Half a Million Flee Northwest Provinces for Refugee Camp

May 9, 2009, SWABI, Pakistan — -- Jamshed grabs his shirt, the only piece of clothing he brought as he fled the fighting. He points to a blanket, the only item he managed to carry with him from his home. He describes how he left his oldest son to guard his house in his village in Buner, where the Pakistani military is fighting the Taliban.

Does he worry about his son and the rest of the family trapped in his hometown?

"It is my biggest wish that my family comes back to me," he says. And then he starts crying. Sobbing. The emotional weight of the last few days -- the 20-mile walk, the fear of Taliban-laid mines and wayward army shells, the living in a tent camp under 95 degree heat -- he finally allows it to overwhelm him.

As a group of visitors leaves, Jamshed manages little response, surrounded by three of his six children in a small, United Nations-stamped tent in the Swabi refugee camp, 20 miles away from the fighting currently raging in the Northwest Frontier Province.

On the second full day after declaring the state was at war, Pakistan's prime minster said today that Pakistan was "fighting for its survival" in its attempts to "eliminate" the Taliban from the Swat Valley, from where they have distributed brutal forms of justice and extended their reach to an area just a few mountain tops away from the capital, Islamabad.

Both Pakistan and the United States say the fight is an essential one, and increasingly, residents of the area publicly oppose the Taliban and ask for the military to crush them. Whether the army can push the Taliban back from the area -- and the government can then step in and help rebuild the area -- will help determine how capable Pakistan is to defeat a militancy it has battled on and off for seven years.

But the Pakistani army has resisted the type of counterinsurgency training it needs to fight an embedded insurgency, and its reputation for causing civilian casualties has created the largest exodus in South Asia since Pakistani violently split with India in 1947.

In the Swabi tent camp, about an hour north of Islamabad, 3,500 people are spread across a few acres of tents. But the camp's directors say they expect 10 times the number of people to arrive in just the coming days. The U.N. is building two silos and expects to take over the camp in the coming days.

Right now, the organizers say, they have enough food and resources. But the "money isn't enough," says the camp director.

Sher Zada, an older man with a long, white beard, arrived in the afternoon with a tractor full of 20 children, all from his extended family. He'd driven them here for the last two days, afraid that the military would accidentally target his home.

Describing his village, he said, "there is firing from one side and the other. The place is on fire."

Like Jamshed, he also left nearly everything behind, except for one family member to guard his belongings.

"We hope the situation gets better," he said, "so we can all go home."

Half a million people have left or are leaving their homes in Swat, Buner and Dir provinces of the northwest, according to the United Nations. They join 550,000 people who fled their homes late last year and early this year from a previous round of fighting between the military and the Taliban.

Amin Zada, 35, who fled from Buner, complains that there is no electricity or cold water, no security and a shortage of medical facilities in the camp.

"By God, I want to leave," he says, even though he has been recruited by the Untied Nations to help teach nearly 300 children living in the camp.

A few miles away, the United Nations hands out cooking oil donated by Saudi Arabia and untreated wheat donated by the provincial government in Pakistan's Punjab province to people who are able to stay with relatives and friends, avoiding the camps.

Men stand in lines for the majority of the day, first registering as a UNHCR internally displaced person, then standing in another line to register for food distribution, then actually waiting in the food line.

Each family of one to three receives a single bag of wheat, which produces about 100 loaves of bread, and 2.5 liters of oil for an entire week, the camp's organizers said. A family of four to eight will receive double that amount, and a family over 9 people will receive four bags and 10 liters of oil.

The small distribution center has helped feed 35,000 people, according to its organizers, one of five registration sites across Swabi, as little as 20 miles away from the fighting.

The future of Pakistan's troubled northwest will be as much determined by the success of the military operation as the success of the government's ability to deliver basic services after the operation is over.

For years the northwest -- especially the tribal areas along the Afghan border -- have struggled behind better funded provinces in Pakistan. A lack of education and development has helped allow the Taliban to exploit government vacuums in the area and to gain strength, especially the Swat valley and the areas around it.

"Pakistan has a crisis of governance and an inability to actually provide basic services to its citizens, from law and order to justice in the courts, to even electricity and education," says Brian Katulis, a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress who just returned from a trip to Pakistan. "Those long term strategies, those policies -- this is where the Pakistani government has been quite weak. And when the state fails in those areas, that's when you see the Taliban come back in and fill the gap."

The Swabi camp and the nearby distribution center are peaceful, say its organizers, and have managed to provide enough food and services to maintain a level of self-imposed security among the residents. But that is not true in the whole province. In a tent camp in Mardan on Friday, just about 50 miles west of the Swabi camp, residents were so desperate for help they looted a U.N. truck full of supplies as police beat them in response.

For Jamshed, his ability to control his own future has been taken from him. He is at the whim of the government and aid agencies helping him. For now, that is OK, he says, so long as he receives the help.

"I can't fend for myself," he says. "If the government helps us we will be thankful."