File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0109, message 286


Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 12:03:06 -0400
Subject: AUT: FW: Afghanistan's Refugee Crisis
From: "bob brown" <vacirca-AT-charm.net>



-- 
"solidarity means sharing the same risks" - Che
( la solidarita significa correre gli stessi rischi)

----------
From: Marwan Dalal <dmarwan-AT-yahoo.com>
To: postcolonial <postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Subject: Afghanistan's Refugee Crisis
Date: Tue, Sep 25, 2001, 7:33 AM



MERIP Press Information Note 70

Afghanistan's Refugee Crisis

Hiram Ruiz and Margaret Emery

September 24, 2001

(Hiram Ruiz and Margaret Emery are policy analysts for
the US Committee forRefugees.)

Over the last two weeks, an estimated 15,000 Afghan
refugees have fled to Pakistan, and hundreds of
thousands more are reportedly on the move within
Afghanistan. This latest flight of Afghans from their
homes deepens a humanitarian crisis that has troubled
the region for more than 20 years.

Already, some 2 million Afghan refugees are living in
Pakistan and more than 1.4 million in Iran, with an
estimated 30,000 in India, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and
other countries. Additionally, some 900,000 people are
displaced from their homes within Afghanistan. If and
when the United States and its allies launch a
military campaign against Afghanistan, UN officials
estimate that the number of new refugees and displaced
could climb past 1 million.

>From a humanitarian perspective, the recent terrorist
attacks and
Subsequent US threat of military action against
Afghanistan could not have come at a worse moment.
Even before the current refugee movement, the
Pakistani and Iranian governments were showing
impatience with the large, intractable refugee
populations in their countries. Tajikistan shut its
doors to Afghan asylum seekers and drought victims.
International aid began to dwindle nearly a decade
ago, as "donor fatigue" set in after the Cold War.

Although some long-time refugees have been integrated
into their host countries, living in cities and
working stable jobs, more recent arrivals have been
forced to live in squalid conditions, without access
to adequate food, water, shelter and sanitation.

The recent withdrawal of UN international aid staff
and other
Humanitarian groups from Afghanistan means that more
Afghans, lacking desperately needed assistance, will
migrate to Pakistan and Iran in search of food and
medical care. Some governments, including the US, have
already pledged new aid to the refugee effort. But
with Pakistan, Iran and four other nations closing
their borders to refugees, the situation inside
Afghanistan could become catastrophic.

TWO DECADES OF MISERY

The Afghan refugee crisis dates back more than 23
years. Since 1978, as many as a third of Afghanistan's
26 million inhabitants have been forced to flee their
homes, temporarily or permanently. The first wave of
Afghan refugees came in April of that year, when the
country's new communist regime introduced a massive
agricultural reform program that the rural population
deeply resented and resisted.

In December 1979, the Soviet Union, concerned that the
communist government in Kabul was losing ground,
occupied Afghanistan and installed a puppet regime.
After the occupying forces unleashed a wave of terror
on the civilian population, hundreds of thousands
of refugees poured out of Afghanistan. Within two
years of the
invasion, some 1.5 million Afghans were refugees,
mostly in Pakistan.

By 1986, the number of Afghan refugees in Pakistan and
Iran had grown
To nearly 5 million. The US and other Western
countries were by now
Supporting the Islamist resistance movement known as
the mujahideen in their struggle against the
Soviet-led government. At the same time, the West
poured money into the Afghan refugee camps in
Pakistan, many of which served as bases for the
mujahideen. The international community did not
provide similar assistance to Afghan refugees in Iran,
where the 1979 revolution had put an anti-Western
regime in power. In the decade after the revolution,
Iran did
not actively seek aid from the international
community, although the UN High Commission for
Refugees (UNHCR) consistently kept a presence, albeit
a poorly funded one, in the country.

When the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989,
they left in power another communist regime, which the
mujahideen defeated in April 1992. Afghan refugees
welcomed the mujahideen victory, and over the course
of 1992 more than 1.4 million refugees returned home.
But far from bringing peace to Afghanistan, the
mujahideen conquest only opened a new chapter in the
conflict, as warlords fought one another for small
pieces of territory.

ENTER THE TALIBAN

In 1994, the Taliban emerged as a significant military
force, capturing Kabul two years later. A Taliban
offensive in the Shomali Plains in 1999 forced some
150,000 people to flee their homes. Although many of
the displaced returned home in 2000, some 60,000
remained displaced, and a late July 2000 Taliban
campaign displaced more tens of thousands of people,
both internally and to Pakistan. Among the displaced
were some 10,000 persons who became stranded on
several islands in a river along the Afghan-Tajik
border.

Pushed back from the Tajik border by Russian patrols,
the group
Suffered periodic attacks by the Taliban and went
largely without UNHCR aid, since they were displaced
persons and (technically) not refugees.

The Taliban, who control between 90 and 95 percent of
Afghanistan,
Function as a repressive police state. Both women and
men must adhere to strict behavioral codes that
prevent women and girls from working, receiving
necessary health care and getting an education. In
some areas, despite the hunger and grinding poverty
fueled by the drought, the Taliban have obstructed
international relief efforts. The Taliban's ban on the
cultivation of poppies (used to make heroin), while
welcomed by the international community, left
thousands of farmers who grew the crop without any
livelihood, and forced many landless laborers to
migrate to camps for internally displaced persons, or
to Pakistan.

Over the past year, Afghanistan's refugee crisis has
been exacerbated
by the worst drought in 30 years. After inadequate
rain and snowfall led to poor crops, tens of thousands
of Afghans abandoned their homes in search of food
beginning in June 2000. By year's end, some 350,000
Afghans had become newly displaced, many of them due
to the drought, others due to the war.

Another 172,000 had fled to Pakistan. In early 2001,
tens of thousands more Afghans sought refuge in
Pakistan or became displaced within Afghanistan, and
by August 2001, an estimated 900,000 Afghans had been
internally displaced, most living with friends or
relatives in Afghanistan's larger towns and cities.

WHY THEY FLEE

Twenty-three years of unrelenting conflict, widespread
human rights
Abuses and more recently acute drought have created
devastating humanitarian conditions in Afghanistan.
Over the course of Afghanistan's civil war, warring
factions have repeatedly violated human rights and
international humanitarian law, engaging in
indiscriminate aerial bombardment and shelling,
summary executions, rape, persecution on the basis of
religion and the use of anti-personnel mines.

Afghanistan reportedly has the highest infant, child
and maternal
Mortality rates, the lowest literacy rate and life
expectancy, and one of the two or three lowest levels
of per capita food availability in the world. In
October 2000, the UN Commission on Human Rights
special rapporteur on Afghanistan asserted that the
country was in "a state of acute crisis -- its
resources depleted, its intelligentsia in exile, its
people disenfranchised, its traditional political
structures shattered and its human development indices
among the lowest in the world."

In May 2001, the World Food Program warned that more
than 1 million
Afghans were facing famine conditions, and in
September reported that in some areas, people were
surviving by eating grass and locusts. Although the UN
and other aid agencies have for years supplied food
and other assistance to the Afghan population, since
the September 11 terrorist attacks, all international
aid workers have withdrawn, leaving only a skeleton
staff of local UN employees in place.

HOST COUNTRY FATIGUE

In recent years, Pakistan has displayed a hardening
attitude toward its 2 million Afghan refugees,
reflected in periodic border closings and attempts to
close long-term camps. Refugees have experienced
harassment and violence, while the government has
deported, and possibly returned to persecution,
thousands of Afghan refugees.

>From the late 1970s through the early 1990s, the
international
Community lavished substantial assistance on Pakistan,
the refugees and the mujahideen, but in recent years
has significantly scaled back its assistance, leaving
Pakistan to manage the refugees on its own.

Today Pakistan's faltering economy, weakened in part
by economic sanctions imposed by the US and other
countries, has prompted a backlash against Afghan
refugees, who the government of Pakistan says take
jobs from local people.

The government also blames refugees for increased
crime and social
problems, such as drug use and prostitution. The
government of Pakistan takes the position that since
the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan -- which caused
most "long-term" refugees to flee -- has ended,
refugees should return home. Further, the government
claims that the home areas of many long-term refugees
are free of
conflict, and that many Afghans who have entered
Pakistan since mid-2000 are victims of drought, not
refugees. Pakistan, a long-time supporter of the
Taliban, may be under pressure from its own Islamic
extremists to repatriate the refugees, whose presence
in Pakistan reflects poorly on the Taliban.

Since consolidating its grip on power in most of
Afghanistan, the Taliban has also tried to impose its
policies on Afghan refugees in Pakistan, warning
refugees not to send girls over the age of eight to
schools and ordering teachers in refugee schools to
limit lessons for girls under age eight to verses from
the Quran.

Pakistan's changed attitude toward Afghan refugees had
its most serious impact on the estimated 200,000
Afghans fleeing conflict and drought who arrived in
Pakistan between mid-2000 and early 2001, particularly
those who sought refuge at Jalozai transit center near
Peshawar. For months, only minimal assistance was
provided to the Afghans at Jalozai, and between
January and June 2001, at least 95 refugees, weakened
by hunger, dehydration and disease, died of exposure.

The more than 1.4 million Afghan refugees in Iran,
many of whom have
Lived there for nearly two decades, have also faced
growing hostility and intolerance from their host
country. Claiming that refugees take scarce jobs away
from local people, Iranian officials have made it
clear that they no longer welcome Afghans. Beginning
in 1997, the government set several deadlines for
refugees to leave the country, declined to register
new arrivals from Afghanistan as refugees, attempted
to round up and confine refugees to camps, and at
times summarily deported them.

Hostility toward Afghan refugees reached a new high in
late 1998 and early 1999, when mobs attacked and in
some cases killed Afghan refugees, demanding their
deportation. Iran deported about 100,000 Afghans in
1999, many of whom were repatriated after roundups in
the eastern provinces and urban centers.

Nonetheless, as many as 200,000 Afghans may have fled
to Iran between
Late 2000 and August 2001. During the same period,
Iran forcibly repatriated an estimated 82,000 Afghans.

"HUMANITARIAN COALITION"?

As the threat of US military action against
Afghanistan becomes more
acute, a new refugee exodus from Afghanistan could
accelerate the descent of the regional refugee
situation into humanitarian disaster. As suggested by
UNHCR chief Ruud Lubbers, the US and the rest of the
international community should at least devote the
same efforts to building a "humanitarian coalition" as
they have to building a military one. UNHCR has issued
an appeal to international donors for an additional $6
million. Meanwhile, internally displaced Afghans will
likely face even greater risk than those who attempt
to cross borders. A strong response from the
international community, and a commitment to
maintaining an aid network  inside Afghanistan as
well, if feasible -- could help ensure that fleeing
Afghans
do not become incidental victims of the US war against
terrorism.

(When quoting from this PIN, please cite MERIP Press
Information Note
70, "Afghanistan's Refugee Crisis," by Hiram Ruiz and
Margaret Emery,
September 24, 2001.)

-----

For more information on Afghan refugees, see the US
Committee for
Refugees website at:
http://www.refugees.org

For background on Taliban policies toward women, see
MERIP Press
Information Note 24: Afghan Girls' Struggle for
Schooling:
http://www.merip.org/pins/pin24.html

Fred Halliday analyzes Iranian-Taliban relations in
the fall issue of
Middle East Report (MER 220), "Shaky Foundations: The
US in the Middle East."

The upcoming winter issue of Middle East Report will
examine the
implications of the September 11 attacks for the
Middle East.





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