Afghan refugees strain Kabul

A cluster of 15 refugee families left their camp in Pakistan six months ago and arrived in Afghanistan homeless. In Karta i-Seh, a southwest Kabul neighborhood so shattered the houses look like sandcastles wrecked by a violent tide, they found a skeleton of a house. They cleaned away debris, threw out shell casings, and slapped down bricks to secure plastic sheets for windows, sure that better days were coming.

Half a year later, the families - ethnic Tajiks who don't use a last name - have no electricity, heat, running water, or plumbing. Only two of the young men have found work, and they have one goal: to save enough money, about $100, to send their family back to Pakistan.

Of the 2 million refugees who have returned to Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban, up to half have returned not to the cities and villages they lived in before, but to Kabul. The strain on the Afghan capital - home to a US-backed government, over 4,500 foreign peacekeeping troops, and arguably the largest postwar reconstruction-aid effort - has left living conditions here worse than they were a year ago. Possibly intensifying that strain, Afghanistan and Pakistan announced Tuesday plans to close camps and return the remaining 1.8 million refugees to Afghanistan in the next three years.

"My daughters are very angry with me, because I've been telling them for years that our country was good," says Bibi Hanifa, a mother of eight with despairing forest-green eyes.

While international and Afghan officials have tried to convince refugees to return to their old villages, they never discouraged a massive return to Kabul, partly because the security and economic situation in other parts of the country is so precarious. Kabul - the only part of Afghanistan protected by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) - has become an obvious magnet for returning refugees.

The result is an overload on an already broken city's resources. "Kabul is a city which has lost its grip on its ability to control itself, "says Nasir A. Saberi, the deputy minister of urban development and housing.

Power cuts by the city's feeble stations are now frequent. Many middle class Afghans, who last winter had electricity most of the night, now find they can get power for only a few hours a day. Even the privileged international staff here are routinely left without electricity, heat, and hot water.

Mr. Saberi's own chilly office is temporarily out of power. But even more urgent, he says, is the city's huge housing crisis: Few can afford skyrocketing rents, and 160,000 applications for land plots sit unanswered. Meanwhile, about half a million of the city's shelter is illegal: haphazardly built shacks and squatter homes without links to utilities such as electricity, water, and sewage.

Shortly after 9:30 a.m. at Kabul's main power station, men have already lined the halls outside the director's office. In one corner, a military commander demands that his home be hooked up, claiming that's an order from the country's powerful defense minister, Mohammed Qasim Fahim. Rumor has it that bribes to the proper people will get a home or building hooked up for more hours, but officials say that depends how important you are.

Engineer Fariduddin Wafik, the director of power for Kabul, reads from the list of those elite who have nonstop power - the presidential palace, government ministries and ministers, peacekeepers, hospitals, and places like the airport, radio stations, and ambassadors' homes. The rest, he says, must accept it in limited quantities.

Page: 1 | 2