Where Misery Is Daily Bread

Every day for the last seven months, 11-year-old Latifa Abduljabor has picked the grass to feed her family on this river island in the no man’s land between Tajikistan and Afghanistan.

It is mostly children who search for the grass. Their mothers then boil it into a watery green soup. But no matter how much they dunk the grass in the river, they cannot wash away its taste.

“It tastes like dirt. It’s bitter,” said Latifa, who fled war in Afghanistan with her family and thousands of others, leaving everything behind, including her one treasured possession, a flowing dress of many colors.

But now the harsh sun is beginning to dry out the grass that is life to about 10,000 Afghan refugees settled on territories in the Panj River, which forms part of the border between the two countries. The sun beats down on the landscape of stunted dry shrubs, and the slightest motion stirs the creamy, invasive dust.

The refugees fled the advance of the ruling Taliban forces in northern Afghanistan in October, but Tajikistan refuses to accept them, citing economic and sanitary reasons and the guerrilla fighters in their midst.

The Tajik authorities’ decision to deny the refugees entry has left most of the women and children here with no choice but to remain with their men. Challenging the fighters’ preference to stay on the island rather than lay down their weapons, thereby conceding defeat, would be unthinkable.

And if the women and children on Jangali Suhta did try to barge into Tajikistan proper, they would run into a minefield and a barbed-wire fence.

“We had to swim across the river at night on inflated inner tubes,” recalled Abdul Kayum, 52, a teacher. “When we swam across, we were sure that--out of respect for humanity and because we are of the same religion--the Tajik authorities would let us in.”

In this hellish landscape of scorpions, snakes, hunger and disease, it is mystifying when people insist on staying. They need food, medicine, schoolbooks and other aid--the U.N. refugee agency stopped providing relief in February on the grounds it could not be sure whether the assistance was supporting combatants--but they say they won’t move.

The fighters with whom their fates are inextricably linked belong to the opposition forces of Afghan guerrilla warrior Gen. Ahmed Shah Masoud that are still resisting the Taliban, a radical Islamic regime.

The Taliban gained control of about 95% of Afghanistan last fall, and fighting died down. But after 12 years of civil war and a decade fighting the Soviets before that, warriors such as Col. Sufi Abdulmanon, 38, insist that their war is not over and that no human should be foolish enough to wonder when it ever will be. That is Allah’s domain.

On a rough mat laid on the dust, between three women shrouded in red and white shawls, 11-year-old Latifa smiled shyly amid the squalor, her face shining like a flower. She wore a white head scarf and the blue and silver plastic bangles she had on when the Taliban came to her village in the middle of the night, driving families out of their houses.

One of the three women, Bolbibi Chutaboi, 40, said that in the past two months, her family has been given food aid once: enough flour to last them 10 days. The rest of that time, they ate grass stew.

Another woman, Asalbibi Rajabmuhammad, 50, with 13 people to feed, cried and clutched her head wretchedly as she described dividing flat bread into small pieces, one for each child, while the adults ate grass.

“No one thinks about the suffering Afghan people,” she said. “The war in Afghanistan has been going on for more than 20 years, but no one seems to care, not the U.N., not anyone.”

On a promontory on the Tajik side where the refugees have also huddled, Aziza Muhammadumar, an 18-year-old mother of two, pulled out a couple of pounds of flour wrapped in a rough cloth, all that remained for two families, nine people in all. To spin the flour out, they alternate eating grass for six days and flour for two.

Search for Food More and More Desperate

The children hate the green stew, but when they refuse it, she said, there is no choice but to smack them.

“If they don’t eat it, they’ll be hungry,” she said. “We know it’s better than nothing.”

These days, the children have to search longer and dig for the roots, which are boiled to make an odious milky yellow soup.

“We look for grass from morning till afternoon,” Latifa said. “It’s hard to find. You have to wander around looking for it and then bend over to pick it.”

Children wander with flies on their faces. Many are sick with cholera, malaria, diphtheria and typhoid because of the unsanitary conditions and murky river water, which they drink.

Before sleeping, the refugees burn off the grass to keep away scorpions and snakes. Stinging flies descend in clouds, leaving red welts on children and adults alike.

At his base on the promontory, Abdulmanon sat cross-legged in a straw hut on a mat with a grenade launcher tucked underneath it like a surprise for the tooth fairy.

A radio sputtered at his side with reports and information from the opposition forces, known as the United National Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan. A small black-and-white Soviet television run on a car battery sat under a black cloth, like a shrouded woman.

Rebels View Fight as One for Freedom

A warrior who began fighting when he was 15, Abdulmanon characterized the conflict with the Taliban not as one for territory and power. To him, it is a battle for freedom, for the right of women to be educated or to work and for men to wear Western clothing, remain cleanshaven and pray when they please.

“The Taliban don’t understand what real personal freedom means, so they deny people liberties,” he said. “They don’t understand that our people are a freedom-loving nation. They see freedom as a simple antique.

“A lot of people are really suffering under the Taliban. All those people are waiting for us to liberate them. They tell us: ‘Keep on fighting and free us from the Taliban.’ If there’s a power that tries to set its own rules against the will of the people, this power will not last long.”

Outside the hut, Hudoinazar Imomnazar, 49, a strutting, proud figure with gray in his beard, stood atop a Russian-made truck mounted with an antiaircraft gun and daubed with Taliban markings. Grinning, full of bravado, he boasted of killing the driver three months ago and taking the truck as a trophy from the Taliban, who, in fact, had earlier forced the guerrillas’ retreat to this desolate riverbank.

“This is the first time we had to pull back this far,” Abdulmanon conceded. Masoud’s forces, which with U.S. backing once fought the Soviets to a standstill, now get their main support from Russia and Iran.

The Taliban truck and the fighters’ Russian-made jeeps were somehow poled across the river on two lashed-together wooden barges called kemas. Donkeys were also brought across on the kemas, or they swam.

Hudoinazar, who goes by his first name, has been fighting for 23 years. During that time, he has married four wives, fathered 21 children--ages 1 to 23--and lost half his left foot to Soviet weaponry. Soviet bombs killed two of his wives; the other two are living with his many children in a hut on the promontory. In front of the older woman, he noted his current preference for the younger wife, who giggled coyly at his praise.

Abdulmanon claims that the promontory is part of Afghanistan, but the Russian guards who patrol the border for the Tajik government, which is too weak to defend its own territory, insist that the area is in Tajikistan.

The Afghan said he could raise 1,000 men at any time--a figure that fits U.N. refugee agency estimates of the number of fighters grouped here. He and other commanders here report that 4,000 Afghan fighters are scattered for 40 miles along the border on the Tajik side of the Panj.

“The Taliban is accumulating forces on the border. Our job is to wait until Ahmed Shah Masoud’s forces advance from another flank within Afghanistan. And when that happens, we’ll strike from this side,” Abdulmanon said. He gave no estimate of when the attack might be, other than to say it could be within days or weeks.

The proximity of fighters and refugees is one reason that people here are so desperately short of food. The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees sent aid last year and early this year but in February pulled out altogether.

Some aid has been distributed by ACTED, a French agency that has U.S. government funding to deliver more in coming days. Doctors from the medical relief agency Merlin have also delivered help.

But for most families, the flour has run out. Some have a few pounds of wheat sent by Masoud’s forces in Afghanistan, which they boil into porridge while children like Latifa Abduljabor collect grass.

Several times, grenades fired from the Afghanistan side have landed on the island of Jangali Suhta. In March, a grenade injured Mohgul Muhammad, 25. Shortly before, she had given birth to a son, Mustafa, on the island.

The U.N. refugee agency is pressing Tajikistan to admit the refugees because their positions are within the Taliban’s range of fire.

“The U.N. started to set their own conditions,” said Hudoinazar, the fighter. “They said, ‘If you move to Tajikistan, we’ll be able to help you better.’ They said, ‘Surrender your weapons, leave this place, and we’ll help you.’ But we prefer to stay here and fight the Taliban. Even if there is only one of us left, it’s his duty to fight the Taliban, and he’ll do it.”

Stephane Nicolas, director of the Tajikistan office of ACTED, said the U.N. decision means aid hasn’t been delivered to needy people.

“Actually, in most of the countries where war happens to be, there are people with weapons,” Nicolas said. “In Afghanistan, we provided aid to 80,000 people in Khoja Ghar, and there were also a lot of people with weapons. But that’s our work.”

Despite the illness, hunger and hostile location, the women here don’t complain, according to Col. Abdul Khayan, the top commander of opposition forces on the promontory.

“They make the best of what we have here,” he said. “The overwhelming majority of women always go along with what we say.”

But not all of them. According to Russian border guards, about 200 women and children on Jangali Suhta have twice gathered on the riverbank, most recently in January, and pleaded vainly to be let into Tajikistan.

The front-line commander on the promontory, Col. Shermuhammad Faizmuhammad, 41, seated amid a group of four dozen men, said both sides in the Afghan conflict are formidable. If both continue to receive aid from their supporters to fight the war, he said, there will probably never be peace.

Mid-sentence, his daughter, a toddler, reached up and tickled his gray beard. He gazed fondly down and asked her if she wanted to go to Tajikistan.

“Yes,” she whispered.

The child’s response provoked gales of laughter among the circle of men, as if the very thought of escaping this place was a joke that only a child could get away with.

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More photos of the Afghan refugees on Jangali Suhta are on The Times’ Web site at latimes.com/refugees.