MASLAKH CAMP (Afghanistan): The old woman rose up out of the dust, her black chaddar unwinding behind her, like an apparition in slow motion, and moved towards the road. “Food,” she wailed. “We need food. Give us food.”

The size of this camp and the enormousness and concentration of human suffering here hits the visitor like a physical assault. The tableau of wretchedness extends for more than three miles and one mile wide along a road cutting through the flat desert plain towards Iran, and more than half a mile back towards a towering mountain range.

Hundreds upon hundreds of squat, mud-walled shelters extending up the slopes of the mountain, winter-proof tents for the fortunate who are receiving aid, tattered black domed tents for the nomadic Kuchi people camped here who have yet to join them, and clumps of human waste everywhere underfoot.

No one knows how many people live here, such is its sprawl. Officials of the vanquished Taliban regime counted 300,000 people on these plains - making Maslakh more of a city than a ‘camp for internally displaced people’, which is what it is called in aid community parlance. International aid organizations conducting a survey of the camp say there may only be 150,000. Nobody knows. But it is certainly the largest such camp inside Afghanistan, and among the largest in the world.

Three years ago, this camp did not exist. Successive years of drought have ravaged the Afghan hinterland, emptying the mountain hamlets as people abandoned their homes to scavenge for food. They were followed - inevitably, in a country as devastated as Afghanistan - by those who do not meet the seemingly harsh criteria of international organisations running the camp: nomadic herders whose way of life was destroyed by the drought, the urban poor of Herat, the occasional Taliban fighter on the run, and, admittedly, a number of day-trippers who turn up for the food.

And so this camp grew. It was already in crisis when the International Organization for Migration (IOM) took over the camp last summer, and its population swelled after Sept 11 when international aid workers were evacuated from Afghanistan. Some 700 families turn up here each week, seeking food and shelter.

T he scale of the camp - and the failure of international aid organizations to limit its growth to a more manageable size - are just one indication of the epic challenge confronting the international community as it prepares to disperse the billions in aid money that has been pledged for Afghanistan.

“It is true conditions are not superb in the camp, but it is still attracting a lot of people from all over Afghanistan because the conditions are still better than in their homes,” said Rafael Robillard, the IOM’s chief of mission in western Afghanistan. “The dilemma now is how to make a nice neat camp without attracting people from all over the country, and emptying out the villages.”

Inside the camp, the stories as are exhaustingly familiar. When their crops failed during the first year of drought, people survived by selling or eating their chickens. The next year, they ate their goats and sheep, and the next year their cattle - if they still had any. In the end, there was nothing left to sell but the wooden beams of their mud and chaff homes, and so they abandoned what was left of their homes and fled a winter of hunger.

Further calamities were in store for the people at Maslakh. Two weeks ago, there was a torrential downpour - 150 millimetres of rain in three days, hitting Maslakh with the force of a water cannon, followed by a drastic drop in temperature. The nomads’ tents were swamped, the roofs of mud huts dissolved and caved in, people froze. The icy winds that scythe across the desert plains and the relentless winter chill made pneumonia a killer.

International aid organizations admit they have been overwhelmed by the sheer scale of Maslakh. The IOM has launched a massive programme of reorganisation, directing fresh arrivals to a camp that will open next week, and re-registering the present inhabitants to make sure they are not abusing the system. It also plans to assist those willing to return to their villages for the spring planting season. —Dawn/The Observer News Service.