Local Resources Becoming Strained : Pakistan’s Welcome Mat Is Wearing Thin for Afghan Refugees

Eight years after millions of Afghans fled a Soviet invasion of their country, those refugees face the prospect of another upheaval not of their own making and out of their control.

An estimated 3 million Afghans--the largest refugee population in the world--have been settled in more than 350 barren, mud-colored and sun-baked refugee camps such as the Tindo camp here in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, a few miles from the border with their homeland.

Another estimated half a million “unregistered” refugees, who live outside the camps, jam the streets, bazaars and outskirts of Peshawar, the provincial capital, and a handful of other towns.

‘People Getting Fed Up’

Aid officials from western and Islamic countries praise Pakistan’s role in absorbing such a huge influx of people over the years and add that the assistance programs being run here--with the help of more than 50 relief agencies from a score of countries and the United Nations--also are probably the best, aside from being the biggest, in the world.

Yet there are signs that the welcome mat is wearing thin.

“The people are getting fed up now with looking after the refugees,” said Ghulam Jatoi, the head of the National Peoples’ Party, a Pakistani opposition group. The traditional welcome and giving of shelter to Islamic brothers from across the border is disappearing. “Remember,” he said, “the Prophet Mohammed also said to make sure that you were not a guest for more than three days. So we have given them eight years.”

This view, which seems to be shared by a growing number of Pakistanis, is explained in part by several factors: the size of the refugee population, the duration of their stay, the strain on scarce local resources and the entrepreneurial instincts of many Afghans who cut in on Pakistani businesses and land, especially here in the North West.

Frustration Deepens

It is also in part the result of war-related increases in gunrunning and drug smuggling that have made this country’s traditionally wild North West tribal areas even wilder. There are now an estimated 650,000 heroin addicts in Pakistan compared to perhaps only hundreds five years ago.

Moreover, the sense of frustration is deepened by the lack of any solution to the stalemated war in Afghanistan between the the Afghan resistance fighters known as the moujahedeen , and Soviet and Afghan government forces.

In the last year, an even more explosive ingredient has been added to this mixture.

Senior Pakistani officials and western diplomats here say they are convinced that a clever and seemingly effective new strategy of subversion and terrorist bombings aimed at the Pakistani population and easily blamed on the presence of the refugees is being directed by the secret police arm of the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan.

Bombings Increase

This year, said a top Pakistani official familiar with detailed intelligence reports, more than 300 people have been killed and perhaps 1,000 injured in bomb blasts that have spread from the Peshawar area to the cities of Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi. The blasts almost always touch off demonstrations against the refugees, whose presence, in the eyes of many Pakistanis, is causing the bombings.

The strategy, the official explained, is to drive the wedge even deeper between the Pakistani population and the refugees. The apparent goal is to bring enough pressure on the government, through the threat of destabilization, to force it to accept terms more favorable to Moscow and Kabul in U.N.-mediated talks aimed at finding a settlement.

Pakistan’s role in the war is crucial.

Aside from absorbing the refugees, this country has allowed its territory to become the principal funnel for secret aid, money and weapons--primarily from the United States but with some from China, Egypt and Saudi Arabia--to the guerrilla forces inside Afghanistan.

Domestic Pressure

So far, there is no sign that the government of President Zia ul-Haq is wavering from the U.S.- and Pakistan-supported call for a Soviet troop withdrawal and a freely chosen new government for Afghanistan. But by all accounts, the domestic pressure is greatly intensifying for a settlement to the war, with less concern for the postwar details.

The stakes also are high for U.S. policy.

Growing resentment toward the refugees spills over onto the government and, in turn, toward Washington, since it is widely perceived here that Pakistan’s key role in supporting the Afghan resistance is linked to the $4-billion multiyear U.S. economic and military aid program for Pakistan. Actually, Pakistan began helping the refugees before the U.S. aid program went into effect.

The refugees, knowledgeable officials said, are not involved in the urban terrorist blasts. The Afghan intelligence agency, known as KHAD, slipped many agents into Pakistan along with the refugees to seek recruits, but that effort was not successful, senior Pakistani officials said. But Kabul has changed its strategy and has successfully trained and recruited people to carry out such attacks from the tribal areas in northwest Pakistan, a region that is not controlled by the central government and where money traditionally can buy almost anything--including almost any deed.

‘No Concept of Patriotism’

“Seventy-five percent of the saboteurs that are caught are ours,” said one top Pakistani official. “The tribesmen are good capitalists,” he added. “They are not traitors. They just have no concept of patriotism.”

The shift in strategy also appears to have had a secondary benefit for Kabul.

Prior to the urban bombings, there had been stepped-up bombing by Afghan and Soviet air force planes along the border regions. This has been reduced now, replaced in part by the terrorism campaign. But the Pakistanis believe the terrorist strategy may also have been adopted because the cross-border air strikes were fortifying Pakistan’s case with Washington for U.S. AWACS, airborne warning and control system radar planes.

The refugees are caught in the middle. Yet, the overwhelming majority of them play no role in the two explosive forces--the emergence of the terrorist bombing campaign and the economic problems caused by the “unregistered” refugees--that may determine their fate.

Refugees Take Heavy Toll

“There is tremendous pressure on the province and the people here,” said Arbab Jehangir Kahn, the Peshawar-based chief minister for the North West Frontier Province, which alone has 2.1 million refugees.

When the refugees came, he said, many were business people and farmers who brought their own transportation, including thousands of buses and trucks, and millions of heads of cattle.

“The pressure on our roads, schools, hospitals, grazing grounds is enormous,” he said. The refugees burn up “very valuable land” for wood and “take up the meager job opportunities” in and around the city.

“The basic amenities of drinking water and sanitation are under severe pressure. People are getting restless,” he said, “but for the time being I think we can handle the situation.”

In the vast number of isolated camps, such as Tindo, such complaints seem unrelated to the reality of the refugees’ empty lives. They say they only want to go home to a sovereign Afghanistan, free of Soviet troops, not make a new life for themselves in Pakistan.

‘We Are Here of Necessity’

The Afghans and Pakistanis “are of one religion, custom and culture,” said 52-year-old camp elder Mohammed Nazir. “And they know we are here of necessity not choice.

“How can anyone living in a camp, away from home, dependent on the mercies of others, have a comfortable life,” he added, “even though we know our hosts do their best to make us comfortable. Even if we were given gold every day, we would not live here. We would go home.”

There is no barbed wire or fences around these camps. Residents are free to travel to a nearby village if they can find transportation. Some find occasional day work for the equivalent of $2 daily in those villages.

At Tindo camp, the overall impression is one of emptiness and solitude. That impression is deepened because there are few men present among the 1,400 families and 10,300 people who live among the mud-walled family compounds, and conservative Islamic women withdraw out of sight of male visitors. About 2,500 of the camp’s males are in Afghanistan fighting with the resistance, officials said.

Costly Aid Program

The few males gathered around a vine-covered patio during a recent visit here all tell similar stories of bombed-out villages, lost relatives and three- or four-day treks by foot, mostly in 1979, from nearby Nangarhar province in Afghanistan, across the mountains and into Pakistan.

Caring for the refugees, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials, costs about $2 million a day. Pakistan reportedly pays about half of that, and donor countries and international agencies the other half. Although there have been widespread allegations of corruption associated with aid to pursue the war inside Afghanistan, officials here say they are confident that the humanitarian assistance programs are well run.

Still, the material assistance seems meager. At the camp here, residents say they receive limited but regular deliveries of flour, about 30 pounds a month, and cooking oil and sugar, but no money. Until 1983, they said, each family received about $9 monthly from a U.N. refugee self-reliance program. Some of the refugees manage small gardens and others occasionally slaughter some of the few animals in the camp.

Restrictions Possible

The dimensions of the Afghan refugee flood are not confined to Pakistan. More than 1 million are in neighboring Iran, bringing the total refugee population to 5 million out of what had been a 16 million pre-war population. It is estimated here that another 1 million Afghans have been killed during the long war and that perhaps 3 million are refugees inside Afghanistan as a result of war-zone dislocations.

Although the great waves of refugees came in the 1978-81 period, Pakistani Prime Minister Mohammed Khan Junejo said in a recent interview in Islamabad that 5,000 to 10,000 refugees continue to enter the country each month. And, he said, he might now consider new regulations that would restrict refugees to their camps.

“Every time there is a bomb blast, the refugees get blamed. So it is for their own good for them not to be seen in the center of the local population,” he said.