The war in Afghanistan has gone on so long, however, and the refugees have become such permanent fixtures that outside contributions for their care began to diminish in 1987, forcing UNHCR into some grim cutbacks.
Last year, for example, UNHCR stopped distributing tea and sugar in the camps to save $5 million annually. A seemingly trivial thing, the tea and sugar served two basic needs in the camps. Much of the water used in the camps is tainted, taken from irrigation ditches and rivers because refugees become impatient waiting in the interminable lines at scarce safe-water wells. Impure water is the most common cause of diarrhea, the No. 1 child-killer in the camps.
Refugee workers had used the tea to train refugees to boil impurities out of their drinking water, but they also worry that no more tea means the loss of one of the few social pleasures refugees have to break up the suffocating monotony-neighborly conversation over a shared pot of tea.
UNHCR also has been forced to make drastic cuts in its rations of powdered milk for refugee children and of kerosene for lighting and heating. Those two cutbacks save $2 million and $8 million a year, respectively.
”For our operations here, we are 100 percent dependent on donations from governments and nongovernment agencies,” said a UNHCR official in Islamabad, Pakistan`s capital. ”We have very little regular budget, only the salaries of our essential personnel. Our cutbacks represent a saving of $15 million a year. That is a lot of money with which you can do a lot in public health, sanitation and education. Do you provide more clean-water systems in the camp or a couple of tons of tea every year?”
With a diminishing budget and with arable land so scarce in Pakistan, UNHCR cannot make the refugee population self-sufficient. The only food assistance refugees now get from the UN comes in the form of wheat and cooking oil, which are generously rationed so refugees can trade the excess on local markets for meat, vegetables and fruit.
Through the 85 international voluntary agencies that help run the camps, UNHCR has begun income-generating workshops in carpetweaving, carpentry, mechanics and other crafts. These are designed to give the refugees income and something to occupy their time. The workshops have worked well as far as they go, but they touch the lives of only a small percentage of camp inhabitants.
The essentially urban nature of the large Pakistan camps is totally unnatural to Afghans. At home they lived in remote mountain valleys, each family`s house hundreds of yards from the next, each community made up of closely interlocking families and clans.
Camp life in Pakistan has been particularly hard on Afghan women, who must observe Muslim purdah and cover their faces with a veil when in front of men who are not close relatives. In rural Afghanistan, observing purdah is not so much a problem because even neighbors are likely to be close family members. Women can go outside during the day without veils and other restrictions. But in crowded refugee camps, men do not like women to leave their huts at all.
”The stress is incredible on village women,” a Western volunteer said.
”We have been devoloping craft workshops expressly for women so they can get a little bit of extra income but also to give them a chance just to get out of their houses once in a while. We have had a terrible struggle to overcome the objections of the mullahs (Muslim religious leaders), who don`t want the women out of their houses under any circumstances.”
The mullahs push to maintain the Afghan rural tradition of sending a husband to the doctor when his wife is sick. ”There have been instances,”
said the volunteer, ”when the mullahs said they would rather have their womenfolk die than allow them to be examined by a male doctor, and
subsequently all women disappeared from the clinics. This has created terrible friction over health care for small children. If the mothers aren`t there, we can`t teach them anything about effective home remedies and preventive practices such as oral rehydration or nutrition.
”Oddly enough, we have been able to use purdah to introduce some living improvements in the camps. In Afghanistan, villagers relieve themselves in the fields near their homes, and that is what they have continued to do in the camps. But in the camps, the women have had to wait for nightfall or get up before dawn to dash outside in the dark. The whole practice has created enormous health hazards, as you can imagine.
”We have introduced family pit latrines for each house that eliminate the pollution. After initial resistance from the mullahs, who didn`t see how it fit into the traditional way of things, the project began to succeed when men saw that their women would not have to leave their houses to relieve themselves.”
Most women have been in the camps from six to eight years, however, and the experience of being held virtual prisoners in their own homes for that long has taken its toll.
”There is a lot of despondency and of uncontrollable, spontaneous weeping,” said the volunteer. ”When you ask them what is wrong, they don`t know. They don`t see camp life and purdah as part of the problem. Some of the mullahs have said that if women had kept stricter purdah in Afghanistan, the Russians wouldn`t have invaded. God is punishing them, in other words. It makes women feel all the worse.”
Their prolonged stay in Pakistan has, of course, created problems for everybody in Afghan exile society. At any given time 40 percent of all married women between 15 and 45 are pregnant, according to one study. There is little for children to do. The girls, by and large, are not allowed to attend school. The boys, their hearts set on becoming soldiers, drop out as soon as they are old enough. The soldiers come home to bury their dead at the edge of the camps in cemeteries that resemble the burial grounds of American Plains Indians, bristling with tribal flags attached to long poles staked into the ground.
”What is going to happen to a generation of men who now know nothing but war?” asked a Western aid worker. ”What is going to happen to a generation of children who know nothing but life in a camp? Whether they like it or not, whether they win the war or not, these people are eventually going to have to go home, and their lives have been fundamentally changed by this experience.” Dr. Mohammed Azam Dadfar, an Afghan physician who now runs the Psychiatry Center for Afghans in Peshawar, said a psychological disorder he had labeled
”refugee camp syndrome” had reached epidemic proportions. The refugees have relied so long on outside assistance, he said earlier this year, that they now suffer an overwhelming sense of dependency.
”We`ve become a paralyzed people, a nation of souls bought and sold by distant powers,” he said. ”The principal cause of distress is the pervasive atmosphere of life in a border society, a place of refuge that is strangely both temporary yet all too permanent. The camps are wells of frustration, of unresolved grief. It leaves the patients with a bleak view of the future, therefore they feel no urge to exert themselves.”
The same sort of cultural paralysis has set in among the Hmong, the mountain tribal people from Laos who have fled by the tens of thousands into northern Thailand. The Hmong were closely allied with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency`s clandestine war in Laos during the American involvement in the Vietnam conflict.
When the Communists came to power in Laos in 1975, they turned on the Hmong for their American connections. Wholesale Communist bombing, raiding and murder inside Hmong settlements after 1975 set off their exodus to Thailand. And the Hmong were among the first groups that the U.S. wanted to bring to America for resettlement.
Of all the people the U.S. had allied itself with during the Vietnam War, the Hmong proved to be the bravest and most selfless and incorruptible. They tied down enemy forces far beyond their own numbers and saved the lives of countless American fliers shot down over Laotian jungles. America believed, rightly, that it owed something to the Hmong.
The problem is the Hmong themselves. More than 80,000 have come to the U.S., but while their numbers in Thai refugee camps keep rising, they have come here only reluctantly and slowly. In their native Laos, the Hmong were an extremely isolated, primitive mountain society that did not see or use the wheel until World War II. They are a polygamist, animist, traditionbound people who, like the Afghans, are organized by clans.
Moving to America is not particularly desirable, and the Hmong clan elders know it. Those who have come to the U.S. have not adjusted well to life in a freewheeling, high-tech, Christian, monogamist society. The children adapt, as all children do, but the older people long to go home. They write to their friends and relatives in the Thai camps of the difficulties in America. To see the 75,000 Hmong now lodged in the Thai border camps is to see a whole culture unraveling. Old men, the family and clan leaders, stand warily outside interview centers for possible emigration to the U.S. They are afraid to go inside because they don`t really want to emigrate, hoping that somehow, someday they can go back to Laos. If they do go inside, they sometimes sit answering questions with their backs to the interviewers, perhaps to show that their hearts are not really in it.
Their children, many of whom have grown up after 10 years in the camp and now have families of their own, are increasingly frustrated with their fathers` uncertainty. There is no life, no education, no opportunity in the camps. The Thais have begun hinting they may soon resolve the problem simply by pushing all the Hmong back to Laos. The children want to go to America before that day of reckoning comes, but if their fathers say they cannot, they will not go on their own.
Ban Vinai is the largest of the Hmong camps in Thailand, housing 42,000 people in a hilly, picturesque jungle area where the Mekong River separates northern Thailand from Laos. Songleng Chang is the 62-year-old head of the Chang clan in the camp. He has been living in Thailand since May, 1979, when, he said, Communist soldiers began harassing and robbing people in his village, threatening his family in particular because of his position as head of the clan. He fled with his two wives, two sisters, two sons and their wives and two grandchildren, all of whom remain in Ban Vinai.
”Many people left when we did, maybe 1,000 of us,” Chang said. ”We walked for 12 days until we reached the Mekong. We had to make boats out of bamboo to cross. One person would have two pieces of bamboo lashed under his arms, and he would use his hands to paddle. We lashed the old people and the babies to the younger ones. Some young men had to keep recrossing to bring the babies across.”
Chang has seen many people leave Ban Vinai for the U.S., including relatives who now live in California, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. He has never gone for an interview with U.S. immigration authorities.
”I`ve decided not to go yet,” he said, though he admits life in the camp is unbearable for most people who have been there for a long time. ”I`m so bored. I want to go into the forests and hunt, but they won`t let you do that here. I want to plant my fields, but they don`t have land here for us to plant. In Laos we could hunt and plant any time we wanted to. In this camp or in another country, the Hmong can`t farm anymore.”
Charming and almost docile in demeanor, the Hmong also have a stubbornness about them. Health workers are chagrined because elders have decided that modern medicines and inoculations are themselves dangerous, disease-bearing agents. As a result, it took camp doctors from 1984 to 1988 to increase inoculation coverage of children from 4 percent to 20 percent. At the same time, the overcrowded camps have seen outbreaks of measles, tetanus, diphtheria, tuberculosis, polio and whooping cough.
Suicide rates in the camp are high, principally among women aged 15 to 25 who are forced into arranged marriages. Many of the adult men have turned to opium, which may be a way to escape anxiety over the future but is also a sure route to rejection by American immigration officals.
”It is a real pity,” said Dr. Andre Veneman, a Dutch physician working as a camp medical coordinator. ”You can see that when fathers smoke opium, their children look worse off. Whatever money they manage to get goes to their habit, not to their families. We see a real breakup in society here. The best people leave, the rest are deprived of their leadership.”
Still the Hmong continue crossing the Mekong illegally and setting up households in camps like Ban Vinai without registering with UN or Thai officials. By not registering, they have no hope of resettlement in the U.S., but they also avoid the risk of being forced to return to Laos.
Concerned about the continuing influx, Thailand earlier this year accused Laos of deliberately trying to rid itself of all Hmong. Last year the U.S., UNHCR and Amnesty International accused Thailand itself of serious human rights violations when it forced Hmong refugees it considered illegals back to Laos. One group of 33 people, shoved back across the river by the Thais, were shot to death on the banks of the Mekong by Laotian soldiers. The massacre came to light only because passing Thai fishermen stumbled on the only survivor, an 8-year-old girl.
Political reality gives men like Chang only one real option, resettlement in the U.S. But he won`t take the necessary steps to leave. In a long meandering conversation, Chang came up with any number of reasons why he shouldn`t go to the U.S. As he named them, you could almost hear the echoes of years of tortuous family discussions and arguments about going or staying. Finally he concluded: ”I am just going to wait for Laos to reopen. I don`t know when we can go back. We`re just waiting. I`ll wait here as long as I can. I can`t permit my children to go (to the U.S.). I have told them they must stay with me until I make my decision. If the father cannot go, the son cannot go. He depends on the father.”
