PESHAWAR: Not much to celebrate for displaced persons
While 332 families having 1,962 individuals were registered till Friday afternoon with the management of the camp, set up at the site of the abandoned Kacha Garhi Afghan refugees’ camp, scores of other families have been awaiting their registration.
Dozens of women and children were taking shelter in the shadow of trees on roadsides near the camp entrance whereas their male family members were striving hard to convince officials of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), supervising the registration process, that they deserved aid.
The displaced persons told Dawn that the festival of Eid did not matter any longer to them as their houses were burning and their family members killed in the ongoing conflict in the agency. All of them had agonising tales to narrate and were mostly denouncing the operation claiming that the non-combatants had been bearing the brunt of indiscriminate shelling and bombing.
They claimed that during the last three days none of the public representatives had visited them and it appeared as if they belonged to any ‘alien’ country.
“I lost my mother when a jetfighter bombed my residence at Charmang area,” said Abdul Munir, a tenth-grade student at an army school in Khar, the agency headquarters. “On August 19, the jetfighters started bombing the area and also targeted our residence. As I was inside a room, I remained unharmed but my mother died outside.”
He said that their house was destroyed.
“During the nights we faced artillery shelling and when the day dawned the gunship helicopters started shelling and the jets pounded our places with bombs,” said Sher Khan, a schoolteacher. The security personnel were mostly targeting non-combatants while the infrastructure of the militants had been ignored, he alleged.
A large number of militants, he said, were foreigners and they included Uzbeks and Tajiks in the region. He said that his house was destroyed on August 7, a day after the operation started in the area following which his extended family of 24 persons took refuge in different places.
“I used to work with my brother at his grocery store in Mamond area, but the shop was destroyed in bombing and we left our area,” said Haneef Khan, a 13-year-old boy, who has now been residing in the camp with other family members. He said that whenever they heard sound of jets or helicopters they used to hide in trenches which they had dug after the military operation started.
“We are in a fix whether this operation is against non-combatants civilians or against the militants,” said Tahir Khan. “The bombs used by the jets were so devastating that they caused three to four meter deep craters wherever they fell.”
He added that the maize crop was ready for harvesting in the area but the security forces did not give them time to harvest it.
“Our females observe strict purdah, but the washrooms are away from our tents which cause inconveniences to us,” said Mr Khan.
Another displaced man said that the militants had currently been taking benefit of the standing maize crop. The bombings also destroyed various storage places where they had stored wheat grains and killed their cattle.
Talking about the facilities at the relief camp, the residents complained that there was no electricity and the food was unhygienic. “We are also facing shortage of potable water in the camp,” a man said.