the governor of the North-West Frontier Province, Syed Iftikhar Hussain Shah, stated that the Nasir Bagh refugee camp must be razed to make room for a new housing development to be called Regi Lama, and delays would be tolerated. The township project has been in the pipeline for years, but previous governments lacked the resolve to implement it. This governor, however, is more determined, and has ordered implementation to be accelerated. According to a report by the Pakistani daily ‘The News’ on 17 March, he wants the Nasir Bagh refugee camp vacated and the refugees shifted to the Shamshatoo refugee camp, 30 km from Peshawar and already home to 52,000 people. “Afghan refugees have to know that their stay at the new site will be entirely provisional, as they will have to go back to Afghanistan as early as possible,” the governor warned. Hanife shudders at the mere mention of return to Afghanistan, a country now ravaged by over 20 years of conflict, not to mention drought and hunger. “We came here with the trust of protection from the UN. Where are you now?” she cries. During the recent visit of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to Peshawar, residents of Nasir Bagh were prevented from delivering a letter signed by camp leaders, calling for his assistance. While thanking the Pakistani authorities for their humanitarian aid over the years, the letter said: “Recently the Pakistani authorities have changed their policies with respect to Afghan refugees.” It added: “Dismantling of the camp means confronting 120,000 Afghan refugees, already faced with grave misfortune and difficulty, [with] further aggravation of their problems to the extent of unpredictable human catastrophe.” In the context of the plight of Nasir Bagh and the government’s stance, there are many who warn of serious repercussions should the government decide to proceed. “It’s very possible the authorities are playing with a beehive. I think this could lead to a larger issue being forced,” UNHCR senior programme officer Zivan Dimato told IRIN. “If you are talking about evicting 120,000 people without compensation, you could very well have an uprising that could turn violent and very ugly.” According to Dimato, who described this as not just a camp, but a proper settlement, “rather than forcing these people out, the authorities should try to work with them, particularly when it was the Pakistani authorities that years ago decided they should be located in Nasir Bagh. It’s a very genuine cost issue for the refugees, and a protection issue for us. For UNHCR, these people are still refugees. These people need to be compensated and/or relocated with adequate levels of assistance to a place they find acceptable. I don’t see any other solution than this.” He warned: “Imagine 10,000 Afghans marching down the main government boulevard here in Peshawar. It is entirely conceivable that Nasir Bagh could become a rallying point of solidarity for many Afghans living in Pakistan.” These views were echoed by Afrasiyab Khattak, chairman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP). Khattak told IRIN: “We aren’t just talking about a deprivation of shelter, but a deprivation of economic means. These people are doing odd jobs - daily-wage jobs, working as vendors there, and they will lose this. An eviction will have very serious consequences for these people unless an alternative place is provided to them in a planned way so that they can restart their lives and their livelihoods.” Asked what would happen if the government failed to heed these warnings, Khattak appeared fatalistic: “An element of desperation is entering into the psyche of the Afghan refugees. They feel totally helpless and totally pushed to the wall. Nasir Bagh could become the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.” The Pakistani daily ‘Wahdat’, recently reported that women from the camp - many of them just like Hanife - hadwarned that they would burn themselves in front of UN offices in Peshawar unless the government reversed its decision, a threat which lends credence to Khattak’s grim prognosis. This could indeed be the start of something far more serious than the government is prepared for - a tinder-box waiting to explode.