#15
Toronto Sun
October 18, 2001
Unending suffering Afghan refugees in dire misery
By MATTHEW FISHER (74511.357@CompuServe.com)
Sun Columnist at Large
JALOZAI, Pakistan -- While Osama bin Laden and the United States play an increasingly dangerous, high- stakes game with global stability, the Afghans, who mostly blindly support the world's most wanted man, suffer and suffer some more.
I've never been to the moon, obviously, but I imagine that the ragged western margins of this arid plateau about 150 km north of Islamabad are what it must look like.
The light was eerily thin. Hills of sandstone became mountains that stretched off into the distance towards Afghanistan. The earth was rocky where it wasn't chalky and chalky where it wasn't rocky. There was no foliage. Nor was there any obvious water source.
This was as forbidding and isolated a panorama as Canada's Arctic archipelago, Tierra del Fuego, the Sahara, the Kalahari or the Australian Outback. None of these distant places, however, is home to 70,000 refugees.
I've seen hopelessly impoverished displaced people in the heat and despair of Haiti, the Congo, Rwanda and the mud and dust of Chechnya and the Balkans. But I have never seen such epic poverty, gloom and rage as that experienced by the latest wave of Afghan refugees to reach this bleak desert.
MET WITH FORCE
If they succeeded in threading their way through Pakistani security forces who sometimes used force try to prevent them from crossing the border, the newest arrivals from Afghanistan have ended their odyssey in the most forbidding precincts of the Jalozai Refugee Camp. The unluckiest of the unlucky have been left to fend for themselves in what is called Block 38.
Designating this patch of dirt a block was a bad joke. Not one concrete structure existed in Block 38. The only buildings were several shrouded one-hole latrines put up by the United Nations.
About 2,000 makeshift lean-tos of scraps of plastic and burlap were laid out haphazardly as far as the eye could see. Under these flimsy canopies, as many as 15 people squatted in the squalor waiting for a tomorrow holding as little promise as today. The only sounds were of babies bawling and kids and adults begging.
"All we were able to bring with us were a blanket and two ropes," railed a wizened 72-year-old Afghan who had arrived a few days earlier from Kabul with his 39-year-old wife and three of their five children.
"We have not eaten for two days. When we tried to get food from a distribution point yesterday, the police hit my fingers so hard they bled."
Others held up small chunks of rock-hard brown bread and screamed that this was all their few rupees could buy. With little firewood available, and neither oil lamps nor electricity, they asked how plastic would keep their many children warm during the coming winter.
The families in Block 38 arrived from Afghanistan in the past three months, but Pakistan has not yet allowed them to be inscribed on refugee rolls. Because they do not yet officially exist, they have been ineligible for ration cards or the meagre medical assistance that the UN offered official refugees in Jalozai.
Despite years of killer drought and civil war in Afghanistan, and now the added peril caused by U.S. air strikes, Pakistan has sealed its borders to more than one million Afghans whom the UN believes would otherwise flee. Pakistan's refusal seemed heartless. The truth of it is that Pakistan has already been burdened with more refugees than any other nation.
Hosting two million Afghan refugees, some of whom arrived more than 20 years ago, has seriously complicated Pakistan's own attempts to deal with poverty and drought. The Afghans, with their tribal customs and conservative religious beliefs, have been thrust into an explosive ethnic mix, contributing to a growing rift between secularists and Islamic fundamentalists.
The families stuck in Block 38 had only three concerns -- food, water and warmth. The moonscape they now called home was not furnishing them with any of them.
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