UN Warns of Afghan Disaster, Refugees Build New Lives in Pakistan
World Food Program (WFP) Spokesman Khaled Mansour said the country could soon be inhabited by "walking skeletons" as the UN agency's new boss toured this Afghan refugee camp in northwestern Pakistan.
"The most important thing for us is not to wait for the CNN factor, where you see people completely wasted and stunted and dying (on television) so they decide to give the food or money," Mansour told AFP.
"Regretfully we have to wait until we have walking skeletons before we get the money. We hope this doesn't happen in Afghanistan.
"It hasn't happened so far but malnutrition rates are rising. If this is continuing for months and months, you can definitely have walking skeletons. "People are dying not only because of starvation but also because of malnutrition," Mansour said. "It's getting bad."
Aid workers have already warned Afghanistan's meager resources are being stretched to the limit by the returnees, with around 1,090,000 -- more than a million from Pakistan alone -- signing up to head home in less than four months.
Violence is rife and many areas lack food, clean water and adequate health care. According to aid workers here, some returning refugees are taking one look and heading back to Pakistan.
There are a few families who have gone back to Afghanistan and they didn't have anything there and they came back," said Ghazala Shah, who works at this camp 40 kilometers (25 miles) northeast of Peshawar. "Those families are saying 'don't go back'."
She said many refugees now swap between their native and adopted countries, living less than a day's drive from their Afghan homes.
"Most of them are seasonal repatriations -- they go there (Afghanistan) for the summer and go back (to Pakistan)," she said.
Shah added ethnic Pashtuns were reluctant to head home after the Tajik-based Northern Alliance's victory over the Taleban last year, even though the new multiethnic transitional government has been sworn in.
"Most of the Pashtuns don't want to go back but the Tajiks do want to go back," she said.
"Most of the Pashtuns have constructed their own houses here. They say they have shelter here and they prefer to stay safe in the camp here."
The WFP's new Executive Director, James Morris, who has made a priority of visiting the Afghanistan-Pakistan hotspot just 10 weeks since taking up the post, said he was pleased Shamshatoo's refugee register had dropped from around 60,000 to 48,000 since repatriations began in March.
"It's gratifying to see the population of the refugee camps go down," he said at the camp. "That is the objective of the World Food Program -- for people to have food and more importantly to have food back home."
But it is increasingly clear that Pakistan is regarded as a permanent home by many of its 2.2 million Afghan refugees, some of whom fled the Soviet invasion more than 20 years ago.
The WFP feeds just 123,000 Afghan refugees out of a total of 1.5 million living in Pakistan's camps, according to the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) refugees commissioner, with the vast majority supporting themselves through manual labor or by setting up small businesses.
"Our official policy is anybody who has gone must stay back in Afghanistan, but we have a very long and porous border so people do travel back," NWFP Refugee Commissioner Mushtaq Ahmad told AFP.
"They're here for such a long time and they have no other place to go," he said. "We are a neighbor of Afghanistan, we have historic links, we have cultural links. We can't just leave them like that."
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on Wednesday accepted it would take "some years" to shift everyone back.
"We are extremely pleased that so many people have opted to return home from Pakistan," said UNHCR Spokesman Hasim Utkan. "But with Afghans so integrated, with many born in Pakistan during their decades of asylum, the repatriation will take some years."