[Mb-civic] Returning Afghans were promised a new life. They have misery and death

[Michael Butler]

advertisement

Independent Home | News | Sport | Comment | Education | Motoring | Money |
Jobs | Travel | Enjoyment

Home   > News  > World  > Asia
Returning Afghans were promised a new life. They have misery and death
By Nick Meo in Kabul
14 February 2005

To Kabul's new rich, the suburb of Karte Sakhi is an unpleasant reminder of
what Afghans did to themselves in the civil war, a place to move through
swiftly in their four-wheel-drive cars. To the most destitute and desperate
of the city's poor, it is home.

Like a latter-day version of the ruins of Dresden in 1945, the devastation
is breathtaking. Once it was a pleasant tree-lined district. Now only the
metal stumps of street lamps remain from rocket explosions which blew down
buildings and scarred walls with shrapnel.

In the mud and snow of February the suburb is even more of a bleak, hellish
place, to hurry through on the way to the city centre. But Karte Sakhi
cannot be ignored. It has become a symbol of what has gone wrong in the new
Afghanistan.

Inside the skeletons of buildings, under tarpaulins covered with snow,
hundreds of families have crawled into the ruins to live a half-life as
squatters. They have no electricity, no clean water, no sanitation, and no
heating. There are no jobs for the men and little food for the children. For
the women life is a grinding struggle to try to keep the family together,
stop the roof leaking, and share the meagre handouts of food that keep their
children alive but not nourished.

These people are not the victims of a war which ended years ago. They are
some of the families who heeded Hamid Karzai's call to return from the
refugee camps of Pakistan to a new Afghanistan. Instead of finding that
longed-for new beginning, they have ended up in a nightmarish dumping
ground, the losers in the dream of a new Afghanistan promised by Western
leaders.

For the past fortnight the families of Karte Sakhi, who have endured three
years of misery in the ruins, have shivered, coughed and died in
Afghanistan's coldest winter for 20 years. Roia, 23, who has four children,
came back from Pakistan because her husband, Qolam Sakhi, had heard things
had got better in Kabul.

Two years later, they are still in the wrecked house that they found on
their arrival. There are no permanent homes for families like them. There is
nothing to warm the children except glowing coals and hot ashes which a
nearby bakery sometimes lets them take them as charity after the bread is
baked. The baby is constantly sick and there is no money for medicine. Power
for the single electric light bulb comes from a car battery which they
rarely have the money to recharge.

Roia pointed to condensation streaming down a plastic sheet over a window
and admitted she feared whether her youngest would survive until spring. She
said: "Sometimes the walls or the ceiling collapse. That's the biggest fear.
We didn't think it would be like this in Kabul. President Karzai said there
would be land and help but there's been nothing for us here." As she
recounts her family's troubles matter of factly, her husband starts weeping,
shamed by the humiliation of the misery they are reduced to.

There have been no new homes built for them in the massive reconstruction
process. Social housing is not planned by anybody, although the city is
covered with building sites, the tasteless mansions of the nouveau riche,
those who have prospered on the drugs trade, and merchants who have done
well from the influx of Westerners. In Kabul's distorted economic boom,
fuelled by drugs and aid money, the price of land has rocketed while the
city bulges at the seams with returnees putting an unbearable strain on its
primitive infrastructure.

Near the city's sports stadium is a camp of improvised tents made by
refugees from old sacking and tarpaulins. In here, a week ago, an infant
froze to death. Twenty deaths from cold have been registered so far. The
baby boy's grandfather, Rahmatullah, an unemployed labourer, said the family
had tried to warm the child during the night but he died soon after dawn. He
said: "I am near to despair. How can we go on like this? The animals in
Kabul are better off than we are. We were happy to come back to Afghan-istan
because this is our country, but now we wish we had stayed in Pakistan."

Dr Jawid Samadi runs a clinic for the returnees, funded by the United
Nations High Commission for Refugees. In the camps he visits, 1,500 to 2,000
people are sick with respiratory diseases, including pneumonia and
bronchitis, especially children.

"For a doctor it is painful to see the condition these people have to live
in," he said. "When you see the pledges the foreign countries made to help
Afghanistan, then look at how these people are living, there is a big gap
between the two. It makes me very angry."
Also in Asia
DNA tests reunite Baby 81 with his real parents after six weeks
DNA test joy for 'Baby 81' couple
Returning Afghans were promised a new life. They have misery and death
The sea claimed an ancient capital of India. Now it has given it back
War and piste on the frontline of the battle for Kashmir

Legal |  Contact us |  Using our Content |  © 2004 Independent Digital (UK)
Ltd