The Road of Last Resort
Broken by Drought and War, Afghans Take Flight to Survive
These Afghan farmers, who left their families behind after losing their crops and livestock to the draught, are heading for Herat and Iran to look for work. (Lucian Perkins - The Washington Post)
By David Finkel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 18, 2001; Page A01
First in a series of occasional articles
TORKHAM, Afghanistan--He is standing unsteadily on the eastern edge of Afghanistan, a hollowed man with an unbuttoned coat, a torn wool cap and dust-coated eyebrows. Dead fields. Dead crops. Dead animals. A dead village. That's where he has come from. He ran out of money. Then he ran out of food. That's why he is here. He left nine days before. He spent the first day walking, and the next eight squeezed into vans that took him past more dead fields, more dying animals, more dying villages. And now it is down to this for 30-year-old Abdul Qahar: a final journey of 200 yards.
"Pakistan," he is saying of what's ahead.
There will be work. Or at least food. Or at least water. There will be help.
All he has to do is cross the border.
Just moments out of the van, he begins walking, still too far away to see what awaits him. He can't see the solid metal gate blocking most of the roadway. He can't see the hundreds of people like him -- without proper documents, without money for bribes, without any possessions other than their filthy clothes -- who are surging toward the small opening, trying to press their way across. He can't see the Pakistani border guards who are waiting with wooden sticks and instructions to let no more undocumented refugees through. He can't hear the sounds of people being hit, hard, and he can't see the flinches and retreats.
What he can see: He is almost, almost there.
"I'm desperate. I can't think. I don't know where I'm going," he says and steps forward into the crowd.
Each day, step by invisible step, the population of the world is shifting.
Just as one man, on one day, is trying to find his way out of Afghanistan, so are a vast number of other people on similar journeys, all over the world, in swelling numbers, motivated by fear of war, hunger's ache, the need for a little money, the desire for a lot.
How many people are on the move at a particular moment no one can precisely say, but over a year's time the number is in the tens of millions. There are, at the moment, an estimated 12 million refugees around the world, and another 25 million people who are displaced within their own countries by conflict, and tens of millions who leave one life behind for a new one, crossing borders however they can. They are being smuggled out of China, or being trafficked out of Africa, or crossing the Rio Grande, or floating amid cattle herds across the Zambezi River to shield themselves from gunfire, or traversing the Strait of Gibraltar in rubber rafts even though an estimated 3,500 people have died doing that in the past decade.
The journeys take days, weeks or longer. Success means arriving unnoticed. Failure comes in the form of visibility, such as when 910 dazed Iraqi Kurds end up on the French Riviera after the decrepit freighter smuggling them in is run aground. Or when 58 Chinese are found in England, suffocated in the back of a truck that was supposed to be carrying tomatoes. Or when 150 people, most of them children and women, freeze to death after having arrived in an Afghan refugee camp.
Those journeys, the visible ones, which is to say the failed ones, are what make headlines, reminding the world that such journeys are taking place. But the invisible ones, which is to say the successful ones, or the ones whose outcomes are not yet certain, are also transforming.
What can a journey mean? What is it to be such a person?
For the most desperate, the ones who aren't heading toward something good as much as away from something unbearable, the journey, in its origins and execution, can be a matter of life and death. And no place was more extravagant in its desperation in the early months of the year than this one: Afghanistan.
It is a broken place from border to border, where the worst drought in memory has left 22 million people increasingly desperate, and two decades of war have left the country in ruins, and the extremist policies of its Taliban rulers -- no music, no TV, no cleanshaven men, no schooling for women, no cliff-size statues of Buddha -- have left it ever more isolated from the rest of the world.
So bad has the situation become that in the past year 700,000 Afghans have abandoned their homes and begun journeys like Abdul Qahar's, a number so large that at times the country has seemed stitched with lines of fleeing people, a place entirely on the move.
Buildup to a Crisis
A Taliban checkpoint: men in black turbans and black eyeliner and shouldered rifles, a dead sticker bush festooned with fluttering ribbons of confiscated cassette tapes, a chain across the road slowly lowered.
Then nothing.
A dead-looking village.
Then nothing.
A broken bridge and a detour across a dry riverbed.
Then nothing.
A few sheep. A few camels. A few nomads.
Then nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
This is the landscape of southern Afghanistan, the part of the country to first feel the drought. It is where the mountains that define so much of Afghanistan flatten into plains, and the plains turn into desert, and the desert gives way to shriveled grazing land, and dying orchards, and vanished rivers, and wells that no longer reach water.
"Critical. Worse and going to worst, by the day," is how Fayyaz Shah, who runs the World Food Program's office in the southern provincial capital of Kandahar, describes the situation. "I mean the people are going backward and backward. In some villages, you come across children -- I'm sorry to use this word, they're acting like animals. They want food. That's it. That's all their life is. The search for food."
It has been building to this point for three years. The first signs of impending crisis began showing up here in the form of endlessly clear skies and lowering water tables. Month by month things only grew worse. In 1999, a prediction that 60 percent of the harvest would be lost turned out to be optimistic. By spring of 2000, people had begun to leave. By summer came the eerie sight of a long-lost Soviet helicopter, the crew's skeletons still inside, exposed when, after a decade, the 130-foot-deep lake it had crashed into went completely dry. By last fall, truck convoys were dispatched deep into the Rigestan Desert in search of 25,000 nomadic families living in small riverbank encampments, whose water sources were gone, whose animals were dying, who were stranded and in grave danger of dying as well.
One by one, out came the families, in the backs of trucks, or hanging onto the sides, or seated on top, or, in a few urgent cases, brought out by helicopter. The drought was now firmly in place throughout Afghanistan and journeys toward every border were underway. The numbers kept increasing and soon grew to include the rescued of southern Afghanistan, who came to Kandahar, regained their strength and pushed south toward Pakistan.
Months later, perhaps half are gone. Maybe they're in Pakistan, Shah says, or maybe they found a way to cross into Iran, or maybe they're encamped somewhere in the southern dunes. His concern of the moment is no longer them as much as the other half, the 14,000 families still in the vicinity of Kandahar, who are living in conditions that are growing more desperate by the day.
In a place called Talacon, for instance, which is 20 miles outside of Kandahar, 1,600 families are stuck on a remote patch of land that doesn't even qualify as a formal encampment. It's just a place with groupings of tents here and there, not even tents, really, but dead willow branches supporting pieces of torn cloth, appearing from a distance like wind-blown litter ensnared in the brush.
There is no drinkable water here other than what puddles up out of a small spring. There is no medical help. There is no food other than the wheat sacks that the World Food Program brings once a month. There are no latrines. There is no heat on sub-freezing winter nights except from whatever brush can be built into fire. There are only people, filthy and needy, who have nowhere else to be.
"I used to beg," says a woman who lives in one of the tents, a widow with eight children, describing what life was like before this place, starting to cry simply because someone is taking a moment to listen to her. "Now I can't even beg."
"I feel cold, all the time," says the woman in the next tent, whose name is Gul Maida, who came here four months ago, and gave birth to twins in the tent three months ago, and is feeding them spoonfuls of dirty water because she is too weak to produce milk. One is wrapped in a green cloth, the other in brown. "I haven't named them yet," she says.
" 'If you're desperate, there's a place for you,' " is what the man in the next tent, Mohammed Essa, says he was told, explaining how he ended up here. He had just arrived in Kandahar with his wife and two sons after begging their way onto trucks for nearly a week, and was standing lost in a market, wondering what to do next. So he came here, and 25 days later, he says he thinks he is going to die.
"Can't you see?" he says, showing how thin he is. "Isn't the cold killing me? Isn't the hunger killing me?"
He holds out his hands. They are encased in thick dirt. He points to his wife, who is both deaf and mute and looks back at him with a frightened expression. He shows what he owns in the world, some blankets and a pot. He points to his sons, one 8, the other 6.
"I want to leave this place," he says.
"Pakistan," he says of where he wants to be.
"Tell me," he says. "How do I go?"
'Unbelievable Misery'
It is a question being asked not only in Talacon, but in western Afghanistan as well, by people whose journeys have brought them as far as a flat, treeless, useless, windswept patch of dried-up dirt. This is the place where 150 people, mostly children and women, froze to death in the course of a few nights in late January, and where a few weeks after that a convoy of cars approaches and rolls to a stop.
Years ago, this was the site of an animal slaughterhouse. Now it holds tens of thousands of miserable people who had hoped to make their way into Iran but are stuck instead inside of Afghanistan in a camp near the city of Herat, watching a man named Kenzo Oshima step out of one of the cars.
Oshima is the U.N. undersecretary for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief, who has been dispatched to officially look around. There is a kind of script to these visits, and Oshima follows it for the next hour.
Here are the children lined up for their daily bowl of high-protein porridge. Here are men carrying 110-pound sacks of wheat on their backs to their tents. Here, at this tent, is a man in torn slippers talking about the slow death of his animals. Here, at the next tent, comes the sound of a child's wet cough. Here, at the next, is a woman hunched over trying to build a fire from a few bits of brush, whose child was one of the 150 who froze, who is the only one not to turn away when a gust blows dirt into hair, into mouths, into eyes.
"I saw a sea of people living in unbelievable misery," Oshima will say after his visit.
He will say this in the course of issuing an urgent appeal for help so that money can be shaken loose from governments that have "donor fatigue," which is a polite way of describing how weary the world has become of Afghanistan's never-ending struggles: the ascent of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban, which now controls 90 percent of Afghanistan and is fighting for the remainder; before that the daily atrocities of a civil war; before that the 10-year Soviet occupation. "We believe at least 1 million people are at risk of famine," Oshima will go on, trying to shift attention away from the Taliban and back to those suffering, saying they will need at least $250 million to survive. Meanwhile, people across Afghanistan are begging for whatever they can get.
Once begging was rare in Afghanistan; now it is commonplace. South out of Herat the road is lined with children who spend their days throwing handfuls of dirt into potholes whenever a car approaches, hoping that whoever drives by will toss them some money. North, on the road to Turkmenistan, it is even more bleak: brown land, no other color at all, and no people either except for the occasional person who can be seen hacking runty bushes out of the ground, which he will then drag to the side of the road, hoping someone in need of kindling will give him some money.
Not that there's no chance at all. Not that no one has money. Northeast of Herat, toward Uzbekistan, in the town of Karukh, inside a dingy hotel, a truck driver named Ghulam Sarwar is taking a break and eating lunch as he nears the end of a three-day trip. Normally his load would be wheat. But of course there is no wheat, so his load this day is 35 men who had walked from their village to a truck stop, where they flagged him down and said they were willing to hand over the money they'd gotten from selling what remained of their livestock in exchange for transport to Herat.
"They don't even have money to eat," Sarwar says, shrugging, "so I'm eating, and they're outside." And there they are, in the back of his truck, packed so tightly that no one is moving except for a man who reaches into his pocket and takes out the one possession he has brought with him.
It is a handkerchief. But what it really is is a love letter because that's what love letters are in a place where girls are prohibited from going to school and the female illiteracy rate is estimated at above 85 percent. Maybe a woman can't write what she feels, but she can embroider, and that's what this man has brought, his love letter, white as bridal linen and embroidered with red flowers, which he uses to wipe his eyes while he waits for the truck driver to finish lunch, so he can be taken to Herat, where he hopes to find work, where there is no work to be found, where everyone eventually ends up at the slaughterhouse.
Maslakh. That's the word in Afghanistan for slaughterhouse, and that's the name of the camp, and that's where, two days after Oshima's visit, there is another death.
"A child," says Noor Ali, one of the Taliban who oversees Maslakh, just a few hours after the child was buried. "He got trampled, under the crowd." And before he can finish explaining how such a thing happened, it becomes apparent when another car comes into the camp.
In the car are three men who have come to distribute a few piles of clothing. They are men with charitable intentions, in other words, but as soon as they stop, the car is surrounded by dozens of people, and then very quickly hundreds, who press in, looking, now touching, now trying to get the doors open. Now the driver is panicking. Now he's trying to back up. Now he's inching forward. Now he's picking up speed. Now he's trying to shake off the pursuing crowd by veering off the road, but still they follow, and now he is speeding through a field that has been turned into a bathroom for tens of thousands of people and is covered in feces, and still they follow, and now he is racing past the graves. And now, without stopping, without slowing, he is throwing the clothing out of the car.
The crowd descends. Noor Ali watches. So does Hans-Christian Poulson, who oversees the U.N. humanitarian operation in Herat. "Just for a few rags, a boy is dead?" Poulson says quietly to Ali. They keep watching. A fight breaks out. There's nothing much they can do. Here comes another car.
"It's undignified to make the crowd run around like beggars," Poulson says.
This time it's a fistful of money, tossed into the air.
"They are not beggars," he says.
Here comes the crowd.
Getting to the Gate
If he'd wanted to, Abdul Qahar could have journeyed to Maslakh. His home is in north-central Afghanistan, up in the deep snows where there is intense fighting between the Taliban and several opposing factions, and where it's just as difficult to go in one direction as another.
His decision, though, was to go east, to a crossing into Pakistan called the Torkham gate, which is the spot where more people have crossed out of Afghanistan than anywhere else: millions fleeing the Soviet occupation, tens of thousands since last fall, and now one more, who has no idea of what's just ahead.
"I'm happy," Qahar is saying, now perhaps 100 yards from the gate.
What he doesn't know, not yet, is that last November Pakistan began severely limiting the hours the gate would be open and restricting the influx of refugees to only those with valid documents, saying it couldn't cope with the numbers of destitute people coming across.
"I'll find something to eat," Qahar says.
More than a million Afghan refugees remain in Pakistan from the last big exodus, during the Soviet era. They have taken jobs, says Abdul Hafeez, a Pakistani official in charge of refugees. They don't pay taxes. They wreck the roads. They cut down the trees. They use up the water. "No," Hafeez says, "we don't want any more."
"I'll find work," says Qahar, who comes from a place where there is no TV or newspaper and where radio signals are no match for the mountains, who simply followed word of mouth from the mountains down to Kabul, and then east on the decaying road to Jalalabad, and then all the way east to the Torkham gate. "Anywhere I can find work I'm willing to go," he continues.
And moments later he comes to a stop.
As would anyone seeing this place close-up for the first time.
There is the gate, just up ahead, but it is open only a sliver, which has things in turmoil: a long line of trucks with blaring bird-whistle horns, men in turbans and ripped shoes, women covered in head-to-toe burqas, children everywhere, minibuses disgorging more people, now a wailing ambulance at the back of the line -- all trying to get through the sliver. This is what Qahar finds himself in the midst of. It is dust and truck exhaust and shouting and the drumroll of footsteps under everything else, and the closer Qahar gets, working his way toward the front of the pressing crowd, the more the chaos increases.
Because most people, he is beginning to understand, aren't getting across. They try, and then they try again, and then they become the men standing slightly to either side of the gate, up against barbed wire, six inches from Pakistan, which might as well be back in the mountains.
"Four days," says one man, of how long he has been here.
"Nine days," says another.
Trying. Failing. Trying. Failing. This is what they are doing, the men say, because what else is there? They say they stay near the gate until it closes, and then they find somewhere to sleep, and then they start another day. There are scores of such men. All seemingly the same. But in fact some of the faces change from day to day because people tend to retreat after a while and find other ways across.
One route: north of Torkham, and over the unguarded wilderness that defines so much of the 1,400-mile-long border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The problem with that, though, is the Pakistan side is controlled by tribal factions and there is a history of robbery, of assaults, of murders, of viciousness.
Another route: farther north, through the mountains. But that is a journey of weeks, on foot, through deep snow, over dangerous passes, also leading to tribal lands.
Another: a road between Jalalabad and the border, less a road, actually, than tire tracks leading up the barren hills. It is a smuggling route for trucks carrying loads bound from Iran through Afghanistan to Pakistan. TVs. Tires. Air conditioners. Refrigerators. They are taken as far as the trucks can go, where they are then offloaded into a village of warehouses, where they are strapped onto donkeys and camels. A camel can hold six tires, say the men who run the warehouses, a donkey four; the rest of the trip is a seven-hour walk; the traffic is steady; refugees aren't welcome.
The option of choice, then: Torkham -- at least until people find out what Abdul Qahar is finding out now.
"They won't let me go," he says.
It has taken him nine days to get here. He has eaten only bread. He is hungry. He is thirsty. He is exhausted. He has no idea what to do next. It's 3:25 in the afternoon.
The gate closes at 5.
"What can I do?" he says.
Four o'clock.
Back on the Pakistani side. A border guard is hitting a man so hard to drive him back into Afghanistan that dust from his clothing flies into the air. Now a guard is driving another man back by slapping him in the head. Now another guard is swinging a stick at a man who is charging through carrying a crying little girl. Now another guard is grabbing a teenage boy by the ear and twisting it so hard the boy sinks to his knees.
Back on the Afghanistan side. Qahar has retreated.
4:57: The gate starts to close. People rush. Sticks swing. People fall, get up, rush, are hit, fall again.
4:59: Closed. Chained. Locked.
Five o'clock: Qahar has not made it through. Neither have the ones who are looking over the top of the gate to the other side. They see a wide-open road leading to food, to water, to money, to work, to whatever. To everything.
They see a sign. "Welcome to Pakistan," it says.
And Then Pakistan
Pakistan: where there are roads and telephones and TVs and computers and Coca-Cola and Sony and McDonald's and a man named Amiruddin Deen, who is the newest arrival in this place of abundance.
Drought, he says, telling the familiar story. Money gone, food gone, fighting, snow, three days on a bus, a detour in Jalalabad when he heard about the Torkham gate, a walk through the hills, and, at long last, finally, here.
He looks around.
"I've never seen such a place," he says.
Its name is Jalozai. It is just south of the city of Peshawar. It is 80,000 people, all from Afghanistan, ones who made it across.
"Tie it tighter," one of them says now to Deen.
They are tying pieces of wood together, three pieces in all, two that have been stuck in the ground and one as a crossbar.
Now they are draping a piece of pink plastic over the wood.
Now they are spreading the plastic out into a triangle and weighing the edges down with rocks.
And now Deen is crawling into his new home.
It isn't even a tent, like in Maslakh.
It isn't even a piece of cloth, like in Talacon.
It's just a plastic covering over a patch of useless dirt, which is in a useless field, which over the past few months has been turned into a home for people with nowhere else to go. It's not even an official refugee camp because the Pakistani government, worried that 80,000 will be just the beginning, will allow nothing that would suggest acceptance. It will not allow humanitarian organizations to bring tents. It will allow only water that's trucked in. It will allow only skeletal medical help. It will allow the U.N. refugee agency only occasional access. It won't allow the World Food Program in at all, meaning there is no dependable source of food.
"Everything," says a neighbor of Deen's, when asked what he needs.
"Everything," says another.
"Everything," says another."
"A hellhole," is how Yusuf Hassan, a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency, describes Jalozai. "Jalozai," he goes on, "is turning into a death camp" -- and indeed there have been deaths: In January dozens died from exposure; in February, from various illnesses; in March, on the day Deen arrived, they were burying a child who'd been bitten by a snake.
This, then, is where Deen has come to.
And where Abdul Qahar, who knows no better, is hoping to get to.
And where 80,000 journeys have led.
How do such journeys begin?
"You have patience until the day comes when you know you can't survive," says Ghulam Mohammad, who has been in Jalozai for 45 days. "You close your eyes and say, 'Let's get out of here.' That's what you decide."
How do such journeys end?
That's what Deen is wondering as he looks around in bewilderment. Red-eyed and weary and with no idea of how he will survive, and how his wife will survive, and how his three children will survive, he is already thinking about his next journey, to the place he wishes to be most of all.
"My home," he says.
Back, somehow, to Afghanistan. |
