"Nightmare" Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan closes

By Darren Whiteside

Tuesday February 12, 10:57 PM

JALLOZAI CAMP, Pakistan (Reuters) - Buses drove more than 1,000 Afghans out of a makeshift camp in northwestern Pakistan on Tuesday, ending what a U.N. official said had been a "humanitarian nightmare" for tens of thousands of refugees.

The five-bus convoy ended a three-month operation by the U.N. refugee agency and the Pakistani government to empty the squalid Jallozai site east of Peshawar, capital of North West Frontier Province that plays host to the majority of more than two million Afghan refugees in Pakistan.

In all, some 45,000 Afghans have been transferred from Jallozai since late November to five new camps set up by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) where refugees can get adequate help and shelter, UNHCR said.

"They have been living in miserable conditions in what has even been called a humanitarian nightmare at times," UNHCR deputy representative in Pakistan, Eva Demant, said in a speech at Jallozai.

"Afghans at Jallozai were a tragic proof of the world's neglect of the Afghan refugee problem prior to September 11," she said, referring to the suicide plane attacks on the United States that put Afghanistan under world scrutiny once again.

UNHCR chief Ruud Lubbers said in a statement in Geneva that Jallozai was "tragic and visible evidence of the miserable plight of Afghans fleeing decades of war, abuse, drought and deprivation".

RENEWED COMMITMENT

"By finally emptying it today, we are demonstrating the international community's renewed commitment to help end the suffering of the Afghan people and to support host nations like Pakistan that have borne so much of the burden in recent years," he said.

Beginning in late 2000, Jallozai, 40 km (25 miles) east of Peshawar, became a precarious home to tens of thousands of Afghans who constructed crude shelters of plastic, canvas and other scraps in low-lying ground prone to flooding.

With more than two million long-term Afghan refugees already in Pakistan, the government was at first reluctant to officially recognise new arrivals forced to flee by fighting and the worst drought in more than three decades.

A UNHCR statement said relief agencies had been unable to register Afghans at the spontaneous, ramshackle site and many refugees, particularly children, died while aid workers struggled to provide minimum services.

Aid agencies and many private donors provided some assistance "but Jallozai's poor location and cramped, haphazard layout meant that many of its undocumented refugees received insufficient supplies, suffering terribly as a result", it said.

A year ago, Pakistani authorities permitted UNHCR to transfer some 60,000 people from Jallozai to the nearby New Shamshatoo camp, but thousands more desperate Afghans again flocked to Jallozai and the site filled up again.

As some 250,000 new Afghans arrived in Pakistan following the September 11 attacks and U.S.-led military strikes on Afghanistan, the Pakistani government allowed UNHCR to establish new camps in the border region, making it possible to relocate the refugees.

Those pulled out from Jallozai on Tuesday will be lodged at a recently opened Barkili camp, about 150 km (95 miles) to the north near the Afghan border, UNHCR officials said.