Its inmates must return to Afghanistan by March or disperse to other refugee

Its inmates must return to Afghanistan by March or disperse to other refugee centres. Seeking sanctuary in Pakistan does not end the upheaval of exile.. There are frequent grumbles about Afghan refugees who are willing to labour for less than basic pay in order to eat. Mohammad Siddiqi, an office worker from Peshawar, said: “It is not as if the average Pakistani is rich.

We want them to resettle in their country soon.”Plans to isolate these exiles in makeshift holding centres in the tribal zone aroused the concerns of rights activists Shalman camp is considered particularly hellish. But a sizeable middle-class ?gr?ommunity of Afghan traders and businessmen thrives in Pakistani cities.Sympathy has its limits. As they were asking me over and over where the money was, they took a bayonet and stabbed me These wounds weren’t too deep; they were just to scare me At the end .. they stabbed me below my collarbone. It took eight stitches to close the wound.”Some 1.9 million refugees have returned to Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban, an enormous influx in such a devastated country. The refugee testified to Human Rights Watch: “I had spent all of my savings to repair the house, and I didn’t have much jewellery They took all of that … Even two years after the American bombardment ousted the Taliban, security is illusory outside of Kabul.Cautionary tales about heading home make the rounds. One single mother with an only child returned to Kabul from a refugee camp last autumn, and promptly was robbed and stabbed by half a dozen assailants.

At the end of a debilitating trek through the Khyber Pass, Afghans could find safety in Peshawar, the Pashtun metropolis in Pakistan.Afghans who stayed at home faced marauding warlords with private ethnic armies who rocketed the cities, then suffered five years of brutal Taliban rule, three years of acute drought and a resurgence of the warlords. After an aid worker was murdered near Ghazni last month, the United Nations suspended its resettlement efforts.In Peshawar, there is little overt resentment of the camp-dwellers because their wretched history is common knowledge. By 1984, the Soviet army was poisoning wells, killing livestock and carpet-bombing the Afghan countryside. When Soviet fighter bombers struck even the border towns, half the civilian population of Afghanistan fled.

You can see where they have dismantled the upper storeys of their mud huts, packing up door knobs, nails and even the support timbers. Wiring is stripped away, and light bulbs are carefully padded for transport. More than 32,000 families have left Pakistan’s north-west frontier to try their luck again in Afghanistan since March this year. Some already have given up and returned for the winter, hoping spring will bring gentler temperatures and more secure roads. Roads, electricity and water are scarce, and there is little chance of employment or decent health care outside Kabul.Yet some of the Jalozai families are trickling back across the border.