Fred Halliday
analyzes Iranian-Taliban relations in the fall issue of Middle
East Report (MER 220), "Shaky Foundations: The US in
the Middle East." The upcoming winter issue of Middle
East Report will examine the implications of the September
11 attacks for the Middle East.
Over
the last two weeks, an estimated 15,000 Afghan refugees have fled
to Pakistan, and hundreds of thousands more are reportedly on the
move within Afghanistan. This latest flight of Afghans from their
homes deepens a humanitarian crisis that has troubled the region for
more than 20 years. Already, some 2 million Afghan refugees are living
in Pakistan and more than 1.4 million in Iran, with an estimated 30,000
in India, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and other countries. Additionally,
some 900,000 people are displaced from their homes within Afghanistan.
If and when the United States and its allies launch a military campaign
against Afghanistan, UN officials estimate that the number of new
refugees and displaced could climb past 1 million.
From a humanitarian
perspective, the recent terrorist attacks and subsequent US threat
of military action against Afghanistan could not have come at a worse
moment. Even before the current refugee movement, the Pakistani and
Iranian governments were showing impatience with the large, intractable
refugee populations in their countries. Tajikistan shut its doors
to Afghan asylum seekers and drought victims. International aid began
to dwindle nearly a decade ago, as "donor fatigue" set in
after the Cold War. Although some long-time refugees have been integrated
into their host countries, living in cities and working stable jobs,
more recent arrivals have been forced to live in squalid conditions,
without access to adequate food, water, shelter and sanitation.
The recent withdrawal
of UN international aid staff and other humanitarian groups from Afghanistan
means that more Afghans, lacking desperately needed assistance, will
migrate to Pakistan and Iran in search of food and medical care. Some
governments, including the US, have already pledged new aid to the
refugee effort. But with Pakistan, Iran and four other nations closing
their borders to refugees, the situation inside Afghanistan could
become catastrophic.
TWO DECADES
OF MISERY
The Afghan refugee
crisis dates back more than 23 years. Since 1978, as many as a third
of Afghanistan's 26 million inhabitants have been forced to flee their
homes, temporarily or permanently. The first wave of Afghan refugees
came in April of that year, when the country's new communist regime
introduced a massive agricultural reform program that the rural population
deeply resented and resisted. In December 1979, the Soviet Union,
concerned that the communist government in Kabul was losing ground,
occupied Afghanistan and installed a puppet regime. After the occupying
forces unleashed a wave of terror on the civilian population, hundreds
of thousands of refugees poured out of Afghanistan. Within two years
of the invasion, some 1.5 million Afghans were refugees, mostly in
Pakistan.
By 1986, the number
of Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran had grown to nearly 5 million.
The US and other Western countries were by now supporting the Islamist
resistance movement known as the mujahideen in their struggle against
the Soviet-led government. At the same time, the West poured money
into the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, many of which served as
bases for the mujahideen. The international community did not provide
similar assistance to Afghan refugees in Iran, where the 1979 revolution
had put an anti-Western regime in power. In the decade after the revolution,
Iran did not actively seek aid from the international community, although
the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) consistently kept a presence,
albeit a poorly funded one, in the country.
When the Soviets
pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, they left in power another communist
regime, which the mujahideen defeated in April 1992. Afghan refugees
welcomed the mujahideen victory, and over the course of 1992 more
than 1.4 million refugees returned home. But far from bringing peace
to Afghanistan, the mujahideen conquest only opened a new chapter
in the conflict, as warlords fought one another for small pieces of
territory.
ENTER THE TALIBAN
In 1994, the Taliban
emerged as a significant military force, capturing Kabul two years
later. A Taliban offensive in the Shomali Plains in 1999 forced some
150,000 people to flee their homes. Although many of the displaced
returned home in 2000, some 60,000 remained displaced, and a late
July 2000 Taliban campaign displaced more tens of thousands of people,
both internally and to Pakistan. Among the displaced were some 10,000
persons who became stranded on several islands in a river along the
Afghan-Tajik border. Pushed back from the Tajik border by Russian
patrols, the group suffered periodic attacks by the Taliban and went
largely without UNHCR aid, since they were displaced persons and (technically)
not refugees.
The Taliban, who
control between 90 and 95 percent of Afghanistan, function as a repressive
police state. Both women and men must adhere to strict behavioral
codes that prevent women and girls from working, receiving necessary
health care and getting an education. In some areas, despite the hunger
and grinding poverty fueled by the drought, the Taliban have obstructed
international relief efforts. The Taliban's ban on the cultivation
of poppies (used to make heroin), while welcomed by the international
community, left thousands of farmers who grew the crop without any
livelihood, and forced many landless laborers to migrate to camps
for internally displaced persons, or to Pakistan.
Over the past
year, Afghanistan's refugee crisis has been exacerbated by the worst
drought in 30 years. After inadequate rain and snowfall led to poor
crops, tens of thousands of Afghans abandoned their homes in search
of food beginning in June 2000. By year's end, some 350,000 Afghans
had become newly displaced, many of them due to the drought, others
due to the war. Another 172,000 had fled to Pakistan. In early 2001,
tens of thousands more Afghans sought refuge in Pakistan or became
displaced within Afghanistan, and by August 2001, an estimated 900,000
Afghans had been internally displaced, most living with friends or
relatives in Afghanistan's larger towns and cities.
WHY THEY FLEE
Twenty-three years
of unrelenting conflict, widespread human rights abuses and more recently
acute drought have created devastating humanitarian conditions in
Afghanistan. Over the course of Afghanistan's civil war, warring factions
have repeatedly violated human rights and international humanitarian
law, engaging in indiscriminate aerial bombardment and shelling, summary
executions, rape, persecution on the basis of religion and the use
of anti-personnel mines.
Afghanistan reportedly
has the highest infant, child and maternal mortality rates, the lowest
literacy rate and life expectancy, and one of the two or three lowest
levels of per capita food availability in the world. In October 2000,
the UN Commission on Human Rights special rapporteur on Afghanistan
asserted that the country was in "a state of acute crisis --
its resources depleted, its intelligentsia in exile, its people disenfranchised,
its traditional political structures shattered and its human development
indices among the lowest in the world."
In May 2001, the
World Food Program warned that more than 1 million Afghans were facing
famine conditions, and in September reported that in some areas, people
were surviving by eating grass and locusts. Although the UN and other
aid agencies have for years supplied food and other assistance to
the Afghan population, since the September 11 terrorist attacks, all
international aid workers have withdrawn, leaving only a skeleton
staff of local UN employees in place.
HOST COUNTRY
FATIGUE
In recent years,
Pakistan has displayed a hardening attitude toward its 2 million Afghan
refugees, reflected in periodic border closings and attempts to close
long-term camps. Refugees have experienced harassment and violence,
while the government has deported, and possibly returned to persecution,
thousands of Afghan refugees.
From the late
1970s through the early 1990s, the international community lavished
substantial assistance on Pakistan, the refugees and the mujahideen,
but in recent years has significantly scaled back its assistance,
leaving Pakistan to manage the refugees on its own. Today Pakistan's
faltering economy, weakened in part by economic sanctions imposed
by the US and other countries, has prompted a backlash against Afghan
refugees, who the government of Pakistan says take jobs from local
people. The government also blames refugees for increased crime and
social problems, such as drug use and prostitution.
The government
of Pakistan takes the position that since the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan -- which caused most "long-term" refugees to
flee -- has ended, refugees should return home. Further, the government
claims that the home areas of many long-term refugees are free of
conflict, and that many Afghans who have entered Pakistan since mid-2000
are victims of drought, not refugees. Pakistan, a long-time supporter
of the Taliban, may be under pressure from its own Islamic extremists
to repatriate the refugees, whose presence in Pakistan reflects poorly
on the Taliban. Since consolidating its grip on power in most of Afghanistan,
the Taliban has also tried to impose its policies on Afghan refugees
in Pakistan, warning refugees not to send girls over the age of eight
to schools and ordering teachers in refugee schools to limit lessons
for girls under age eight to verses from the Quran.
Pakistan's changed
attitude toward Afghan refugees had its most serious impact on the
estimated 200,000 Afghans fleeing conflict and drought who arrived
in Pakistan between mid-2000 and early 2001, particularly those who
sought refuge at Jalozai transit center near Peshawar. For months,
only minimal assistance was provided to the Afghans at Jalozai, and
between January and June 2001, at least 95 refugees, weakened by hunger,
dehydration and disease, died of exposure.
The more than
1.4 million Afghan refugees in Iran, many of whom have lived there
for nearly two decades, have also faced growing hostility and intolerance
from their host country. Claiming that refugees take scarce jobs away
from local people, Iranian officials have made it clear that they
no longer welcome Afghans. Beginning in 1997, the government set several
deadlines for refugees to leave the country, declined to register
new arrivals from Afghanistan as refugees, attempted to round up and
confine refugees to camps, and at times summarily deported them. Hostility
toward Afghan refugees reached a new high in late 1998 and early 1999,
when mobs attacked and in some cases killed Afghan refugees, demanding
their deportation. Iran deported about 100,000 Afghans in 1999, many
of whom were repatriated after roundups in the eastern provinces and
urban centers. Nonetheless, as many as 200,000 Afghans may have fled
to Iran between late 2000 and August 2001. During the same period,
Iran forcibly repatriated an estimated 82,000 Afghans.
"HUMANITARIAN
COALITION"?
As the threat
of US military action against Afghanistan becomes more acute, a new
refugee exodus from Afghanistan could accelerate the descent of the
regional refugee situation into humanitarian disaster. As suggested
by UNHCR chief Ruud Lubbers, the US and the rest of the international
community should at least devote the same efforts to building a "humanitarian
coalition" as they have to building a military one. UNHCR has
issued an appeal to international donors for an additional $6 million.
Meanwhile, internally displaced Afghans will likely face even greater
risk than those who attempt to cross borders. A strong response from
the international community, and a commitment to maintaining an aid
network -- inside Afghanistan as well, if feasible -- could help ensure
that fleeing Afghans do not become incidental victims of the US war
against terrorism.
