Refugees yearn for home By Paul Jeffrey
United Methodist News Service Everywhere you look in this refugee community, life is a brown monochrome. The simple brown mud walls and mud houses rise from the brown earth, and brown dust swirls in the air, coating everything. It would look hopeless were it not for the occasional flashes of color, including the bright blue tent-like burkas of Afghan women walking to their homes. Hope can also be seen in the white kite that 7-year-old Abdul Maruf flies above the brown village. Marufs family left their drought-ravaged farm in the Afghan countryside a year ago, moving in with relatives outside Mazar-e-Sharif. Yet three months later, when the war with the ruling Taliban threatened to overtake their village, Marufs parents fled to safety in neighboring Pakistan. Soon after arrival, Maruf put together a kite, one of many pleasures banned by the Taliban. He said his biggest complaint about the camp is a lack of wind, and he runs through the street kicking up dust as he struggles to get his kite airborne. I like it here, but I liked it better at home, he said. If peace comes, I want to go back home. And Ill take my kite with me. Maruf lives in Shamshatoo, a two-year-old community of more than 75,000 Afghan refugees that sprawls over treeless hills an hour outside Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan. Its one of about 100 refugee camps in Pakistan. The more than 2 million Afghan refugees living in Pakistan arrived in several waves: fleeing the Soviet invasion in 1979, fleeing a brutal civil war after the Soviets withdrew a decade later, fleeing the Taliban who took power in 1996, fleeing a 3-year-old drought, and, most recently, fleeing the U.S. war against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. Mohammed Qasem is one of the newest arrivals, having come to Shamshatoo in October after living as an internally displaced person an IDP in the lingo of aid workers for several months near Herat. Hes happy his 11-year-old daughter Gulalai can attend school in the camp, something not possible under the Taliban, but he longs to go home. One day we will go back. The foreigners will leave our land and the war will stop and we will build our country again, Qasem said, with the optimism typical of new arrivals. More than 100,000 new refugees have entered Pakistan since the U.S. bombing began on Oct. 7. No one knows the exact numbers. Although officially closed by Pakistani authorities, the porous border has hundreds of trails used by smugglers and drug traffickers. Refugees pass across easily. Although Pakistan has long hosted the largest concentration of refugees in the world, the international community has been less than generous in lending a hand. Donor fatigue combined with shifting geopolitical priorities left Pakistan almost alone with the burden of refugees, until Sept. 11 and the subsequent war thrust Afghan refugees back into the limelight. Many of the refugees are crowded into already packed Pakistani cities like Peshawar, where local residents complain about the social impact. Afghans are cheaper workers than the Pakistanis and that has driven down local wages, explained Geir Valle, director of operations here for Norwegian Church Aid, a member of Action by Churches Together, an international network of church relief and development agencies. With Pakistans economy suffering hard times from canceled factory orders and reduced travel in the wake of the September terrorist attacks in the United States, the tension between the two nationalities has grown. Afghan refugees make handy scapegoats for local problems. The Pakistani government is uncomfortable with the negative publicity being given to the refugee camps. While journalists are reluctantly allowed into Shamshatoo, they are refused entry into Jalozai, an even more squalid camp for newly arrived refugees just a few kilometers down the road. The government has also refused to let most nongovernmental organizations near Jalozai. According to Valle, the government has permitted very little aid to get into Jalozai, only enough to avoid a complete disaster. Pakistan wants the United Nations to relocate the people in Jalozai to a string of 11 camps in remote areas near the Afghan border. While the isolated camps will provide food and shelter to the refugees, the location will take the refugees away from day jobs and markets where they earned extra money. And there will be no turning back. The trip to the new camps is clearly a one-way ticket, said Kjell Helge Godtfredsen, director of Norwegian Church Aids emergency program with Afghan refugees. Most refugees talk wistfully about returning home some day. They are a bit skeptical, however, that conditions inside Afghanistan will soon permit that. The countrys recent history affords little hope that the warlords and ethnic leaders gathered in Bonn will figure out a formula to return Afghanistan to sanity. Even when peace comes, aid workers in Shamshatoo dont expect a quick return home. The drought lingers, and unexploded cluster bombs from the U.S. air war have only added danger to every step in a country that may have 10 million land mines. | 
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