Return of 5 Million Afghan Refugees a Massive Project

The long-awaited return of 3 million Afghan refugees from camps in Pakistan to their mountainous homeland will require thousands of trucks, more than a million tons of wheat in the first year and the cooperation of the Soviet Union to allow supplies to travel through Soviet territory, refugee experts here estimate.

With the addition of 2 million Afghan refugees living in Iran, it would be the largest and most complicated mass repatriation of refugees since 1972, when 10 million refugees were returned to Bangladesh from India after the Indo-Pakistani war.

“It will be a massive logistical operation, fascinating in its complexity, but terribly, terribly difficult,” said Anne Willem Bijleveld, deputy director of the U.N. High Commission for Refugees office in Islamabad.

Thursday’s signing of the Afghan agreement has refugee officials scrambling to come up with a strategy to deal with the staggering logistics of a return migration to the poor, rugged land of Afghanistan, devastated by more than eight years of war.

The main flow of refugees is not expected to begin until after most of the 115,000 Soviet troops in Afghanistan have withdrawn. But even if that takes nine months, it is scant time for refugee workers to organize a plan.

Their work is complicated by the fact that no one has a clear picture of conditions the returning refugees will face when they get home.

“We’re caught in the dark,” one refugee worker said.

Except for a handful of volunteers, mostly French doctors and nurses, who have braved Soviet firepower to work inside the country, no foreign aid workers have seen the interior of Afghanistan since Soviet troops arrived in December, 1979.

“People are going back to unknown conditions,” Bijleveld said.

Bijleveld and other refugee specialists interviewed here said the returning refugees may even be forced to carry roof timbers with them into Afghanistan to help rebuild their homes because of the scarcity of lumber in their home country.

In addition, their farm fields may need to be swept of mines before they can be planted. Their children, many of whom have grown up in refugee camps in Pakistan, will need to be taught the rudiments of farming so that traditional agricultural practices can be revived.

As a result, World Food Program Director Taieb Essayem said, food supplies will need to be doubled or even tripled to reach refugees once they have resettled.

World Food Program officials, who last year distributed more than 450,000 tons of wheat to the 3.1 million Afghan refugees living in 300 refugee camps in Pakistan, are even considering issuing ration cards to the refugees so that they can be identified once they are back home.

But the refugee workers must also calculate the needs of what they term the “internally displaced persons” affected by the war. The capital city of Kabul, for example, is bulging with former farmers who came seeking shelter from the war.

Kabul’s prewar population was 300,000. Now it is estimated at more than 1 million. If the war ends, many of these people can also be expected to return to their rural homelands and will face the same needs as the refugees returning from Pakistan.

Unless some way can be found to feed these people and reactivate the Afghan farm system, the returnees could face food shortages and even famine, the refugee experts said.

Livestock Killed for Food

Much of the uncertainty about the needs of refugees once they return to Afghanistan results from inadequate knowledge of the state of agriculture. Since the war began, thousands of acres of arable land have been abandoned. Most of the livestock and work animals needed for farming have been killed for food.

Because winter crops must be planted in September or October, it is unlikely that the refugees would be able to plant a crop this year, even if a settlement in the war were reached today, Essayem said.

In fact, it may take years before the Afghan refugees, representing more than a third of the prewar population of Afghanistan, no longer need to be supported by refugee agencies and donor countries.

As it is, the estimated 5 million Afghans in Pakistan and Iran are the largest refugee population in the world. To feed and house them costs several hundred million dollars a year in contributions, in addition to the nearly half-million tons of grain annually.

Inside Pakistan, where most of the refugees now live, distribution of supplies is a relatively easy task. Food and grain are simply delivered to the camps, which are scattered from areas near the Iranian border in Baluchistan to the Indian border in Pakistan’s Punjab province. At the camps, the refugees collect the supplies from a central warehouse.

Even in Pakistan, the process requires 15,000 full-time employees with the Pakistan Commission for Afghan Refugees, the agency handling the actual delivery for the World Food Program, a Rome-based agency of the United Nations. It is unlikely that the Pakistanis will be able to help inside Afghanistan, however.

More Manpower, Equipment

To reach the Afghans once they return to Afghanistan will require even more manpower and equipment, none of which is in place now.

“You will need thousands of trucks,” Bijleveld said.

Essayem agreed, saying: “You need trucks and means of transport. The problem is mainly how to find the refugees when they’re not in 300 camps, nicely settled.”

Pakistan was able to absorb the massive influx of refugees in part because the flow was gradual, beginning with the Soviet invasion and continuing over years.

The return to Afghanistan, when it occurs, probably will be a more concentrated movement in a shorter period. Despite years in Pakistan refugee camps where, in many cases, conditions are actually better than those in their rugged homeland, most Afghans are anxious to return, relief officials say.

The refugee camp at Khorassan, 30 miles south of Peshawar, is a typical example of how the Afghans have adapted to refugee life but still hold a strong desire to return.

The several thousand industrious residents of Khorassan are of Turkman ethnic stock, mostly from the north of Afghanistan in Mazar-i Sharif province. A clean and well-organized camp with wide streets and large mud-walled family compounds was built in three years by the people.

Camp’s Shopping Strip

Now it has electricity and a retail shopping strip, with butcher shops and even a carpet merchant. One of the main sources of income in the camp, in fact, is weaving the brilliant red Turkman carpets.

The pride of the camp is a large, enclosed mud field for the beloved sport of buzkashi played by the Turkman men. Played on horseback, the game is probably a precursor to polo. As many as 50 burly men riding stallions compete with each other for possession of a headless calf that they hoist onto their saddle by reaching down into a dangerous scrum of flailing hoofs.

The sport is well enough established in Khorassan that a good buzkashi stallion can fetch as much as $10,000, a fact that speaks both of the serious interest in the sport and the economic well-being of the refugees there.

Despite their relatively good life in the camps, all of the Turkman refugees insist that they plan to return to Afghanistan. Refugee workers estimate that no more than 10% of all the refugees in Pakistan will attempt to remain there.

“As soon as the soil of Afghanistan is free from Russian feet, we want to go home,” said Goul Agha, 32, a native of a village north of Kabul.

Will Send Scouts First

However, Rais Abdul Bari, the respected leader of the camp, said people are likely to wait until the Russian-backed Kabul regime falls before they make their move. He said the community will first send scouts to their homeland in the north to evaluate conditions for the return of their families.

Reaching their homes will be more difficult for these people because their villages are near the Soviet border. For this reason, Bijleveld believes it may be necessary to persuade the Soviet Union to allow supplies to pass through its territory.

“We hope we can get their help, but it is one of the big question marks,” he said.

Fortunately, more than 50% of the Afghan refugees come from areas adjacent to Pakistan, including an estimated 466,000 from Kandahar province, 390,000 from Nangarhar province and 340,000 from Paktia province.

Even the border territory is terribly rugged, but it is also the area that will first become safe for return after the Soviets begin their withdrawal.

Despite the many problems faced in the return, the biggest grounds for hope that it will succeed is the Afghan people themselves, a rugged, strong people accustomed to hardship.

“The Afghan is a survivor,” said Bijleveld. “Even after eight years in Pakistan, he doesn’t have the dependency syndrome that we find in other refugee communities.”