Kabul’s ubiquitous fruit stands and pharmacies begin to thin out around the Charahee Qambar neighborhood, situated a few miles west of the capital’s center and home to the city’s largest settlement for internally displaced persons (IDPs). UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, estimates that between 800 to 1,000 families, many of whom claim to be from Sangin, a town in northern Helmand province, live in the camp’s mud shacks with no electricity, heat or running water.
But some aid workers and officials are questioning the residents’ IDP status. Given the vast nature of Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis, aid resources are limited. If the Sangin families are actually nomads, as some assert, they would not qualify for protection under international charters on the displaced.
Sangin, a Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan’s largest poppy growing region, has been the scene of some of the heaviest fighting between NATO and insurgents in recent years. The families at Charahee Qambar (Qambar Square) say that starting in late 2007, many of them made the three-day, 300-odd mile journey to the capital in search of security.
Their makeshift camp is grim. After a recent rain, the maze of dirt paths between the houses turned into a quagmire; children with red, chapped hands filled plastic jugs of water at one of only two pumps, and the sound of children coughing filled the air. According to one local non-governmental organization (NGO) estimate, as many as 70 percent of the children are suffering from pneumonia and other respiratory ailments. The air was foul from the smell of burning trash that people set alight in an effort to stay warm.
"I’m ready to leave this place. [?] The government isn’t helping us. UNHCR has helped a little, but it can only help so many people," said resident Noor Mohammad. His neighbor, Khalikdad, 20, chimed in: "Where is the help? We have no food or carpets."
Government policy is to provide assistance for a period of six months, with the goal of resettling the IDPs in a safer town in their home province, explained Mohammed Omar Ayat, first deputy at the Ministry of Refugees and Repartition. "Most of the people at Charahee Qambar don’t want to return to their homes," he said. "Unfortunately, most of them want to live in Kabul and not in a nearby village, but there just isn’t enough space in the city."
The real responsibility, he acknowledged, lies with the Afghan government: "This settlement is one of the biggest problems for Kabul right now. We don’t know exactly where these people came from, but we do know that they are Afghans and they are poor and this makes it our duty to help them."
Relief officials say they must measure where aid can be most effective. And some distrust the urgency with which some Charahee Qambar residents are staking their claims. "What makes Charahee Qambar newsworthy is that the people there claim to have fled the violence in Helmand, but that claim cannot be justified," said Nadir Farhad, a UNHCR spokesperson in Kabul. They "speak like people from Helmand, but are probably nomads."
While recognizing their need, Farhad suggests the residents are simply rural-urban migrants like uncountable scores of others eking out a living in makeshift Kabul suburbs. "When you question these people at Charahee Qambar about what they left behind, they tell you, ’nothing,’ and when you question them further, they tell you they never had anything there and that they are nomads," Farhad said. "I’m not saying they’re not poor, they are; that they’re not vulnerable, they are. [But] we have a big question mark."
Farhad’s questions echo those of Daoud Ahmadi, the spokesperson for Governor Gulab Mangal of Helmand Province. Ahmadi told EurasiaNet that the people living in Charahee Qambar regularly migrate to Sangin in the winter. "They don’t belong to any part of Afghanistan. They don’t have any land, they just travel around, spending summers in colder areas and winters in the warmer regions of Afghanistan," Ahmadi said. He conceded, however, that villagers from Sangin have had problems with Taliban-style insurgents.
The Ministry of Defense, which owns the land at Charahee Qambar, has denied requests by NGOs to install a plumbing and water system at the settlement. A ministry spokesperson, commenting on condition of anonymity, said that the land is needed for a military facility to train the Afghan National Army (ANA) and that the ministry initially only agreed to allow the people to remain on the land at Charahee Qambar for a period of three months during the record-breaking cold winter of 2007-2008. "We are trying to find a peaceful solution to this situation, but this isn’t our responsibility, it belongs to the government," the spokesperson said.
Elissa Bogos is a journalist and photographer based in Kabul.
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