Sun, Sep 23, 2001 page1

• Humanitarian crisis looms as Afghans flee their homes

  EXODUS The possibility of US military strikes already has exacerbated a humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and has its impoverished citizens streaming toward the borders

  • THE GUARDIAN
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  The British aid agency Oxfam on Friday warned that Afghanistan faces an escalating humanitarian crisis and that 1.5 million refugees could pour across the country's borders in the event of an American attack.

  About 2.5 million more people inside Afghanistan have abandoned their homes in the cities and fled to rural areas. In the eastern city of Jalalabad, 65 percent of the population has already moved out, Oxfam said. Many are massing at the border, unable to cross since Pakistan sealed its frontier.

  

  Pakistani border soldiers watch Afghans waiting in a buffer zone between the two countries in Chaman, about 1,500km south of Islamabad, yesterday.

  PHOTO: AFP

  Fourteen British charities, including Oxfam, yesterday wrote an open letter to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair warning that up to 5 million people face starvation. They also called on Blair to ensure that there were no civilian casualties in any military offensive.

  Following last week's attacks in the US, 10,000 Afghans poured over the border near Quetta, in the deserts of western Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands more are believed to be waiting on the Afghan side of the frontier with no shelter and little food.

  Those who have reached safety count themselves lucky. As soon as Margalara, a 27-year-old Afghan woman, heard rumors of an impending attack she packed a bag and left four days ago with 15 of her relatives, mostly young children. The journey to her cousin's house in Quetta along the potholed road through the southern Afghan desert should have taken six hours by car, but Taliban guards posted along the way were trying to stem the exodus.

  "They said to us: `Why do you want to leave your country? You should stay. This is your land.' We told them our children would be killed if we stayed but they didn't listen. We waited for two hours then they took our money and let us pass," she said.

  "We had heard rumors that fighting would start, that another country would attack. I don't know which country it was but I think the Taliban must have done something bad again."

  In the months before the attacks on the US, thousands of Afghans had fled to escape civil war and three years of drought. Most of those who arrived in the past week have relatives in Quetta and have disappeared unnoticed into the high-walled, mudbrick compounds in which most Afghan families live.

  The city is already full of Afghan refugees, more than 300,000 of them, who have left their country over the past 20 years. Some support the Taliban's hardline Islamic government, many others despise them.

  "We hate the Taliban. Women have to wear a burqa [an all-covering veil], we can't go out alone, we can't work, our children can't go to school," Margalara said. "We hope that this time the Taliban will be finished and a new government will be chosen by the people."

  Pakistan, already home to 2 million Afghans, is trying to halt the flood of new arrivals. Last Monday, 500 refugees with no family connections in Quetta gathered for the night in the Ayub football stadium, in the city center. The following morning they were picked up in a truck sent by the Pakistani authorities and deposited back at the border at Chaman.

  "It doesn't take much intelligence to know they were definitely destined for deportation," said William Sakataka, the head of the Quetta office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

  Sakataka and his team are trying to get access to Chaman to provide tents and food to the refugees gathered on each side of the border, but the Pakistani government has closed the area. Many are stuck in Spin Baldak, just on the Afghan side.

  Sources suggest that Pakistan is likely to reopen its borders if Afghanistan becomes embroiled in a full-scale war.
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