#10
Chicago Tribune
November 25, 2001
Refugees are living a hellish existence
Decrepit embassy a bleak portrait of Afghan crisis
By Paul Salopek
Tribune foreign correspondent
KABUL, Afghanistan -- When visiting Russian diplomats stopped by their old embassy in this crumbling capital last week, they were expecting to turn a new page in post-Cold War Afghan relations.
After years of enmity dating to Moscow's 1979 invasion, a new, post-Soviet Russia was hoping to reopen its mission in a new post-Taliban Afghanistan. But the implacable legacy of war barred the door.
"They said that peace had come and that we should go home," said Hamidulla, the leader of some 20,000 Afghan refugees camped out in the sprawling embassy compound. "But we have no other homes. So we didn't let them in."
Hundreds of jeering refugee children, many malnourished and wheezing with respiratory illnesses, began throwing rocks at the diplomatic convoy. The Russians sped away without setting foot outside their cars.
Racked by ethnic divisions, plagued by 10 million land mines and crippled by a war-blasted infrastructure, Afghanistan faces enormous obstacles to peace and prosperity after the final defeat of the Taliban. But no problem haunts this nation more than the issue of its displaced peoples--an entire nation of homeless poor scattered across cities, deserts and borders.
According to the United Nations, an estimated 4 million Afghans are living as refugees in neighboring Pakistan and Iran, and an additional 1 million people are uprooted within the country. The total, about one-fifth of the population, represents the largest refugee crisis in the world.
"It's hard to convey the scale of the suffering," Filippo Grandi, the director of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Afghanistan, said in a recent press conference here. "We're talking about massive flows of displaced people."
Since the U.S.-led bombing campaign against accused terrorist Osama bin Laden and his Taliban allies began in Afghanistan two months ago, that seemingly bottomless pool of refugees has grown by an estimated 150,000 Afghans, Grandi said.
Most of those fleeing the bombing have ended up in camps in Pakistan. That number would have rocketed higher if Pakistan's borders had not remained closed.
Perhaps no group of people captures the abject nature of refugee life in Afghanistan more than the inmates of the old Soviet Embassy.
Once residents of the fertile Shomali Plain outside of Kabul, the 4,000 families living in the destroyed compound were forced en masse from their villages by the Taliban in 1998, when a major offensive was shaping up in the area.
The Shomali villagers were the special focus of the Taliban's wrath, the refugees said, because many were minority Tajiks, the ethnic constituency of opposition warlord Ahmed Shah Massood.
"They cleared out my village and took us all to Jalalabad," a distant city to the east, said Abdul Wahid, 38, a farmer living in one of the embassy's old staff apartments.
"Our children were dying in the heat there, so they brought us to this place and now they are dying in the cold."
The sprawling old Soviet compound is a hellish place. Located in a southern quarter of Kabul that was pulverized by squabbling warlords, the rocket-pocked complex resembles a prison camp at the end of the world.
Apartment towers that once housed Soviet officers and their families in the 1980s are now concrete shells blackened by campfire smoke, where refugees live packed into hundreds of dingy, cavelike cubicles. Pestilential creeks of raw sewage flow across parade grounds where Soviet holidays were marked with marching troops and folk dancing troupes. At the massive, bunkerlike chancery, 240 families--or about 1,000 people--sleep in bureaucrats' former offices.
Some refugees have built mud-brick walls inside the tiny offices to subdivide them for up to 25 people. The embassy's once-grand lobby, its bronze plaques and marble flooring ripped out long ago, is covered in an inch of dirt.
"People die here all the time from diarrheal disease, typhoid or respiratory illnesses," said the compound's only doctor, Mohammed Daud, who runs a government clinic inside the embassy's high, bullet-pitted walls. "I don't even see the dead. They bury them in the fields."
A group of international humanitarian groups has helped with donations of food and clean water, Daud said. But conditions are still so dire that children, ill and malnourished, are dying at night from Kabul's chilly winter weather.
With Northern Alliance rebels having routed the Taliban from the Shomali Plain and much of the rest of Afghanistan, aid organizations are hoping that misery on such a vast scale will end soon.
"If the situation in the country becomes relatively stable, we will see a very strong flow of refugees back to their homes," said Grandi, the UN refugee director.
He noted that if only 20 percent of displaced Afghans begin that migration, it would still represent some 800,000 people--a massive migration not seen since the genocide in Rwanda.
For many refugees at the Soviet Embassy, that journey remains a tenuous dream.
"I hear our farms have been completely destroyed," said Dastagir Khan, who has lost three children to disease since being forced off his land three years ago by Taliban authorities.
"There is nothing to go back to."
A recent visit to the Shomali Plain, some 20 miles outside of Kabul, largely confirmed that bleak assessment.
Village after village was demolished, with few walls left standing.
As part of the Taliban's scorched-earth policy in the region, thousands of land mines were strewn in the fields, wells were poisoned and irrigation canals were dynamited, the refugees said.
On a recent morning, the only people visible for miles were gangs of destitute Kabul residents ripping up dead vineyards for firewood.
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