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Afghan Refugees Suffer in Pakistan
By Aamir Latif in Peshawer, Pakistan
07/11/2001
It is nearly midnight in Peshawar, a city in northwest Pakistan bordering Afghanistan. Tayyeb Gul is laying out his blanket and preparing to go to sleep. His mattress is a slab of concrete tucked into the lee of a dumpster in a filthy parking lot near the city's White Mosque.
The sidewalk is cold and his blanket is thin, perhaps mercifully so, as it is home to vermin that leave nickel-sized welts on his body.
Forty or so men line the sidewalks nearby. Like Tayyeb, nearly all are Afghan refugees.
If Tayyeb is lucky, he won't be asleep for long. On most nights, the trucks arrive around 2 a.m., air horns blaring a rude wake-up call. The drivers offer work in long shifts and short money. If chosen, the laborers will work until 7 p.m., loading sacks of grain, or gravel and stone, or electronics. The pay fifty rupees, or 82 cents for 17 hours of hard labor.
Tayyeb offers up a hand so swollen and calloused that it resembles a small baseball glove, then considers his plight. "I came to Pakistan as a baby in my mother's arms," he says.
Except for two short stays in Afghanistan, he has lived all of his 22 years in Pakistan, mostly in refugee camps and squatter settlements. Yet, he has no citizenship. In fact, he has no birth certificate or documentation of any kind.
Officially he does not exist. He is what the Pakistanis call "an illegal refugee".
Tayyeb's father once had a small shop where he bought and resold scraps of paper and bone and bits of rope that the legions of boys here scour from the gutter.
Tayyeb would like to have a small shop also, he says, and though he has no idea how to go about achieving it, some nights he lies on the ground thinking about this "better life".
For two decades, Pakistan has seen wave after wave of refugees arrive from Afghanistan.
In the 1980s, they fled the Soviets; in the early '90s, the mujahideen (fighters); and in '96 it was the Taliban. Today, they're escaping the U.S. bombing campaign.
The Pakistani government, in cooperation with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has set up tent cities to accommodate this latest group, whose numbers could reach into the hundreds of thousands; Pakistan is desperately pleading for tens of millions of dollars to help pay for their care.
Yet none of that money is earmarked for Afghanistan's forgotten refugees, the estimated 2.5 million expatriates already residing in Pakistan.
"My boss got all excited about the money coming in to help the new refugees," relates a United Nations employee.
"I asked her, 'What about the old refugees?' She said, 'Forget about the old refugees.'"
A tiny percentage of these Afghan merchants, teachers, and other professionals have made the transition into Pakistan's upper classes, yet the vast majority live in shantytowns, in mud huts, tents, and caves.
Their children suffer the effects of malnutrition and nearly all are illiterate. In a country where the average Pakistani makes about a dollar and a half a day, Afghans are the poorest of the poor, consigned to a semi-permanent underclass.
As for the Pakistanis, 20 years of expending scarce resources on outsiders has severely tried their charitable impulses.
"We can't even feed our own people, how are we supposed to feed 2.5 million Afghans?" is the refrain heard most often. And so the Afghans are harassed and unwelcome in their host country, and unable to return to a homeland devastated by 22 years of war, carpeted with an estimated 10 million land mines.
This is Islamabad, the capital of this country of 140 million people. Twenty years ago, there was a small bus stop opposite a fruit market on the outskirts of Islamabad, in a sector known as I-11/4.
Afghan refugees roaming the country searching for relatives and work began to pitch tents near the depot during long layovers. Today there are an estimated 200,000 Afghans on the site, living in an interconnected maze of mud houses that stretches as far as the eye can see - down through washes and up over the sides of rolling hills.
Then the huts give way to tents, and further still, to a few caves with beds and belongings neatly arranged. There is no potable water, no electricity, no gas, and no publicly financed school.
I-11/4 is a place where child labor is the norm and where scores of infants die before their first birthday.
From the roofs of the mud houses, you can look out toward Islamabad proper and see new developments creeping across the open fields toward the camp.
International Islamic University's new campus, due to open next month, is situated just a kilometer or so away; some of the world's poorest refugees are occupying prime real estate there.
Developers have leapfrogged the refugees, purchasing plots as far away as I-17. Stranded for decades, two million Afghans struggle to survive in Pakistan.
For those I-11/4 residents who want to send their children to school, the obstacles are formidable. At the Pakistan Literacy Cell, Shaista Abassi leads about 80 children through the alphabet. They sit shoulder to shoulder in the dirt courtyard - some with books and pencils - while others follow as best as they can.
This is one of two public schools in the community, both funded by UNICEF.
Kudrat-Ullah sits on the floor of his mud house in I-11/4 and considers how far his fortunes have fallen.
The two-story house across the border in Kabul is gone, as are his five acres of wheat, his vineyard, and all his livestock. He looks around at the empty room in which he lives with seven other family members. "We have just the clothes on our backs," he says. "We have lost everything else."
Kudrat-Ullah's story is complicated, perhaps typically so. He first arrived in Pakistan approximately 12 years ago and has twice moved back to his homeland - only to be driven out.
His time in Pakistan has been a series of temporary stays doubled up with relatives or living in mud huts or in tents. Like many men here, he has a tattered, faded identity card from one of the scores of
mujahideen that once dominated Afghanistan.
He fought with Burhanuddin Rabbani, Afghanistan's U.N.-recognized president, against the Soviets, he says. "Now the Soviets are Rabbani's friend," he adds ruefully.
Some estimate that 50,000 men and boys find work in the sprawling 25-acre fruit market nearby, the vast majority of them Afghans.
Kudrat-Ullah is in his mid-40s and rail thin, with bony wrists and sunken cheeks.
The merchants and truckers pick the younger men first and Kudrat-Ullah can usually find employment only three days a week carrying boxes of produce. His pay amounts to 60 rupees a day, or 97 cents.
He has 10 children. The youngest, the one he is most worried about, is two years old.
The entire family is malnourished, and his wife has had little milk for the infant. There is no money for formula, but fortunately the child is "out of the danger zone" as he has just begun to eat solid foods.
They can now feed him mashed-up banana peels and melon rinds, something many families here are forced to do; it keeps the children alive.
Dr. Raheemullah Aalamy, a Kabul University School of Medicine graduate who runs a small, dirt-floored clinic in the colony, reports he has seen 500 infants die in the last two years - mostly due to typhoid, malaria, and dysentery; all preventable diseases caused largely by lack of sanitation.
He points to a small stream of urine and feces just outside his door, a few feet from where a dozen patients are waiting.
"This is part of the problem here," he says. The packed-dirt streets are bracketed by open sewers, breeding grounds for bacteria and the mosquitoes that spread disease and death through the community."
In I-11/4, male children can mean the difference between starving and surviving.
At the age of four, children are sent out into the streets to scavenge for rotten fruit and vegetables. By seven or eight they can hold down a modest job, making around 20 cents a day running errands or selling food by the side of the road. At 10, they begin to make real money, running produce or unloading trucks for 75 cents a day.
With a husband and three or four boys working full time, a family can bring in as much as $3 a day.
The girls are kept around the house to help cook, carry water, and help with the younger children. Six- and seven-year-old girls wander the streets with infants perched on their hips.
Kudrat-Ullah's sons aren't sure how old they are; Assad-Ullah thinks he might be 10 or 11 and Aziz-Ullah is pretty sure he is eight. They leave the house in the chilly predawn blackness to join the enormous throngs of people converging on the fruit and vegetable market.
Except for the muffled sounds of thousands of feet, the streets are eerily silent.
Occasionally, a car passes by and one can see hundreds of children and an equal number of men silhouetted in the dusty shafts of light.
There is a mosque at the foot of the market. On most days the boys stop to offer their prayers, but today they are late. Aziz-Ullah heads off into the darkness with a group of small boys to buy his stock of plastic bags. He will roam the market for most of the day, reselling the bags at a small markup, netting perhaps 25 cents.
Asked about the thousands of children working in the market, Akbar Hayad, administrator of Islamabad Fruit and Vegetable Market, explains, "The Afghans are basically poor people, so they send their children out to work. As for school, there are no such arrangements." And he adds with a smile, "There is no law to bar them from having so many children. I think this is the only recreation they have, to give birth to children."
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