Fighting, Famine and Freeze Sap Afghan Spirit

Feb. 21, 2001 -- Alexander the Great never managed it, neither did British imperial troops and sturdy Russian Cossack regiments. Even the 1979 Soviet invasion ultimately ended in failure.

None of history's fiercest conquerors ever broke the indefatigable Afghan spirit. They tried and failed to beat a group of people often billed as the toughest in the world.

But after more than 20 years of civil war, two years of drought and a merciless winter, the Afghan spirit, by accounts from the region, has finally snapped.

In a land where heroes of the likes of Rudyard Kipling's Kimball O'Hara dared tread, there are millions of displaced Afghans cramming into refugee camps across the region, freezing in the harsh winter of the northern Hindu Kush mountains and collapsing under crushing poverty.

At the Pakistan border, 80,000 Afghan refugees are stranded without proper shelter, sanitation or water and conditions are only further deteriorating.

To the north, at the Afghan border with Tajikistan, tens of thousands of stranded Afghans are risking starvation, the weather and fighting between Taliban and opposition forces.

No Hope at the Borders

Both Pakistan and Tajikistan have closed their borders to Afghan asylum seekers. Tajikistan, fearing political instability and reprisals from the Taliban which controls most of Afghanistan, closed its borders last September.

Pakistan, after witnessing some 170,000 Afghan asylum seekers heading for its borders since September was forced to close the gates last November.

In neighboring Iran, tribesmen with ethnic ties to the fleeing Afghans have let in thousands of refugees.

Within Afghanistan, aid officials say the situation is worse. In the west Afghanistan city of Herat, some 80,000 Afghans fleeing the drought from neighboring areas face starvation in squalid, ill-equipped camps.

A Winter of Discontent

This winter, the hardest hit have been the Afghan children, many of whom have simply frozen to death as blankets to keep off the bitter subzero temperatures ran scarce.

U.N. officials estimate 150 refugees died in three nights in the fierce January winter, 90 percent of them children.

During a recent trip to the region, Hiram A. Ruiz, a senior policy analyst for the U.S. Committee for Refugees described meeting a group of refugees in the Pakistani border town of Peshawar who fled their homes north of the Afghan capital of Kabul more than 15 years ago.

Ruiz said about seven years ago, families started repatriating back to Afghanistan to rebuild their lives only to be rendered destitute by the drought that hit two years ago.

In order to make it back to the camps in Peshawar, these villagers had to avoid the capital, Kabul, and the Taliban forces stationed there, forcing them to take a treacherous mountain route which claimed the lives of many family members.

"All this," said Ruiz, "only to land in Peshawar where once again, they are faced with nothing but the crushing sense that the future holds nothing for them."

Political Hot Waters

On the political front, the picture is also bleak. In a report released on Monday, Human Rights Watch detailed two massacres allegedly committed by Taliban forces in the central highlands of Afghanistan last May and this January.

Witness accounts reaching international monitors say 560 people were executed after the Taliban recaptured the central Afghan town of Yakaolang in the Bamiyan province in January.

"The massacres were part of an effort to intimidate the population," said Vikram Parekh, researcher for South Asia at Human Rights Watch.

"The fighting has not only displaced thousands of people, it has made the farming cycle, which is harsh on a land that is normally difficult live off, even more difficult."

Distribution of seeds to help the next farming cycle has not helped as Afghan refugees, faced with starvation and little hope of returning home, have consumed the seeds.

The only certainty, say aid workers, is that things will get worse. "The greatest frontier is really the human dignity of the Afghan people who are forced to live in destitution in conditions that have forced the educated Afghan community to leave, making any hope for reconstruction difficult," said Parikh.

Now even the seemingly unlimited reserves of Afghan dignity and resilience seem to have withered like the harvest.