Ignoring the Risks, Afghans Rush Home
By JOHN F. BURNS
nytimes.com
MASTALI, Afghanistan, April
25 — When Umer Gul came
home this month after 22 years as a
refugee in Pakistan, his tears of joy
spoke for the tide of Afghans now
returning to a country where many
had despaired of ever setting foot
again.
Standing in the jutting wooden
prow of the truck that carried his
family up to this village near
Jalalabad from Peshawar, the
Pakistani frontier city, Mr. Gul was
enraptured.
"Look at that! Such beauty!" he
said, waving at fields of ripening
wheat stretching to distant
mountains in a haze of green and
yellow. Then, just as the truck
neared the end of its journey, a light
rain lifted and a rainbow spread
across the sky, arcing directly over
this mud-walled village, where Mr.
Gul's ancestors dwelled for
generations until Soviet forces
invaded in December 1979.
Three months after the invasion, as
Muslim guerrillas fought their first
battles with Soviet troops in eastern
Afghanistan, Mr. Gul took his
family down to Peshawar,
beginning two decades as a casual
laborer, then as a shopkeeper,
earning as little as 50 cents a day.
Age 38 then and 60 now, he passed
all his middle years in Pakistan and
feared that his only way home
would be in a coffin.
Now, over much of Afghanistan,
but particularly in the region from
the Pakistan border to Jalalabad and
Kabul, a human tide is running.
"It's something you cannot know,
the misery of living poor in a
foreign country," Mr. Gul said after
he, his wife, Zar Gul, 50, and seven of their children and
grandchildren clambered down from the truck 100 yards
along a winding pathway from his childhood home and began
unloading the beds, cooking utensils, sacks of clothes,
doorframes and windows taken from their home in a
settlement near Peshawar.
"All those years in Pakistan, we used to say, `We have
nothing — we don't even have a country,' " Mr. Gul said.
"But now we have a country again. Now we are home, and
the years of hopelessness are behind us."
A while later, after much of the village had turned out to
welcome him, Mr. Gul sat down over a mug of green tea in a
leafy village clearing, flanked by the teacher and the butcher
and a milling crowd of others, and he asked for a message to
be passed to the country that drove the Taliban from power
five months ago, opening the way for the current flood of
returning refugees: "Tell America, `Thank you, thank you, you
have brought us home.' Tell America, `Umer Gul is their
friend.' "
In the two months since the United Nations refugee agency
began to assist repatriation, more than 300,000 Afghans have
left Pakistan and migrated home. Even if the rush subsides,
refugee officials believe that as many as 1.2 million could
return this year from Pakistan and Iran, which also has
millions of Afghan refugees.
Uncertainties abound. The flow from Iran is only just
beginning, a few hundred people a day against the 15,000 who
have crossed on some days from Pakistan.
And as thousands head home, other Afghans, though in much
smaller numbers, still clamor to flee. At Chaman, a border
town south of here, near Kandahar, thousands of Pashtuns
who have fled ethnic violence in northern Afghanistan since
the Taliban's collapse are cooped up in temporary camps on
the Afghan side, seeking sanctuary that Pakistan has been
increasingly reluctant to grant.
Even if the rush continues, United Nations officials say, it
could take three years, perhaps much longer, before most of
the five million to six million refugees in neighboring countries
come home. Some never will, having settled into relatively
prosperous lives, particularly in Peshawar, a city that is now
as much Afghan as Pakistani. Others have married into
Pakistani or Iranian families; younger people born outside
Afghanistan have lost the zeal to come home that burns in
older Afghans.
Still, the numbers who have chosen to move already stand as
a remarkable development, all the more so in light of mounting
signs that Afghanistan remains deeply unstable. Just about
everywhere that the country's future is weighed, people worry
about the risk of anarchy if the new government in Kabul fails
to rein in warlords who now control much of the country, or
if the Taliban and Al Qaeda regroup for a new guerrilla war.
But those coming home seem to be ignoring the naysayers.
Along the main road west from Peshawar, up to the frontier
and on toward Jalalabad and the hinterland, a continuous
stream of trucks, buses, minivans and cars passes from dawn
until past dusk. Almost all are packed with refugees,
sometimes as many as 30 or 40 to a truck, along with
improbably stacked cargos of beds, bicycles, carpets and
wood-burning stoves.
Officials of the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees are sufficiently worried about the risks of new
violence that they tell those at the agency's registration centers
in Pakistan, where refugees sign up for benefits that include
up to $20 in cash for individuals, $100 for families, that they
go home at their own risk.
"Our message is that it is a precarious situation, that they
should make their decision responsibly," said Melita Sunjic,
the agency's chief information officer in Pakistan. "We ask
them: `Are you sure you want to do this? It may not be safe.'
But they say, `We know our villages.' And the truth is, they
know the situation much better than us."
The flow has far exceeded the United Nations' predictions
when details of the repatriation program were announced in
January. Then, the total of returnees from Pakistan for March
to December was expected to be 400,000. That number
seems likely to be reached by mid-May, and officials are now
preparing for at least 800,000 returnees from Pakistan this
year, and possibly as many as 400,000 from Iran.
Although major industrial nations have pledged $4.5 billion in
development aid for Afghanistan, United Nations members
have been slow to respond to an appeal for $271 million for
the repatriation program.
Even this seems certain to fall far short of the costs: the cash
payouts, a package of supplies that includes plastic
groundsheets, 330 pounds of wheat for every family, shelter
materials and tools.
"It's a bit scary that the operation is
going so well, and we still have to
live from day to day," Ruud
Lubbers, the former Dutch prime
minister who directs the refugee
agency, said at a recent news
conference in Islamabad, the
Pakistan capital.
Mr. Lubbers said getting the
refugees home and helping them
rebuild their homes would improve
the chances that Afghanistan could
resist a slide back into political
extremism.
Not all refugee experts would agree,
because many of the refugee camps
in Pakistan served as incubators for
conservative, anti-Western forms of
Islam.
But Mr. Lubbers said he believed
that the returnees, as victims of the
earlier cycles of violence in Afghan
politics, would be among the first
to resist efforts to stir further
trouble.
Some refugee officials worry that
the rush to return now may be
giving an exaggerated sense of the
Afghans' eagerness to make new
lives.
For one thing, there have always
been thousands of families who
have moved back into Afghanistan
in the spring, to plant crops in their
native villages and escape the heat
of Pakistan in the summer, before
returning to Pakistan again after the
fall harvest. This year, lured by the
cash payouts, some of these annual
migrants could be passing
themselves off as permanent
returnees.
Others may be among the bogus
returnees who make an industry out of collecting the payouts,
then doubling back into Pakistan to start the process again. At
least 70,000 would-be returnees have been rejected so far,
either at the registration centers in Pakistan or at the locations
in Afghanistan where the payments are made. Those seeking
to make a "revolving door" of the program, in the term used
by Mr. Lubbers, are identified by United Nations workers
who are themselves mostly refugees, with a sharp eye for
signs of fraud.
Pakistani officials, eager to accelerate the homeward flow,
have taken measures to discourage refugees from doubling
back. The most punitive of these, visible at the Nasir Bagh
camp in Peshawar where Mr. Gul and his family spent 15
years, are the wrecking crews that descend on a home or
shop as soon as the truck carrying a departing family pulls
out.
Across the border in Afghanistan, there are more harsh
moments. Driving into their native country from the Khyber
Pass, the refugees are plunged into a landscape scarred by all
they fled: ruined buildings, the rusting hulks of Soviet tanks,
the fluttering flags of rival warlords and, everywhere, men,
women and children begging. Aboard the truck carrying Mr.
Gul's family and three others going home to Mastali, there
were long periods of silence as the journey carried them
across the Kabul River toward home.
Five of Mr. Gul's 10 children were born in Pakistan, and all
seven of his grandchildren, so the younger children were
seeing their own country for the first time.
But the uneasiness appeared to lift as the daylong journey
neared its end. Mr. Gul's cousin, Shamsur Rehman, held his
18-month-old son, Jamil, over the side as Mastali approached,
telling him, "Look, my son, this is your country, this is your
soil, this is your home."
In the village, Mr. Gul and his family spent their first night in
the home of his oldest brother, Saleh Gul, a 70-year-old
farmer who came back from Pakistan five years ago.
The family compound, consisting of several homes inside
high walls, was bombed by Soviet aircraft when Mastali was
used as a base by Muslim guerrillas in the 1980's, when
three-quarters of the 20,000 people living in the district fled to
Pakistan. In the days ahead, the younger Mr. Gul will set
about rebuilding his part of the compound, now little but
shattered walls serving as a manger for his brother's cows.
For the work, he has the equivalent of $250 in savings from
his years in Pakistan and the repatriation bonus of $100. By
his own estimate, he will need at least $2,500 to complete the
task, a sum far beyond anything most Afghan villagers can
hope to amass. But worries about the future seemed to count
for little as he paced about the ruins of his old home.
"In Pakistan, I grew old," he said, stroking his graying beard.
"But tonight, back in my home, I feel like a young man again.
I feel as though my life is beginning all over again." |
