Aid Groups Wait on Border of Afghanistan

By Paul Jeffrey

A young Afghan girl stands in front of an United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) tent in Shamshatoo Camp near Peshawar, Pakistan. Through its ACT partners, UMCOR is sending family shelter kits to Afghan refugees in Peshawar and other areas. The kits include a family tent, tarp, plastic ground sheet and four blankets. (How to help) Credit: Paul Jeffrey/ACT International

Peshawar, Pakistan: While the dramatic collapse of the Taliban in Afghanistan has raised hope that humanitarian aid can be moved quickly to millions of Afghan civilians who face hunger, aid workers here on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan say they are still unable to get food and other emergency supplies through to those who need them.

Continued fighting between the Taliban and Northern Alliance fighters and bombing by U.S. warplanes have convinced many truck drivers not to risk navigating the road over the Khyber Pass, aid workers here report.

A truck carrying 400 tents to displaced families inside Afghanistan has been stuck at the Turkham border crossing west of here since November 12. Several trucks are stopped at the border because drivers fear continued fighting near Jalalabad, a city on the road to Kabul.

Mohammed Naeem, director of the Coordinator of Afghan Relief, which is supported by ACT, said that despite press reports that the Taliban had retreated from the area around Jalalabad, the situation remains far from settled. "Many Taliban just took off their turbans and put on other hats," Naeem said.

In several areas of Afghanistan, combatants of the Northern Alliance have taken over in the wake of the Taliban pullout. Yet sporadic killings and widespread looting of relief supplies continued in several parts of the country aid workers report. Several vehicles belonging to the United Nations and private aid agencies have been stolen in the chaos.

Although long frustrated by the active opposition they suffered from the largely Pashtun Taliban, aid workers confess to having mixed feelings about the Uzbek, Tajik and Hazara warlords who make up the Northern Alliance. "They are the liberators of Kabul today, just as the Taliban were the liberators of Kabul five years ago when they freed people from the grasp of the guys who form the Northern Alliance today," said Geir Valle, director of operations here for NCA.

Continued bombing along the border near here also inhibits the movement of relief materials. An Afghan agricultural development agency supported by ACT-Netherlands had the windows blown out of its offices at Jaji, in Afghanistan's Paktia province, earlier this week. The offices of all UN agencies and non-governmental organizations in Jalalabad were looted on Wednesday. Local staff in Jalalabad of the Danish Committee for Aid to Afghan Refugees were seriously beaten.

The Pakistan government supported the Taliban before President Pervez Musharraf accepted U.S. financial incentives to switch his country's allegiance. Yet in the wake of the Taliban's reported demise, Musharraf has yet to reopen much of Pakistan's 1,500-mile long border with Afghanistan. In Peshawar on November 16, scores of foreign journalists congregated impatiently for hours outside the local office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), waiting for permission from Pakistani authorities to join a UNHCR convoy from here to Kabul. At the end of the day, Pakistani officials remained adamant that the border would remain closed, and the journalists returned to their hotels.

More than 2 million Afghan refugees live in Pakistan, and Pakistani officials hope that at least half of them can be motivated to return home when hostilities cease. The refugee flow from Afghanistan, already a steady current after three years of drought, picked up in volume following the beginning of the U.S. bombing campaign on October 7.

Aid workers here report that refugees are watching and waiting to see whether the conditions stabilize inside Afghanistan. AREA's director, Masoom Stanezkai, said many refugees in Pakistan had suspended the purchase of new items to avoid having to eventually carry home more weight.

Several aid agencies had been cooperating with the UNHCR and Pakistan's government in establishing a new string of camps that were originally destined to hold Afghan refugees near the border and prevent them from penetrating further into Pakistan. In the wake of the Taliban's apparent collapse, Pakistan officials hope many of the refugees will start returning home, and they quickly altered their plans and designated the prospective border camps as way stations for refugees returning to Afghanistan.

Valle predicted Pakistan will "very strongly encourage" the refugees to go home, but warned it would lose support of the UNHCR and non-governmental organizations like NCA if the return was anything but voluntary.

Valle said ACT members were also being asked by the Pakistan government to help establish a camp for internally displaced families at Shar Shahi, deep inside Afghanistan near Jalalabad. Valle said NCA might transport water equipment it obtained for refugee camps inside Pakistan to the new camp at Shar Shahi. Yet he warned that establishing camps for displaced families was not a long-term solution.

"Long before the bombing started, people had been displaced from their rural villages by the drought," Valle said. "They shared what they had with each other for as long as they could, but that solidarity ran out. They sold off their carpets and goats until they had nothing left, then they left for the cities or for other countries. If we want them to go back home, we've got to carry out food distribution programs, build water systems, and rehabilitate farms and housing in the wake of the bombing-all factors that will contribute to pulling them back home."

For now, however, planning those long-term programs remains difficult. Communication between aid workers here in Pakistan and their counterparts inside Afghanistan has been reestablished in several places, although in other areas it remains impossible.

According to Julia McDade, the CA representative here, aid agencies are ready to respond quickly once communication and transportation links can be fully reestablished. She said that winter snows had not yet completely closed off several areas of northern Afghanistan that may soon become unreachable.

Massive food caravans from outside the country won't be enough to help all the 7.5 million people in Afghanistan who face hunger in the next six months. Yet aid officials say some food is available inside the country. The problem is that unemployment in the cities and drought in the countryside have left most Afghans unable to afford it. Valle said NCA and other agencies are buying what food they can inside the country in order to avoid the costs and delays of transporting commodities from the outside.

Whether the food will arrive to hungry villages on time depends largely on whether the political situation can stabilize in coming days. McDade said a key element to halting the conflict is whether Afghans feel there is a viable alternative to the Taliban, something other than the feuding warlords of the Northern Alliance. "If the people can own the solution that the international community is brokering with Afghan leaders, then they will reject the Arabs and the others who supported the Taliban, and turn them in," McDade said."But if their sense of hope for the future is squashed, then the Taliban will be given a chance to reorganize. This solution has to come about soon, in the next four to five days, or the suffering of the people will be prolonged."

November 17, 2001

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