Painful Exodus of Afghan Refugees Continues in Overcowded Camps in Pakistan

Atibar Gul pulled the hem of her ragged cloak over her infant son to shield him from the heat as he lay in her lap, his eyes glazed by fever.

“I took him to the hospital,” she said, nodding down the parched river bed in the direction of a medical facility funded by Saudi Arabia. “They told me because I don’t have a card, they can’t look after him.”

The card would have confirmed her official status as a refugee from war-torn Afghanistan and made her, her son and her four other children eligible for a share of the $1.13 million in aid being dispensed to more than 2.8 million Afghans each day.

But Gul has been unable to obtain registration because she refused to pay a bribe to camp administrators, she claimed as she squatted in the dust near her makeshift tent in the sprawling Hawai Refugee Camp.

‘We Have No Money’

“I’ve been here now for three months,” she said, her native Pushtu translated by another resident of the camp, 40 miles west of Peshawar city. “I have no clothes. We have no money.”

Driven from her Kandahar province village by Soviet shelling that left her right hand shredded by shrapnel, Gul said she and her children had survived with the help of relatives who fled to Pakistan four years ago and obtained registration.

A camp official denied charges that registration cards had to be bought, saying distribution was halted because of overcrowding in the camp.

“Since last year there has been no further registration,” he said. “The problem is that new people are coming in. Three or four families come every week.”

Overcrowded Camps

Pakistani officials said they are denying registration to pressure refugees clogging overcrowded camps into moving to newer, less congested facilities. There are now more than 300,000 unregistered Afghans in Pakistan and the number is swelling. But no one knows how many have sought registration and been denied cards.

Pakistani officials said the drastic step has been forced by the continued influx of refugees fleeing Soviet destruction aimed at eliminating rural support for the Afghan resistance.

Although it is a trickle--up to 8,000 monthly--compared to a flood of more than 80,000 arrivals per month during the year after the December, 1979, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, officials said the burden on Pakistan is rapidly growing.

President Zia ul-Haq’s government now provides about half of the $400 million spent on refugees in 358 camps in Pakistan. The rest comes from U.N. agencies, sympathetic governments and about 40 private organizations, including Afghan resistance groups.

Problems Grow Worse

In addition to devouring funds Pakistan requires for its own pressing development needs, the growing numbers of refugees are straining transportation, food and water resources, according to Said Azhar, Islamabad’s chief commissioner for Afghan refugees.

The exodus has worsened other problems.

Refugees continue to snap up hard-to-find jobs, working longer hours for less money that local residents, whom they now outnumber in some areas. Affluent Afghan expatriates have purchased expensive properties, opened businesses and consumer prices have skyrocketed.

Western diplomats and Pakistani officials say Afghan secret police agents last year slipped into Pakistan posing as refugees and planted bombs that caused dozens of casualties. The violence forced authorities in Peshawar to ban refugees from the city at night, but the restriction is impossible to enforce.

The presence of Afghan rebels in the camps also has prompted cross-border artillery and air attacks from Afghanistan, diplomats and officials said.

Water Shortages

“Considering that we have worked with refugees in the United States and Thailand, I can say without a doubt that Pakistan is probably the best host country I have ever seen,” said Ted Yates, director of the U.S.-based International Rescue Committees Afghan aid program.

Officials, however, said things could be better. Many camps have water shortages and poor sanitation, which bring dysentery and skin infections. Respiratory ailments abound during winter. The situation is made worse by the hundreds of thousands of unregistered refugees who prefer camps where families and tribes are already well established.

Most of those camps are in the border provinces of Baluchistan and the North West Frontier and, as a result, many are overcrowded. Officials in the Hawai settlement said they have 10,000 more people than their capacity of 50,000.