Pakistan Facing New Flood of Refugees From Afghanistan

Tens of thousands of Afghan refugees are continuing to flee their country despite Wednesday’s final Soviet troop withdrawal, and Pakistan is bracing for yet another human wave from its western neighbor in the near future, senior Pakistani government officials said Thursday.

What is worse, Pakistan’s chief commissioner for Afghan refugees said, few if any of the 3.2 million Afghans who have been living in the squalid mud huts of the refugee camps here for the past nine years are likely to go home until Afghan President Najibullah’s regime falls. Many experts here believe that could take months.

“We simply do not expect them to start moving out tomorrow morning,” declared refugee commissioner Rustam Shah Mohmand. “There is the fear of conflict, the fear of bombardment, the fear of shelling, the fear of prosecution, the fear of hostilities. And as long as there are those fears and the fears of famine and starvation, no refugee will leave Pakistan.”

Won’t Be Forced to Go

Speaking at a Thursday press conference to mark the completion of the Soviet troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, Mohammad Hanif Khan, Pakistan’s Cabinet minister in charge of refugee affairs, stressed that Pakistan will not force any refugees to go or to stay. But he stressed that any hopes that the Soviet withdrawal would signal a large-scale return of refugees to their homeland are unfounded.

In fact, commissioner Shah Mohmand said, recent fighting near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad has forced more than 30,000 new refugees to cross the border in the past three months. An expected rebel rocket offensive on that city is likely to bring tens of thousands more, he said.

For the millions of refugees who have been here for nearly a decade, peace and security are the principal issues in considering repatriation, he said.

“The basic reason that compelled the refugees to leave Afghanistan was security,” he said. “As long as there is no security, they will not go back.”

Shah Mohmand conceded that not enough has been done to repair the damage inside Afghanistan to meet the refugees’ other basic requirements.

“The refugees will not go back unless they see some infrastructure, unless they see they aren’t going to starve, and unless they have houses to live in,” he said.

Independent aid officials who have been working with the Afghan rebels and refugees for years agreed.

“They’re brave and strong and courageous all right, but they can’t eat dirt,” said Steve Segal, director of the International Relief Committee, which has been working with the Afghan refugees for nearly a decade. “If there is nothing done about infrastructure, we don’t think they’re going to go back.”

Shah Mohmand and other refugee officials say that now that the Soviet troops have left Afghanistan, the fate of the world’s largest refugee population remains the biggest international problem of the Afghan war.

Billions of dollars already have been spent by the United States, Pakistan and Western European nations in supporting the Afghan rebels in their war against the regular Afghan army and their Soviet supporters. Now that the Soviets are no longer a factor, refugee experts say they worry that much of that international financial support, both for the fighting guerrillas and the refugees--groups that often overlap--may begin to dry up.

“Our calculations originally were that by April or May we would see large numbers of refugees start to return,” said one official of the United Nations, which has been charged with overseeing the Afghans’ repatriation. “But . . . if conditions are not stable and if fighting continues, you will see more refugees coming out.”

The U.N. official conceded that the overwhelming majority of the refugees fled during 1980 and 1981 as a direct result of the Soviet’s 1979 invasion.

“It had to do with the escalation in fighting and the use of new weapons systems and air force, which made everybody vulnerable,” he said.

But he and Shah Mohmand said the massive destruction that has been done to Afghanistan during the past nine years--3,000 villages totally destroyed and 5,000 others badly damaged, Mohmand said--has made the refugees return impossible.

The United Nations already has begun limited reconstruction projects inside Afghanistan in border regions where the fighting has stopped, principally the rebuilding of irrigation canals and houses.

But it remains unclear whether enough can be done to persuade the refugees to go home before Pakistani public opinion begins to turn against the people who have been harbored and fed as Islamic brothers for nearly a decade.

“Any government that is faced with a refugee population the size of this one is anxious to see an end to the conflict that caused these people to flee,” the U.N. official said.

An independent aid worker who has spent several years in border refugee camps agreed that reconstruction is the principal refugee concern, but he, too, added that “the other big issue is what will the Pakistani government do. Will they begin to cut off ration cards to send signals to the refugees?”

Already, Shah Mohmand said, the 30,000 new refugees have been denied the registration that would get them ration cards and access to U.N.-provided food. He said they are surviving by staying with relatives in the camps or selling off their few possessions.

He stressed that life in the camps, although free of epidemics and other critical problems often associated with refugee life, is not such that the Afghans would want to stay any longer than they must.

“The refugees’ life in Pakistan is absolutely substandard,” he said. “It is miserable. All they are getting is wheat and edible oil. The absolute majority of them are living in wretched conditions. There is no electricity. Fifty percent are living without clean drinking water.

“We are convinced that each and every refugee will repatriate--some will go sooner, some will go later.”