War-weary Afghan refugees ravaged by Pakistani floods (Feature)

By Sajjad Malik and Nadeem Sarwar Aug 24, 2010, 11:44 GMT

Nowshera, Pakistan - When Soviet jet fighters were pounding every village in the Afghan province of Logar in 1980, Nawabay left her home, walked for miles through the mountains and roamed Pakistan before her husband constructed a small mud compound near Nowshera.

During the next 30 years this small dwelling provided shelter to Nawabay's family that grew to 25, including around a dozen grandchildren. But now that shelter is gone.

Deadly flooding of the Kabul River washed away her house and all the compounds around it in late July, as the waters hit large areas of Nowshera, a district in Pakistan's north-western province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

'We have been made refugees twice - once by the war and now by the floods,' said Nawabay, an elderly Afghan woman, who identified herself with a single name.

Sitting in a small tent, where some bedding and ragged mats - the only belongings they managed to save from the floods - were rolled into a corner, she mourned her losses.

'We are left with nothing, except these beds and pillows which our men saved when flood water came rushing to our mud houses,' she said, complaining that her entire family was forced to live in the small tent big enough for five to six people.

'We are not getting any support from any government or UN agencies and we have depended on ourselves for survival,' she said. A swarm of flies kept humming in the tent, some of them sitting on the faces of the many children standing there, but nobody paid them any attention.

The children looked on listlessly as Nawabay talked about the flood and the devastation it caused.

Outside the tent over a dozen sturdy Afghans dressed in shabby long shirts and loose trousers shouted simultaneously that they were being ignored by the aid workers. Waving the others to silence, a bearded elderly man stepped forward.

'Where should we go? The NGOs (non-governmental organisations) are not coming to us and the government is not helping us either, our conditions are very bad,' Shiren Khan said.

'We even cannot go back to Logar as there is no security in Afghanistan,' he says. 'The government must do something for us otherwise we will perish.'

The refugee camp has been mostly ruined by the floods, leaving just two huts with thatched roofing where once over a dozen such structures were bustling with life.

Pointing towards the destroyed huts, Khan described how they had lived there peacefully, leaving listeners to imagine what it used to be like in the huts, now covered in mosquitoes and flies.

The rest of the residents of this destroyed settlement also wanted to speak, making it difficult to decide who had the best story.

'I will tell you the exact story,' shouted a bearded Afghan named Mujeeb Ullah. 'We lost a lot of goats and sheep in the flood and we want compensation.'

This Afghan camp was not alone in facing devastation, as over 1.7 million Afghan refugees living in Pakistan, mostly in the worst-hit province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa in the north-west, are among the victims of the floods.

Afghans have not been allowed to join the regular relief camps due to security fears, making their plight more precarious than that of the millions of displaced Pakistanis.

Authorities suspect Afghan refugees of links with Taliban militants and al-Qaeda fighters.

'The government has directed the flood-affected Afghan refugees to contact the commissioner of Afghan refuge (UNHCR),' says Hazrat Bilal, deputy head of the UN refugee agency UNHCR relief camp.

'We have set up offices at Nowshera, Mardan, Dir, Dera Ismail Khan and Kohat districts for Afghan refugees and they should go there for relief assistance,' Bilal said.

But Afghans do not accept the official logic and demand immediate aid.

'Why should we go elsewhere? There are a number of empty tents in that relief camp but we are not allowed to go there,' says Mujeeb Ullah, pointing towards a UNHCR-run camp barely 200 metres away.

'We do not get even food, whereas the people in that camp get free meals twice a day. They are treating us like this because we are not Pakistanis. But we are human beings like them.'