JALOZAI: Plight of refugees living in stinking tent city

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writes Tim Meo

Only the desperate end up in the Jalozai refugee camp, a stinking makeshift tent city for the displaced and dispossessed in a dried up river bed outside Peshawar.

Jalozai is Pakistan's most notorious refugee camp. Just a few months ago, aid workers were calling it the worst in the world.
Those with no other place to go, no money, and no friends end up here, squeezed on to a patch of dried mud with just a rudimentary tent made from plastic sheeting for protection against the fierce midday sun.
Dinner for many consists of bits of stale nan bread boiled into a kind of porridge, and there is nothing at all for most of its inhabitants to do but stare into space and brood on the trauma that forced them out of their homes, their country, and into this miserable place.

However, nobody doubts a vast exodus is coming - and the misery that is Jalozai could be repeated on a huge scale. Staff from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees are already scouring the tribal areas looking for suitable sites for the million plus people who are expected to stream out of Afghanistan once fighting starts.

About 100 camps will prob-ably be set up, and nobody expects them to be comfortable.

Sardar Timoryan, an eighty-year-old widow, is one of those who could prove to be the vanguard of the exodus. Alone except for her seven-year-old granddaughter, Aisha, she sits and stares into the middle distance, idly waving away the flies that infest Jalozai.

They arrived before the US bombings, finally abandoning their farm after three years of drought. The little girl's older brothers remained in their village to try to keep the farm going. Sardar and Aisha became separated from the child's father during the chaotic journey across the frontier - her mother is dead - and their plight is so desperate they have been adopted by other refugees in the camp.

Afghans are great survivors, and helping each other, even strangers, is essential for survival. Not that there is a lot that other families can do except offer moral support. Sardar still makes an effort to greet visitors warmly and apologises for not having any tea or bread to offer.

Like everyone else, she came here as absolutely the last resort. She said: "We sold our sheep to come here and now I don't even have one rupee left. I feel I will die here. There is no way to stay alive. All hope has gone. Sometimes I wish I had stayed in Afghanistan. Then I could at least have died in my own land."

Sardar spins wool all day to earn a few rupees. Apart from that, she relies on handouts from aid groups and the UN. Its big white landcruisers with huge radio aerials tour the camp looking bizarrely modern and out of place among the ragged men and filthy children playing around pools of sewage.

Sardar has no money left. What little cash and jewellery she had was spent on transport to get over the border. Only the need to look after the little girl keeps her going. Aisha is a pretty child with huge brown eyes. She doesn't smile much, and clings to her grandmother.

Afghans are fiercely independent people, to whom begging is a disgrace, and for an old woman to end her tough but proud life here is incredibly demoralising.

The camps are particularly difficult for women. Afghans are used to living in houses built of dried mud, surrounded by compounds, with separate living quarters for men and women.

Here there is no privacy - people defecate in the open, cook, eat, and live in full view of everybody.

There is no respite in the airless, dusty camp from the blistering sun, and no breeze to disperse the stink of human excrement which hangs in the air.

An estimated 50,000 refugees are here, many leaving their homes only as a last resort after surviving years of war and drought.

Once Afghan refugees like these were welcome in Pakistan. However, now the international aid has virtually dried up at the same time as the patience of Pakistan's rulers has run out.

"When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, we were greeted like brothers here in Pakistan," said 21-year-old Mohammed Saeed, who arrived as a child refugee in the 1980s in Peshawar and still lives in the city. "But now they just want to get rid of us."

Around 1.2 million refugees still live in camps surrounding Peshawar, although many of them are now more or less permanent settlements with electricity and schools.

Perhaps another two million have settled permanently in Pakistan and several hundred usually arrive each week during normal times. They are a huge burden on the country's faltering economy and have fuelled a drug-and-gun culture which causes instability and corruption.

In the last year, many in Pakistan have called for them to go, including the governor of the North West Frontier Province, and Afghans have increasingly been seen as scapegoats for all Pakistan's problems.

Governor Syed Iftikhar Shah has already said a major influx could cause major social disruption. However, nobody knows what effect millions more refugees could have on this already unstable country.