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ISTALIF (Afghanistan) Istalif was once a paradise, a holiday resort of kings famed for its vineyards and orchards, where locals would greet visitors with handfuls of mountain flowers.
That was before Afghanistan was plunged into 23 years of war and before the Taliban arrived in 1999 and burned every house in the town in revenge for its support of the opposition Northern Alliance.
The mainly ethnic Tajik population fled, mostly to neighbouring Pakistan or Iran, leaving Istalif a ghost town, its vines and fruit trees destroyed and its mud-brick houses crumbling to dust.
Since the overthrow of the Taliban just over a year ago, some of the hardier have returned and started to try to rebuild their lives, brick by brick, stone by stone, helped by UN and other international aid agencies. Locals say about 3,000 of the 30,000 people who used to live in the town have now returned. The rest are waiting to see how the pioneers make out.
If anything, they are some of the more fortunate among more than two million Afghans who have returned to their homes from refuge abroad or within the country in the past year.
Promised materials to reconstruct their houses have been delivered and they have been able to move from tent shelters back into patched-up homes with solid walls and a reasonable measure of protection from the bitterly cold Afghan winter.
“We have been receiving window frames, doors and wood,” said 38-year-old Abdul Ahad, a former refugee in Pakistan. “We are only waiting for glass for the windows.”
An hour’s drive away, on a patch of wasteland swept by a biting wind on Kabul’s outskirts, it is a different story.
More than 150 people, including many young children, are still living under canvas eight months after returning from Pakistan. At night they must bear temperatures falling well below freezing.
RENTS TOO HIGH: They found rental prices in a city in which many houses were destroyed in factional fighting beyond the means of even those who had managed to find work.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that nearly 100,000 people in the capital are in similar straits and lists more than 550,000 countrywide as under threat this winter.
The sudden fall of the Taliban in December 2001 took many by surprise. Aid agencies were overwhelmed by the unexpected rush to return and have been unable to provide for all. UNHCR says such projects will be crucial in coming months if refugees who have already come back are to be persuaded to stay and millions more still outside the country convinced to return.
Khalil, also 38, counts himself lucky to have a job, as a policeman, after moving to Kabul. He came after returning to his village 35 kms away and finding his house destroyed and its fields parched by four years of drought.
Clutching a thin summer shawl around him in the freezing wind, he explained that his monthly salary of two million old afghanis ($40) was nowhere near enough for him to move his family from their tent home in Kabul’s Tai Maskan district.
“It costs one million to rent a house and we just can’t afford that,” he said. “Our main problem is the cold; the children are always sick.
Khalil said foreign aid agencies had provided some rice and sugar, but not regularly and all he had got from the government since his return was a 35 kg (77 pound) bag of charcoal.
“The government has done nothing. It was much better in Pakistan: at least there we were warm, we had jobs and the children were not sick, and the UN was there to give us food.”
Back in Istalif, the returnees may be back in their homes but they have little more.
Aneez Gul, who is in her thirties and has eight children to support, said it would take at least two months to rebuild their roofless house. Snow has already settled on their hillside.
Shakila, a middle-aged woman standing nearby wearing a burqa, reacted angrily when asked if she was glad at least to be back in Afghanistan. She said life was better before she fled the Taliban.
“What does happy mean? We don’t have anything to eat, we don’t have any wood for heating and I am a widow,” she said.
“We are not happy at all. It was better under the Taliban, even though the country was isolated. Now we have the whole world on our side and nobody is helping us at all.”—Reuters
