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Afghan Refugees Waiting For Hope
By Aamir Latif
TORKHUM, Peshawar, Nov. 4 (IslamOnline) - A forlorn cluster of tents surrounded by rolls of barbed wire and miles of barren desert is home to dozens of refugee families that have trickled into this Pakistani border town on Oct. 8, just a day after U. S.-led forces started pounding war-ravaged Afghanistan.
The first camp of its kind set up in Pakistan by authorities, it is a way station for what may become a mass movement out of Afghanistan.
Exhausted, hungry families, and those who are sick or injured, will be able to spend a week or two here before finding shelter elsewhere.
"We are like dust blown to this place, and we will blow away again,'' said Mohammed Karim, a 40-year-old schoolteacher. He arrived with his wife and daughters from Jalalabad on Oct. 8 and is making plans to move to a Pakistani city and look for work.
His mention of dust was apt. In even a short stay in the camp, it is an inescapable presence.
Towering dust whirlwinds are visible from several miles away across the empty plains.
Clouds of it are kicked up when anyone walks between the rows of tents. Beards and clothing are coated with it. People's eyes are red from rubbing the fine grit. Almost everyone has a hacking cough.
"Our food tastes of dust. Our water tastes of dust. We sleep in dust. My wife has been trying to clean, but it is impossible,'' said Karim, poking a smoky fire of twigs outside the family's white canvas tent.
A few tents down, an old woman stepped outside to shake out a rug, and a sudden breeze blew the cloud of dust back into her face.
Another woman was using a broom fashioned from a bundle of reeds to try to sweep the dust out of her tent, to little effect.
"The very inhospitableness of the site is one reason that the camp must remain so small," said Ghulam Haider, an official of the local administration.
Only 100 families at a time can be accommodated - even though refugees have crossed the border by thousands on some recent days. Workers have been picking out the most vulnerable-looking families and offering them temporary haven here.
Water has to be brought into the camp by tankers. There is no shelter from the sun, except in the thin shadow of tents.
The only vegetation in sight is a few small thorny plants that made barefoot children howl when they stepped on them while running between the tents.
The camp is less than half a mile from the Torkhum border crossing, which has become a prime pathway for refugees fleeing one of the heavily bombed Taliban strongholds of Jalalabad.
Most of those passing through are hoping to make their way to the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar, some 70 miles from here.
Plans to set up larger, more permanent camps in border areas have become a point of open contention between humanitarian groups and the Pakistani government.
Pakistan, already home to more than 2 million Afghan refugees, is unwilling to accept more without a massive infusion of international aid.
The aid group Al-khidmat, a sister organization of Pakistan's largest religious party, Jammat-e-Islami, arrived at the transit camp on Oct. 9--a day after it opened--to provide basic care.
"For most of them, it is not a question of chronic malnutrition, or some terrible disease, but just the very debilitating effects of their journey and their displacement,'' said Liaquat Baloch, a group leader.
Baloch said the medics had mainly been treating people with coughs and respiratory problems and children with diarrhea. The medics are also planning to vaccinate children for measles.
The food provided is basic, mainly high-protein biscuits that the refugees say they have to force their children to eat. Even if there were ingredients available to make the meals they are used to, no family in sight had more to cook with than a single blackened
teakettle - from which every family spoken to offered visitors tea.
The camp provides blankets, for which the families said they were grateful. But the blankets are thin, and the desert nights are growing colder and colder.
"Next week, or perhaps the week after, it will be too hard to sleep here,'' said a white-turbaned 80-year-old man named Mohammed Ghose, whose hands were gnarled with arthritis. "Not for me, but for the grandchildren I brought with me."
Some of the families are reluctant to move deeper into Pakistan, still hoping that an easing of the nearly four-week-old U. S. bombardment will allow them to return to their homes.
When they fled, few were able to salvage anything from their former lives. Most arrived only with the clothes they were wearing, or with something easily carried and too precious to leave behind.
Karim, the schoolteacher, said he had snatched a few books of Pashtu-language poetry as the family was leaving. He made sure his 10-year-old daughter, Habiba, had a few notebooks so she could keep up with the lessons he gives her.
"We have not yet found a new life, but we have not yet given up hope we can return to the old one,'' he said. "So we are here, in this place that is not really a place…. Soon we must decide what to do next."
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