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Agencies Off Guard as Afghans Flock Home- NGOs - Global policy Forum Agencies Off Guard as Afghans Flock Home
By Ruth Gidley
Reuters AlertNet
October 11, 2002
A year after the United States and its allies launched their military campaign against Afghanistan, more than two million Afghans who fled the bombing -- and years of drought that preceded it -- have returned home from neighbouring countries. The scale of the return caught relief agencies by surprise, as did the fact that most headed for the war-torn country's towns and cities. As the severe Afghan winter approached, the agencies found themselves forced to change plans to take account of the changing in circumstances.
According to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), more than 1.6 million refugees have returned from Iran, Pakistan and central Asian countries with UNHCR assistance since the installation of a transitional government after U.S. air power helped bring Taliban rule to an end in November 2001. The UNHCR said in a statement on its website: "The voluntary return of so many Afghans is the largest repatriation the UN refugee agency has assisted since 1972, when more than 9.8 million people who had earlier fled East Pakistan were returned to Bangladesh."
Another estimated 400,000 people have made their own way back and more than 230,000 internally displaced people have received UNHCR help to go home.
More than 1.4 million Afghans have returned from Pakistan. Brian White, programme officer for repatriation with the U.S. branch of the International Rescue Committee in Pakistan, said: "They were probably people who came after September 11 but didn't go into a camp and weren't receiving assistance -- who were in many cases undocumented -- who have taken advantage of the return."
"They weren't the people living in the new camps or the old camps," he said. "The new camps are those that were created after September 11 in the tribal mountains. The old camps were started either in the early 1980s or at least the 1990s, in and around urban areas. They don't look much like camps at all. They're essentially large urban settlements."
GOVERNMENT PRESSURE
White said that there were still 1.2 million people in the old settlements and 53,000 in new camps. NGOs said those in Pakistan had been pressured to return by the government and the United Nations. James Beale, chief executive of British NGO Ockenden International, said there had also been significant government pressure from Iran. "They have real economic problems at the moment," he told AlertNet. "Demography and state development have created a very well educated but underemployed younger generation and having a pop at asylum-seekers always covers up your own mistakes."
U.N. workers said in October that Iraq was using strong-arm tactics to send back as many Afghan refugees as it could and thousands had been deported.
NGO representatives said people were not returning to their original homes but to urban centres such as Kabul, Herat in the west, Mazar-i-Sharif or Kunduz in the north and Jalalabad in the east. According to White, returning refugees and internally displaced people had increased Kabul's population, normally about two million, by between 450,000 and 600,000.
"People have decided either before returning or once they've arrived at their place of origin that economic opportunities and security might be better in urban areas," he said. "They either went directly to Kabul, or tried to make it in their area of origin and it just didn't work out." White said international agencies had not been prepared to provide assistance in urban settings. "Now that winter planning has begun, it's an oversight that needs to be corrected."
MINORITIES VULNERABLE
The UNHCR estimated that at least 920,000 people were still internally displaced in September. Others were newly displaced, and minority ethnic communities were vulnerable to persecution. Beale said: "This has been a serious problem in the north and west.... It's not safe to be a Pashtun up there. It's a kind of 'ethnic cleansing'. It's being going on since the fall of the Taliban. They can't go back."
The UNHCR said in September: "Security and living conditions in Afghanistan are not yet wholly satisfactory at this time to encourage all refugees to repatriate." Humanitarian agencies said the insecurity had made it difficult for them to assist returning refugees.
Beale said: "The Americans are still fighting in Afghanistan. The Afghans are still fighting each other in some parts, so it's not in a position to accept a major population influx. It's not in a position to sort out the problems of the people who were there on September 11."
In September, the UNHCR noted that the rate of return was declining as night-time temperatures began to fall in the approach to winter. "People who want to have gone home, at least for now, and now is not really a good time," White said. He said that people needed time to prepare their houses and plant crops in time for a harvest before the winter. White said shelter was one of the main concerns for returnees to both urban and rural settings. "Their shelter could be destroyed -- either by fighting or by the elements. It could be occupied by another family. It could have been pillaged, so they might have a house but nothing in it, no beds or blankets."
MAGNETS FOR RURAL EXODUS
White said that approximately 24 percent of returnees to Kabul did not have access to adequate shelter or resources to withstand the winter, according to UN-Habitat, the U.N. Human Settlements Programme.
NGO representatives said it would be important to provide assistance in villages to avoid distribution centres becoming magnets for a rural exodus and creating large camps that could become undignified and dangerous. White said this had happened last year: "Agencies have tried to learn from this and there are different plans for this winter."
He said organisations were setting up stockpiles of assistance in strategic areas so that people would not have to travel to camps. "In the winter the problem is access, with the possibility of snow, water leading to mud," he added. "It's already difficult right now."
NGOs said resources were scarce in Afghanistan, with not enough funds and refugee returns exceeding their initial expectations. "Everyone is very stretched," said Beale. He said: "Has aid reached everywhere it should in rural areas? Absolutely not. But it wouldn't be fair either to say that no assistance was going outside Kabul, because there are lots of agencies working all over the country and dealing with these problems of security and access every day.
According to Beale, the international community created expectations about the level of assistance that it was going to provide, which were not met. "The gap between needs and reality that drives the disappointment is a serious threat to the sustainability of the return."
At a meeting in Tokyo early in the year, the international community pledged $1.8 billion for Afghanistan this year and a total of $4.5 billion over five years. Afghan officials said in September that only half of this year's money had arrived and most of that had been in short-term humanitarian assistance, or to cover the government's recurring expenses, rather than long-term development.
Afghan Minister of Refugee Affairs Enayatollah Nazari said on a visit to Europe in September: "The aid which was promised by the international community hasn't arrived yet. So we are not able to provide such conditions in Afghanistan for our Afghans to return."
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