Ajab Khan’s five children were born in a refugee camp in Pakistan. Now the 48-year-old has brought his family home to Afghanistan — to a tent pitched on a rocky plain just steps away from land mines.
Khan and his children are among nearly 4,000 Afghan families living in a makeshift settlement because their homes were destroyed or overtaken in the decades they spent abroad waiting out wars.
First, with the former Soviet Union in the 1980s, then the strife of civil war and most recently the US offensive against the Taliban.
The UN’s refugee chief visited Chamtala settlement on Monday in eastern Afghanistan and called for wealthy nations to do more to build new communities for destitute returnees like Khan.
“There has not been enough support from the international community,” High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres told assembled elders from the camp.
He said he would press rich countries to donate more to the cause of returnees during an international conference on the refugee issue in the Afghan capital this week.
At the height of their exodus, Afghans made up the world’s largest refugee population with 8 million people in more than 70 countries. More than 5 million of these people have returned home since 2002, according to the UN.
Donor nations should show their “full solidarity to the Afghan people, to those that come back, to those that go on coming back, because they want also to rebuild their country but face huge challenges in rebuilding their lives,” Guterres said later.
Chamtala is one of five makeshift settlements countrywide in which more than 30,000 recent returnees from various countries are living in tents with only basic emergency supplies from the government and aid groups, according the UN refugee agency.
They are part of an ongoing influx of people — some pushed back across the Pakistan border by closures of refugee camps, others by fighting between government forces and Islamic militants in border areas. Most of the families at Chamtala have arrived since May.
Pakistan says it is not forcefully deporting anyone. But some in Chamtala say they weren’t given any choice when their camps closed except to board trucks heading across the border.
“They sent the police to make us leave. They put us in a truck and took us out,” said Gul Sadad, 28. He said the truck did not just take him out of the camp, but all the way back to Afghanistan.
About 3 million Afghans are still living in Pakistan and Iran, the UN said.
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