by Fernando del Mundo

Afghanistan has seen it all before, but hundreds of thousands of people are again heading home

Abdul Khaliq has never known anything but war, pain and exile. As a youngster he watched invading Soviet soldiers destroy his family's vineyard, pomegranate, apple and apricot orchards.

Laboriously, plant by plant, the family rebuilt their farm, the Soviets withdrew but Afghanistan's new rulers, the Taliban wreaked vengeance on the land once more, torching houses, dynamiting centuries-old irrigation systems and felling the trees yet again.

Abdul Khaliq was not spared his own personal hell. He lost his left leg when he stepped on a land mine in the capital, Kabul, 12 years ago before fleeing into a life of exile in neighboring Pakistan.

Undeterred, earlier this year he packed his wife and five children into a rented car and headed back to his village of Qali Bibi in Afghanistan's Shomali plain.

"The Russians destroyed Shomali in the 1980s," the 32-year-old recalled. "We revived it. Then the Taliban came and razed it. We will make it productive again. We have nowhere else to go. This is home." Abdul Khaliq is one of an overwhelming number of refugees once more voting with their feet and going home.

In the early 1990s an estimated two million Kurds returned to their devastated homeland following the Gulf War and its chaotic aftermath within a matter of months.

Nearly a decade later 800,000 people fled or were forcibly thrown out of their towns and villages in the Serb province of Kosovo, but within three months most had returned. Perhaps never before had so many people left and then gone home in such a short time.

The pattern was repeated in Afghanistan this year. Following the installation of an Interim Administration in Kabul more than one million Afghans from abroad and at least 160,000 civilians internally displaced within the country – a total of more than one million people – also went back within a similar three month period.

"In Afghanistan, like in the two earlier operations, all of the political and historical indicators available suggested this would not happen so quickly," Ekber Menemencioglu, UNHCR's senior director for the region said. "In fact, we didn't think the conditions were right, but the people did."

A BIZARRE PROBLEM

Their enthusiasm to go home highlighted a bizarre problem: the return of so many refugees was happening too quickly, almost too well, threatening to engulf the country's extremely fragile recovery.

After all, this was one of the world's poorest nations, which had endured decades of war, including a Soviet invasion. At its peak in 1990, the exodus of refugees reached more than six million people, making it the world's single largest humanitarian crisis. The country's schools, hospitals, roads and farms lay in ruins. As a new millennium dawned even the weather became a deadly enemy when Afghanistan suffered the worst drought in living memory affecting at least 12 million people.

Well aware of the tenuous internal situation, the new government in Kabul had hoped to stage a cautious and carefully structured return by nearly four million refugees – still the largest single group of uprooted people in the world though their overall numbers had fallen in the last few years.

In line with this policy, the U.N. refugee agency estimated it would assist less than one million people returning from abroad throughout the whole of 2002. But that figure was surpassed by spring, forcing UNHCR to double its planning estimate and High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers to admit somewhat ruefully, "It is a bit scary that the operation is going so well and we have to live from day to day."

Ironically, until the September 11 terror attacks in the United States, Afghanistan had been a largely forgotten problem. UNHCR's budget was a modest $8.4 million for the year 2001 and even that was 40 percent under funded when the suicide bombers struck.

With world attention suddenly focused on the country, the agency estimated it would need nearly $300 million in emergency funding to tackle the unfolding drama as its field staff more than trebled to around 700 personnel in nearly 30 newly opened offices.

DOING BETTER?

The international community, fully aware that it had 'abandoned' Afghanistan once before following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, vowed that this time it would do better and would never again 'walk away' from the country.

The lack of funding, however, quickly became one major bottleneck among many in trying to put Afghanistan back together again. As stifling summer heat and drought again enveloped the country, UNHCR faced the possibility of cutting travel grants, housing and water projects because it had received only 65 percent of its financial needs.

Other agencies fared even worse. At the time this article went to press the World Food Program had slashed its assistance to returnee families by two-thirds to 50 kilograms each and warned of a potential total rupture in its food pipeline later in the year. The International Organization for Migration suspended its entire program providing transportation for returning refugees.

The World Health Organization and Habitat received zero emergency funding. Little of the nearly $5 billion promised for economic development in the next five years arrived. An ambitious program to reopen thousands of schools was moribund.

"A relief worker came here one day and distributed two pencils and a notebook to each of the students," said 31-year-old Sadiqa Naroozyan who returned from exile in Iran to run a women's center for orphans and widows in Kabul. "There were a dozen photographers who also came and took pictures. We have not heard from them again. Many countries offered to help Afghanistan. There were many promises, but no action."

A senior humanitarian official said simply, "It's an utter disgrace."

LESS SECURITY

A report commissioned by the U.S. Agency for International Development translated what these problems and a worsening drought meant for the country's 27 million people, including the returnees. The level of 'diet security' – official parlance for having enough food to eat on a regular basis – plummeted from 59 percent two years ago to an alarming nine percent by mid-2002. A similar measure for water fell from 43 to 15 percent.

The country was a bewildering patchwork of contrasts – of renovation and massive destruction, of relative security and widespread banditry.

Kabul became a frenetic hive of activity full of rebuilding, cell phones, business suits, international meetings, spiralling rents, blaring all-night music which was once banned by the recent Taliban rulers, returning refugees and the comforting presence of international soldiers on the streets.

The country's few roads were congested with endless columns of vehicles crawling along like giant ants, but gunmen also rode the highways and old time warlords held sway in many parts of the country.

Intimidation ranged from individual acts of violence, including murder, to fears by some ethnic groups that the country's various strongmen would continue an ages-old custom of seeking vengeance against old enemies.

Though freed from the suffocating strictures of the Taliban regime when they were under almost permanent 'house arrest', women nevertheless reacted cautiously to their new found freedom. Some returned to work but many continued to wear the all-enveloping burqa which had become a global symbol of oppression. "We don't want to try a new lifestyle just yet, to become recognized," one westernized woman said. "Maybe there will be more changes, this time backwards. It is good not to move too quickly."

An estimated 40,000 people tried to 'go the other way and cross into Pakistan to seek refuge, but became trapped in a squalid strip of no man's land on the border when authorities in that country refused them permission to enter.

High Commissioner Lubbers said on one recent visit, "This is a country with a tradition of settling disputes very easily with a gun. This has to be reduced step by step, but I think we are on the way."

UNHCR's countrywide network and the presence of humanitarian officials offered a degree of stability and protection in this volatile mix. And quiet diplomacy helped defuse potentially dangerous security situations.

Complementing the agency's core protection activities, it was also providing shelter for 96,000 families, seeds and tools for an additional 144,000 households and mini-projects to repair schools, clinics and water facilities.

DIFFERENT SIGNALS

The speed of the returns threatened to swamp such assistance and some harried officials privately suggested the repatriation be slowed or even halted to 'buy time' for national recovery. Paradoxically, however, some capitals saw it as an opportune time to 'return' thousands of Afghans who had sought political asylum in their countries. Erika Feller, UNHCR's senior protection official told capitals that "to bring people back precipitously can only contribute to the growing destabilization of a very fragile country."

Her warning only underlined the recent history of Afghanistan which has seen it all before.

In a seemingly unending movement of people swishing back and forth across the region in massive waves, nearly five million Afghans who fled the original Soviet invasion had gone home, even before the latest returns got underway. But as ongoing violence gripped the country, equal numbers of people left in an ongoing tragic game of musical chairs.

The drama will not end anytime soon. Even if the current rush continues – a big 'if ' given the extreme difficulties in Afghanistan – it might still take several years for the great bulk of people to go back. Some never will. Untold numbers of young refugees were born outside a country they have never seen. Others married and integrated into communities in other countries.

The mood among refugees and returnees veers dramatically from euphoria to deep disappointment, anger even. Ainud-din Sherzai returned home from Iran but now shares one room in a house with an extended family of 20 in Kabul. "If I don't find a job soon, I will probably end up there," he said pointing to a nearby graveyard. "Or I will go back to Iran."

In that country, 50-year-old Mahbooba Niazi who has been a refugee for 19 years explains why she will not be going home anytime soon. "I don't have an education, I can't even read," she said. "But my three children are in university and I am not returning home yet."

When Abdul Khaliq, the farmer who lost his leg 12 years ago returned to his home on the Shomali plain, he immediately repaired one room in the ruins of his father's house, spring being an ideal time to construct mud walls. Villagers busily repaired a 150-year-old underground water system of canals and channels which provides drinking water and irrigates farms.

"We need tools, we need seeds, we need help from God to make it what it was before," a neighbor Jan Mohammad said. "But when we are done, Shomali will bloom again." "This is our place, it is our home," Abdul Khaliq said for emphasis.


Returning home. © P.Benatar

Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 127: "The Environment – A Critical Time" (July 2002). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (830Kb) here or high-resolution (1.5Mb) here