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August 7, 2002
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies of the US Part 5: the Call of Democracy?
August 6, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Signs
of the Elites
Bruce Gagnon
We Must
Come Alive
David Krieger
From
Hiroshima to Hope
Jerre Skog
Global
Reach of Corporate Crime or What the Hell are
They Teaching at Harvard?
Robert Fisk
Return to
Afghanistan:
Collateral Damage
Alexander Cockburn
The
Fox in the Pension Fund
August 5, 2002
Rahul Mahajan
Iraq
and the New Great Game
Jordy Cummings
The
Last Frontier of
Israel and Palestine
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Saddam's Diary
Mike Leon
US Mute
to Israeli Brutality
Norman Madarasz
Brazil:
the Most Important Election of 2002?
August 4, 2002
Susan Davis
Fat Americans
August 3, 2002
David Krieger
Nuclear
Apartheid
Gilad Atzmon
The End
of Innocence
Gavin Keeney
Everybody's
a Critic
Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save Dick Cheney?
August 2, 2002
Ralph Nader
The Labor
Party
Chris Floyd
Moral Maze:
Bankruptcy Made Easy
Jeremy Scahill
Saddam,
Chemical Weapons and Donald Rumsfeld
Jeffrey St. Clair
Dark Deeds in the Black Hills:
Daschle Dooms the
Sacred Land of the Sioux
August 1, 2002
Steven Higgs
Activists
Under Siege
Anthony Gancarski
Draft
Picks:
Staffing the Latest War
Zeynep Toufe
Invisible
Children: AIDS,
Africa and Selective Vision
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel and Squawk:
Angelina Jolie, the NYT
and the Attack on McKinney
July 31, 2002
Amelia Peltz
Inside
Ramallah:
How Can the World Witness Such Suffering and Do Nothing?
M. Shahid Alam
The Academic
Boycott of Israel
Bernard Weiner
20 Things
We've Learned Since 9/11
Philip Cryan
Discourse
and War in Colombia
Neve Gordon
A Feast
of Bombs:
Sharon's Endgame for Palestine
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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Five
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CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
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by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
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August
7, 2002
Return
to Afghanistan
For the Forgotten
Afghans,
the UN Offers a Fresh Hell
by Robert Fisk
The
Independent
In Afghanistan, it is possible to go from hell
to hell. The first circle of hell is the Waiting Area, the
faeces-encrusted dustbowl in which 60,000 Afghans rot along
their frontier with Pakistan at Chaman--a bone-dry, sand-blasted
place of patched bedouin tents, skinny camels, infested blankets
and skin disease. There are laughing children with terrible
facial sores, old women of 30, white-bearded, dark-turbaned
men who from huts of dry twigs look with suspicion and astonishment
at Westerners.
They are a leftover of the last Afghan
war, the one we are supposed to believe is over, although they
are living proof that hostilities have not ended. At least 40,000
of the Pashtu refugees cannot go home because their people are
still persecuted in the north of the country. But Pakistan
no longer wants this riff-raff of poor and destitute on its
squeaky-clean border.
So the United Nations, that great saviour
of the dispossessed, has discovered another vile place for these
people. A second circle of hell, 40 miles west of Kandahar,
it is a grey, hot desert, reached through minefields, shot
through with blow-torch winds and black stones, haunted by great,
creased mountains and fine sand hills that move like waves.
The United Nations has drilled wells
for the 60,000--boring more than 20 metres (60ft) for water--yet
few UN officials can do more than shake their heads when they
stand in this future midden. It is called Zheray Dasht--"yellow
desert" in Urdu--because of the flowers that carpet the
sand after rain. But it hasn't rained here for seven years.
Roy Oliff, of the UN High Commission
for Refugees, describes the decision-making to us with almost
teutonic efficiency as he stands amid this desolation. "There
is a political need to move them from Chaman: they may not have
a choice," he says. "This was the only place the Afghan
government would let us have. We didn't get a choice. The local
people on the main road didn't want the displaced persons near
their villages in case they took away employment and used their
scarce water resources. This area is reasonably [sic] free
of mines. We're not anticipating much resistance. If they get
water and food, there'll be a flood of people here, not resistance.
Five thousand people will be housed in 12 settlements."
Across the hard desert floor, hundreds
of empty, dark-brown tents flap in the wind. There are latrines
and vast tented reception areas and land for each family on
which--if the water holds out in the unending drought--they
can plant trees and graze animals. "It takes them a week
to build a mud-walled home," Mr Oliff tells us. Note here
the UN-speak.
No choice for the refugees. No choice
for the UN. Little resistance from the refugees. That's how
the UN talked in Bosnia as they aided the Serbs in their ethnic
cleansing by trucking Muslims from city to city. It isn't Mr
Oliff's fault. When I gently raise the issue of the UN's collective
conscience, always supposing so sensitive a creature exists
within the world's most bureaucratic institution, he looks
at me with some distress. "Everyone involved in this project
has misgivings and is making the best of it," he says.
The truth, which is as scarce as water
in Afghan-istan, is that Pakistan has already severely limited
the ability of humanitarian workers in the border camps and
that the Afghan authorities in Kandahar don't want the refugees
too close to their own city. There are quite a few Afghan-Arab
families in the frontier camps--al-Qa'ida families among them--and
several Taliban sympathisers. Spin Boldak, across the old Durrand
line from Chaman, was the very last stronghold of the black-turbaned
misogynists last December. The Afghans don't want them infecting
Kandahar again.
Mohammed Godbedin, of the UNHCR in Chaman,
says at least 50 Afghan-Arab families came to the local camps--("They
all came together, not individually," he says) although
many of these families existed long before the days of al-Qa'ida.
The remainder of the refugees are Kochi, nomads whose livestock
died in the drought, and who never had homes. In a few days,
the first of the displaced of Chaman and Spin Boldak will be
taken to visit the Yellow Desert, to decide for themselves if
they are prepared to move.
But this is a mere ritual. Pakistani
and Afghan officials will make the final decision, with the
UN's familiar compliance. The refugee leaders will be trucked
to the Kandahar-Herat desert highway, then led along a sand
trail marked by red and white rocks. On either side of these
markers are land-mines left by the mujahedin during the war
against the Soviet occupation. "They are vehicle mines,
not anti-personnel mines so they won't blow up under people,"
one UN official says helpfully.
Unless, of course, the refugees acquire
a clapped-out lorry and drive on the wrong side of the markers.
Beyond a former Russian military fortress, its tank revetments
still evident amid the grey muck, the desert flattens. This
is where the land is "reasonably" clear of mines.
And where the UN has built its new refugee camp.
Things might be different if the warlord
battles ended in the north, if the Americans allowed the international
peace-keeping forces to move out of Kabul and collect the weapons
in the north and damp down the ethnic fires. More than half
the frontier refugees could then go back to their homes. But
Afghanistan is becoming more lawless by the week. Refugees remain
the linguistic definition of much of this country. And the Yellow
Desert, the latest UN prison for the 60,000 destitute of Chaman
and Spin Boldak, will soon be on all our maps.
Today's Features
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies
of the US Part 5: the Call of Democracy?
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