Russian helicopter gun-ships roared over the Shamali Plain, north of Kabul, Afghanistan, and targeted the village of Rabat. In one of the houses 11-year-old Ghulum Rabani huddled with his family as bombs exploded outside. Then Rabani’s greatest fear happened, a bomb hit his adobe home directly, blowing him to unconsciousness.

 

Every member of Rabani’s family was gravely injured. His father died from injuries, but the others recovered. Rabani lost one leg. Eventually his mother fled with her children to a refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan. Sixteen years after the Russian gunships had destroyed so much of his life, Rabani is back in Rabat. The Russians have long ago withdrawn in defeat. The puppets they left behind have met violent ends, and the scourge of the Taliban has come and gone.

 

It was the Taliban and their scorch-the-earth approach to the Tajik-dominated Shamali Plain that has made sustainable living impossible across Rabani’s native province. Their plan was not only to drive out the supposed supporters of the Northern Alliance but also to make refugee return impossible. The Taliban destroyed shelters and all means of economic livelihood. Nut and fruit trees were cut down and vineyards were burnt. The irrigation system was ruined and tens of thousands of landmines were buried in fields that once produced enough wheat to feed the community.

 

The repressive structure of the Taliban collapsed quickly once the West brought its power to bear in Afghanistan. Proud Afghans, suffering under the indignity of refugee status, were eager to return to their native villages. What they found on their return, however, was deeply discouraging—how could life in such ruins be possible?

 

I first visited Rabat as the United Methodist Committee on Relief Nongovernmental Organiz -ation (UMCOR NGO) Head of Mission in June 2002. I encountered anger from some returnees. A family head named Wahid said to me: “We returned because we heard promises from the rich countries that our country would be rebuilt, but what we find is destroyed homes, without water or other means of support. We can’t live here. If we don’t get help soon, we’ll have to return to refugee camps. There, at least, we had shelter and food, our children were educated, and we had access to medical clinics.”

 

Fortunately for Wahid’s family, as well as for the majority of the families in Rabat’s associated hamlets, UMCOR was formulating a plan to make their return to the area sustainable. Applying its participatory, multi-sector, integrated approach, UMCOR was about to implement a sustainable return project through its local partner, Rural Rehabilitation Association for Afghanistan (RRAA), which would allow Wahid’s family to reestablish a meaningful life back on its ancestral land. RRAA is a project developed by Norwegian Church Aid in Pakistan. Further, as news of UMCOR’s plans reached Rabat’s exiled people in Kashmir, hundreds of neighboring families were encouraged to return to the hamlets of Rabat. By the end of 2002, 250 of the 350 Rabat families had returned and are confident that they now have what is necessary to rebuild a meaningful life there.

 

Recipients Work Hard

The project is participatory in that it is based on the expressed needs of the beneficiaries. UMCOR’s partner, RRAA, interviewed returnees to the village and traveled to the refugee camps in Kashmir, where most of the Rabati people had fled, to find out what they needed in order to return and stay.

 

The villagers prioritized the minimum requirements for sustainable return: shelter, water, agricultural supplies, and access to credit. UMCOR and RRAA set about creating a project that would meet these needs.

 

Within six months, 200 homes for the most needy families who agreed to return were constructed through UMCOR’s self-help approach. The beneficiaries were required to make their own mud bricks and to build their houses up to the roof. UMCOR supplied lintels (door beams), roof beams and other roofing material, doors and windows, and a bag of cement. For water, villagers were required to dig down to the water table, averaging 45 feet, at which point UMCOR would drill an additional 75 to 100 feet. UMCOR also supplied a diesel engine, pipes, and a pump for each well. Of the 35 slated wells, 20 were pumping water by the end of 2002, averaging 5700 gallons per hour to a total of 151 farmers. Beneficiaries of these and other aids were selected by representative village councils called shuras.

 

A Multi-Sector Approach

Two hundred farmers were supplied with improved wheat seed, fertilizer, and pesticide. Winter wheat is now turning the recently demined fields of Rabat green again after years of nonproductivity. Next spring, UMCOR will distribute rain-fed wheat packages, fruit and nut tree saplings, and grape root stock. Microcredit has been thus far extended to 29 widows and 22 other individuals who were disabled by war injuries.

 

The vast majority of those who were injured were not combatants but civilian victims of gunships, mines, stray bullets, or shrapnel. They, like Rabani, can now support themselves with dignity as tailors, shopkeepers, bicycle mechanics, and animal raisers.

 

A visually impaired man named Shawali was particularly creative. Since there are no tractors in Rabat, he saw an opportunity to raise steers. He had only 60 percent of the required capital, but with a $200 UMCOR loan, he was able to purchase a pair of traction animals. Though he is unable to use them himself, he rents them with his handmade plow to neighboring farmers for $6 per day during the fall and spring planting seasons. He will repay his loan easily. Others, like the shopkeepers Ambrlaw and Murad, earn a little over one dollar profit per day, while the tailor Rabani averages between $1.50 and $2.00 per day.         

 

A Long-Held Tradition

As for the widows, we knew that they would prefer credit for a cow or two sheep, but we could not interview them in this traditional rural society. They are still behind the high mud walls around their homes and only venture forth covered in blue or white. They lift their burqas for ease of vision in the immediate vicinity of their homes or remove them to work in the fields. But with the approach of any stranger or vehicle, these tent-like garments drop down over heads and bodies, covering all.

 

Despite tales to the contrary, this has been a rural custom for many generations. I traveled in Afghanistan in the mid-1960s, before 80 percent of the Afghans alive today were born. The only female faces I saw in public were foreigners. The Communist take- over in the 1980s brought a lifting of the burqa and the unprecedented flow of women into education and public service. This long-established cultural practice of wearing the burqa was common for peasant women, but the Taliban brutally forced the practice on the educated, Westernized women of the cities as well.

 

So today, over one year since the fall of Taliban rule, provincial women still honor the burqa, not because of a government edict but out of a cultural imperative. Though I have visited Rabat regularly for seven months, I have not yet seen any of the 500 faces of the women who must be living there. Only female staff members from RRAA have had any contact with the women of Rabat.

 

A Community Reunited

The village mullah (religious and community leader) says that everyone in Rabat has benefited directly or indirectly from the UMCOR project. Most important for him was having the opportunity to end the misery of exile and the separation of families. During the war, the mullah escaped to the north while his wife and children fled to Pakistan. When the family was reunited after two years, Mullah Basir learned that his eldest son had died during the family’s separation. Not to have been able to support his wife or to bury his son in Rabat is a great source of grief to him still. The pain is now mitigated somewhat by seeing his community reunited, shelters reconstructed, and water flowing onto wheat fields freed from landmines. His broken heart is mending, he says, and he is happy to be back home.

 

Mullah Basir wants the United Methodist churches that contributed to this project to know that their generosity is profoundly appreciated.  

 

Little Mochtaba is watching his father, Hadal Shah, put the final touches on their new home. He has put mud around the newly arrived window frames to secure them tightly into the adobe wall. UMCOR’s partner, RRAA, is in the process of delivering window glass to those who have their windows properly installed. With the window glass in place, Hadal, his wife, and Mochtaba will then move out of his grandfather’s crowded house into their own ample space.

 

Hadal married four years ago, two weeks before the Taliban took over Rabat and drove most residents into exile. He returned in June to find his vineyard dead, with no water for his field and no shelter. Now Hadal’s family has shelter, five acres of wheat planted and irrigated, and a hopeful future.

 

A Strong Resistance

Abdullah Jhan joined the resistance against the Russians as a young man. One evening as he stood guard from a rooftop over Rabat, a sniper’s bullet tore through his left leg. That was in 1986; his life as a fighter was over, but he survived, recovered, and returned to Rabat. There, though on crutches, he was able to work in the family vineyard, leaving the eventual defeat of Soviet forces to his colleagues in arms.

 

Generally, all ethnic groups fought the Communist forces, but after their final defeat, no single leader emerged to reunite Afghans. The various warlords brought civil war to Afghanistan, much supported and encouraged by foreign powers. Eventually the Taliban brought a certain order to the war-ravaged country as they expanded from their first victory in Kandahar. But when they spread north of Kabul, they found stiff resistance from the Northern Alliance, led by the Tajik, Masood.

 

When the Taliban attacked Masood’s stronghold in the Panjshair Valley, they had to pass through the Shamali Plain, an area populated mostly by Tajiks. As the Pushtoon Taliban attacked Masood in the north, many Shamali Tajiks attacked from the  rear. The Taliban and their defeated fighters fled from the Northern Alliance supporters to their haven in the south.

 

Flee or Die

When the Taliban regrouped to invade the Panjshair Valley again, they took no chances with the Tajiks of Shamali. They delivered an ultimatum that the entire population must leave the country or be exterminated. The remaining population of Rabat and surrounding communities fled, most to Pakistan. Abdullah Jhan was among them.

 

Once the population had fled, the Taliban ravaged the Shamali Plain, destroying everything that would make the return of refugees possible.

 

After four years as a refugee, Abdullah is now back home. Thanks to UMCOR, his family has shelter and access to irrigation water. Disabled in the war, Abdullah qualified for an UMCOR Income Generation loan. With it he has purchased a milking cow. Native cows of this region are hardly bigger than a full-grown ram. During the winter months, they produce only a quart of milk per day, but when the spring rains turn the earth green with vegetation, he expects to get a gallon of milk per day from his mini-cow, a market value of 60 cents.

 

Sami Khan and Abdul Moqsood felt too old to go into exile and stayed in Rabat as long as possible. But with the 1999 Taliban ultimatum, survival there became impossible and they joined their neighbors in Kashmir. Rabat was abandoned. These proud men have bitter memories of being exploited in Kashmir, where they could not speak the language, were treated with disrespect, and where, in old age, they had to labor from dawn to dusk just to earn enough money to survive. Rabat for them, with all its destruction and limitations, is paradise compared to life as a refugee. They express deep satisfaction and gratitude for the UMCOR program that is making possible a return to normal life where they belong.

 

A Will to Survive

Sher Mohammed also fled in the 1999 mass exodus. This fiery proud man detested his life as a dependent refugee. Twenty days after the fall of the Taliban, he was back in Rabat energetically cleaning up the rubble of his home. On the third day of his return, Sher stepped on a landmine buried in his yard. Neighbors rushed him to the Red Cross hospital in Kabul. Sher lost his left leg and eye and all the fingers of his left hand.

 

Three months later, Sher walked out of the hospital on his new artificial leg. When, in August 2002, news reached Rabat that UMCOR had approved a multi-sector reconstruction project for the community, Sher sought reassurance from the community council that he would be included in the beneficiary list for the UMCOR shelter and microcredit. Assured, he sprang into action. Borrowing money to hire help, he pulverized the rubble of his adobe home with hammers and recast it into mudbrick.

 

When UMCOR visited Rabat shortly after project approval, I was astonished to find Sher’s house construction well under way. There in the middle of the activity was Sher, standing deep in mud, his pants rolled up exposing his artificial leg, and his fingerless left hand forming balls of mud to fling to other workers as they formed the mud foundation of his future home. Around his yard were a thousand bricks drying in the sun. Sher’s home was one of the first completed under the UMCOR project.

 

Sher’s fortitude and resolve is not uncommon in Afghanistan, where, after 23 years of war, this nation’s  stubborn survivors return to their ruined villages in unprecedented numbers. More than in any other country where UMCOR has worked, the Afghans show the drive and the work ethic to rebuild their lives, economy, and nation. May the donor nations give them the basic support they need and deserve.

 

Ethnic Groups in Afghanistan   The largest ethnic group in Afghanistan is Pushtoon (40%). The king and President Karzai are both Pushtoon. The second-largest ethnic group is Tajik (30%), the major group backing the Northern Alliance. Tajik is an ethnic classification, not a national one. Just as half the Pushtoon in the world live in Pakistan, many of the world’s ethnic Tajiks live in Afghan- istan. The descendants of Genghis Khan’s army represent the third-largest ethnic group, the Hazaras (20%). Uzbeks, Pashayees, Nooristanis, Uzbaks, Baluchis, Turkomans, and Aimaqs represent other groups in Afghan society.

 

• Reconstruction in Afghanistan can be supported through Advance #982540-1, Global peace building and Reconciliation—Afghanistan.

 

 

* Henry Hamilton is Head of Mission for the UMCOR NGO in Afghanistan.