Refugees Magazine Issue 125 (September Terror) – Helping Afghanistan

A complex humanitarian operation is pieced together

On the seven floors of UNHCR's blue and yellow headquarters building in Geneva, staff stood mesmerized. The video of planes slamming into the World Trade C enter in New York was "unreal rather than shocking; the horror was too overwhelming to absorb at first," one senior official remembered. "But then we started to hear the words 'Bin Laden,' 'the Taliban' and 'Afghanistan' and it was very clear we were going to become part of this crisis." In the humanitarian world, Afghanistan had become something of an enigma prior to the events of September 11.

The 1979 Soviet invasion had triggered a refugee crisis of massive proportions and in the next two decades millions of people fled the country. Millions more returned as the fortunes of war changed. And then there were new upheavals and further displacements. UNHCR alone spent more than $1.6 billion to help what had become the globe's single largest refugee community.

But when foreign troops withdrew, the big powers lost interest in what they had helped turn into a benighted piece of real estate in Central Asia. Traditional donors became wary of a country increasingly identified with unending war, international terrorism and the whole scale debasement of its female population.

Though basic aid continued to be pumped into the country, Afghanistan's refugee problem turned into the 'unending' or 'forgotten' crisis for much of the outside world.

"The attacks in the United States were a wakeup call," said Pierre François Pirlot, a regional expert who became head of a newly created UNHCR task force for the crisis. "They put Afghanistan and its refugees back on the front burner."

COMPLEX OPERATION

From the start, it was clear this would be one of the most complex operations UNHCR has been involved in in its 51- year history. A civil war between various loose alliances had been in progress for years, destroying virtually all of the country's infrastructure. To compound the problem, Afghanistan was gripped by devastating drought and one-third of the country's 25 million people already needed food and other help merely to survive.

Like Kosovo, Afghanistan's 'humanitarian crisis' was highly politicized. The United States was not only UNHCR's largest single donor, but also a major protagonist in the latest round of fighting.

Pakistan and Iran, who between them still hosted around 3.5 million long-term Afghan refugees, had never forgiven the international community for 'walking away' from the problem several years ago. This time around they officially closed their borders, as did the four other surrounding countries, and hung figurative 'unwelcome' signs along their frontiers to deter new refugees.

Fundamental protection questions and other issues were raised for UNHCR. How could the agency aggressively meet the latest challenge without compromising other refugee crisis during a period when UNHCR had just undergone major staff cuts; how far to pursue an open borders policy with countries determined to keep them shut, allowing civilians to exercise their fundamental right to seek asylum during times of persecution; where and how to help them if and when they left Afghanistan; and how to balance the needs of refugees with more than one million persons uprooted and trapped within the country – so-called internally displaced persons – who did not officially fall under UNHCR's mandate.

In the early phase of the crisis, that problem was academic from UNHCR's perspective. The international staff of all major agencies had left Afghanistan at the start of the bombing campaign. Like Kosovo before it, the country became increasingly isolated from the outside world, with little accurate information on what was happening there and few refugees crossing the officially closed frontiers.

"We can't get in. They (civilians) can't get out," UNHCR's chief spokesman Ron Redmond said at the time. "Stalemate."

MUNDANE PROBLEMS

As the humanitarian operation began, the most immediate problems to be tackled included: How many refugees could be expected? What kind of help would they need? How many staff should be deployed and where? How much would it all cost?

The 'numbers game' is one of the trickiest and most politically sensitive issues in any emergency. The lives of fleeing civilians, the effectiveness of programs and the reputations of governments and agencies revolve around these estimates. In Kosovo, though virtually no capital, intelligence agency or humanitarian group predicted the exodus of nearly one million people within a matter of weeks, UNHCR, among others, was condemned for its 'failure' in a slick pass-the-buck public relations exercise.

Early in this crisis, it was estimated as many as 1.5 million people could flee, in a worse case scenario. UNHCR had been heavily involved in the region for 20 years and Pirlot said, "You tap this experience, you talk to the people on the ground, you sniff around, you gauge the potential for the war spreading, you look at the maps and study history. And then you make an educated guess."

Certainly, if history was any guide, this planning figure was not an unreasonable assumption. At the height of the earlier exodus, 6.2 million people had fled. In one year alone, in 1991, 1.6 million Afghans went home during a brief period of hope. The terrain may be harsh and unforgiving, but even with the most primitive transport, two feet, people can cover huge distances quickly.

In the event, as some frustrated field workers said, it became 'a refugee crisis without refugees' in the first few months. Even those civilians who were able to slip across Pakistan's porous 2,400-kilometer border became labelled as 'invisible refugees' as they melted quietly into already established Afghan communities to avoid official harassment .

The most obvious reason for the 'non exodus' of refugees were decisions by its neighbors to close their frontiers and effectively quarantine Afghanistan, moves which were then widely announced to deter mass flight. People inured to years of war either took the threatened allied 'surgical' air strikes in their stride, moved to the homes of families and friends in the countryside or were simply too exhausted by conflict and drought to move at all.

"Numbers are always a minefield," one planning official said later. "It's a very risky game and always a no-win situation."

WHERE'S THE MONEY?

UNHCR asked for $268 million, including $50 million to meet immediate needs. The agency's most important donors promised to be generous – but there was a hitch, a Catch-22. Some governments said, "We know you have to be prepared and you can't prepare without funds," one official recalled. "But they told us 'we have our own problems. If we can't see the refugees on television, it's difficult to allocate funds.'"

That problem was soon resolved, UNHCR emphasizing that even if a large exodus did not materialize, in this operation at least, nothing would be wasted. Supplies stockpiled on Afghanistan's borders could be used within the country once it reopened to international aid.

In the aftermath of the Gulf War in the early 1990s, UNHCR had decided to establish a permanent stockpile of items to meet any emergency. As the latest Afghan crisis began, the reserves of plastic sheeting, blankets and jerry cans located in Copenhagen, Denmark, were expected to cover as many as 250,000 people.

Absent from the stockpile was one essential item, tents, but for a very good reason according to chief logistical officer Enda Savage. "It is not like going to the supermarket and plucking things off the shelf," he said. "Tents are made of canvas. They rot when they are stored for any length of time so we cannot keep large stockpiles."

At the start of an emergency, tents must be ordered to specific criteria, but the operation is frustrating and expensive. There are only a limited number of suppliers worldwide and the refugee agency immediately block-booked production. "We were offered tents by one donor," Savage recalled, "but they had to go to the same suppliers we were using. The offer was self-defeating."

Each canvas tent weighs between 70 and 120 kilos and costs $70. UNHCR ordered 73,000 of the lighter weight models to be delivered between late September and November. An Ilyushin 76 cargo plane, the workhorse of the international humanitarian community, can carry 575 per flight and it costs $100,000 for each trip between Europe and Central Asia.

To reduce overheads, and in the absence of a major exodus, a planning decision was made to send limited supplies immediately to the area and move the rest by sea or road, with the ability to switch back to air transport if warranted.

"It worked. Success from our perspective is to deliver supplies prior to the arrival of refugees," Savage said.

But in a world where television has taught its audience to demand results instantly, the two months it took to deliver 73,000 tents, or complete similar programs, may be a luxury humanitarian agencies can no longer afford. Research is underway to manufacture lightweight, durable tents at an affordable price which can be stockpiled and readily available.

UNHCR had been heavily criticized for the slow deployment of staff during the Kosovo emergency. Determined to avoid that problem now, it more than doubled its international presence by quickly adding 85 emergency staff on the ground and recruiting another 62 locals as mainly border monitors.

An internal evaluation of UNHCR's performance concluded that despite budget cutting constraints which had eliminated several hundred posts, UNHCR had met its immediate targets, though a major exodus "would have overwhelmed the agency."

The report said UNHCR still lacked 'fast track' budgetary and administrative procedures and lacked other comprehensive methods to provide updated information on staff deployment and the procurement and delivery of supplies.

IN THE FIELD

On the ground, field staff faced a surreal and frustrating experience. The Afghan crisis received overwhelming attention, not because of its humanitarian dimension, but because of the unprecedented political and military fallout following the terrorist attacks in the United States. Thousands of the world's media scrutinized every development, every second of the day.

The refugee element, played out against a harsh moonscape and full of larger-than-life figures, both colorful and pathetic, was elusive to pin down and tackle effectively in this fishbowl environment.

Fragmentary reports from inside the blockaded country suggested millions of people were living life on the very edge and many of them would surely die unless the situation could be resolved before the onslaught of another bitter winter.

"They are selling their livestock and their land, taking the roof beams out of their rooms and in some cases even selling their daughters to get a bride price,"one frustrated aid worker said.

The Taliban rulers oversaw the trashing, looting and theft of U.N. offices and supplies and then, in its death throes, demanded that the agencies return to the country to help a population it had played a huge part in traumatizing.

Security concerns and numbing bureaucracy hampered humanitarian efforts to either get supplies into Afghanistan or help civilians who successfully reached surrounding countries.

Even when campsites were approved inside Pakistan, they were often in remote, tribal, physically intimidating locations and sometimes on disputed land. In one of many such incidents, villagers dismantled 70 tents at the Roghani camp in Baluchistan in November in a dispute over land ownership and distribution of jobs in and around the camp. Security forces did nothing during the incident which, however, was eventually resolved.

Pakistani and Iranian officials asked visiting dignitaries why they should open their borders to new floods of people when other nations had walked away from the earlier crisis and some were even now blocking the arrival of a few hundred asylum seekers.

On the Iranian border, two camps were established – but on the Afghan side of the frontier and not in Iran itself, and inaccessible to U.N. staff.

There were delicate diplomatic talks on the 'open border' issue – how and where to help people who did succeed in crossing a frontier and how best to help people inside Afghanistan itself.

During a visit to the region, High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers said there had been an 'agreement to disagree' on open borders. UNHCR now evolved a two-pronged approach, developing programs to help people inside Afghanistan while simultaneously working with neighboring countries to provide help, especially to the most vulnerable groups such as women and children and the sick and the wounded.

Field staff had to change priorities constantly while still trying to come to terms with a slippery humanitarian crisis that refused to define itself clearly.

"At one point we were concentrating our resources on trying to move people from border areas in Pakistan into camps," one official said. "Then, when the military situation changed in northern Afghanistan, the priority was to transfer supplies to Uzbekistan, ready to ship to Mazar-i-Sharif. And then we had to start gearing up to go back into Afghanistan itself. And this all happened in a matter of days."

"There is always the risk of being overtaken by events in a fast moving crisis," another official said.

THE FUTURE

In the last massive humanitarian emergency, hundreds of thousands of persons fled or were forced to leave Kosovo within a matter of weeks and then returned home just as quickly after only a short period in exile, surprising aid officials both times.

The Afghanistan crisis was very different. Around 3,5 million people were already in exile, many of them having been uprooted for years. Hundreds of thousands of persons were internally displaced, but only a modest number had fled to surrounding countries as winter approached.

The immediate priority was to sustain civilians who had lost everything, with shelter, food and medical care during the long winter. "We are in a race against time and right now we are losing," High Commissioner Lubbers said at one point in the crisis and that assessment remained just as plausible at the end of the year.

However, UNHCR (and other agencies) began reopening its off ices in Afghanistan and restarting work with dozens of local NGOs to deliver emergency supplies as well as continuing its work in neighboring countries.

Late in the year, UNHCR developed a $182 million regional action plan through mid-2002 to help nearly 900,000 people in four main areas. They included providing protection and assistance to nearly 400,000 Afghans in surrounding countries, particularly Pakistan and Iran, being prepared for a further exodus and eventually helping refugees to return home. Inside Afghanistan, the agency will assist an estimated 500,000 internally displaced and other vulnerable persons.

Though civilians continued to go back and forth across the borders – nearly five million have returned in a decade – it was unlikely that many of the long-term refugees would try to go home until at least the beginning of spring and until the situation had stabilized even further.

"In Kosovo people had something to go back to," an official said. "In Afghanistan, there is virtually nothing. Roads, water systems, schools, hospitals have all been destroyed. The country is awash with mines. We are writing on a blank sheet of paper."

The World Health Organization estimated five million Afghans were suffering from psychosocial distress after 20 years of conflict. More than seven million needed outside assistance simply to survive.

"We had a house. We had goats, sheep, blankets, donkeys and camels," a 40-yearold refugee called Nazire said. "We were people. Now we have nothing."

Reconstruction experts estimated it could take around $10 billion to give Nazire and his fellow Afghans a new start in life. "The vast majority of the Afghan people awaken hungry, cold and sick every morning," U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told one aid conference. "All of us know that the international community must be prepared to sustain a reconstruction program that will take many, many years."

It is to be hoped that the international community does not again turn its back on Afghanistan, as it did once before.

Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 125: "The September Terror: A Global Impact" (January 2002). Download the complete issue (pdf, 1.2Mb) here