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Afghanistan    Gebiete  

For three weeks Mohammad Shapai, his wife and six children have slept outside on a freezing, dirty wasteland at the Pakistan border, among the thousands of refugees no one expected to see.

Weeks after the Taliban fled their stronghold in southern Afghanistan and a new government was installed in Kabul with promises of aid and reconstruction, thousands of people are deserting their homes in search of food and to escape worsening lawlessness.

"There was nothing there for us in our house," Mr Shapai said. He left Sherbergan, in the north, a year ago in search of food and eventually arrived at a village in Helmand, in the south. After three years of drought, the conditions were miserable.

"Five of my youngest children died," he said. "No one wanted to give us anywhere to stay. There was nothing to eat and now it isn't safe. The area is full of thieves."

In the past three weeks 13,000 people have poured into southwest Pakistan at the frontier town of Chaman. At least another 40,000 are in camps on the Afghan side of the border and are expected to flood across in the coming days.

A senior UN official in Afghanistan said last night that at least 700,000 people were at Risk of starvation and exposure in southern Afghanistan. "People are dying. We are doing a great deal but it's way below the level of need," said Leslie Oqvist, a UN regional coordinator based in Kandahar.

He said there were 200,000 people in the south-west alone who had fled their homes and were living in the open with little food. Only half that number had received any help. "There's been nothing like it in history," he said. "Together with the interim government, we are embarking on rebuilding a country from scratch."

Pakistan has kept the border officially closed. Mr Shapai and the thousands of others who slipped into Chaman, by bribing border guards or crossing through smugglers' routes, were forbidden from even being registered as formal refugees.

For days they were forced to camp in the thick, choking dust. Families gathered under torn rugs just yards from the barbed wire fence surrounding the Killi Faizo refugee camp, with its food handouts, warm tents and doctors. As they slept out in the freezing nights five died: an elderly man, an 18-year-old and three infants.

The Pakistan authorities finally relented late last week, giving aid workers until yesterday to register the newcomers and take them into the staging camp at Killi Faizo.

Mr Shapai took his nine-month-old son, Sardar Wali, straight to the camp clinic. The boy, wrapped in blankets and coughing badly, has severe pneumonia but now, with access to the proper treatment and medicine, he will probably survive.

The Médecins Sans Frontières doctors at the clinic see up to 100 patients a day. "Most of them have pneumonia, bronchitis or gastroenteritis," said Mohammad Esa, as he checked over Sardar Wali. Four patients with measles are kept in an isolation tent - a measles epidemic in the camp would be devastating.

Nearly all the refugees arriving at the camps tell the same story of violence and insecurity across huge swaths of southern Afghanistan. Aid agencies have not yet returned to Kandahar and, because of the poor security, it will be weeks before food can be distributed to the remote villages where it is needed most.

"The thieves came at night into our home and they looted everything we had. I tried to stop them and they beat me," said Mansum, 32, who fled his village in Helmand.

"Now we don't have anything. The Taliban government was good because it was a religious government. Now the people in charge are the ones who were thieves before the Taliban came."

Other families have travelled longer distances, particularly from the hunger belt in the north-west, which has suffered worst from the drought. As Mansum spoke a truck arrived carrying a family of 40 who have spent the past 15 days driving from Maimana in the north-west.

"We left because people were stealing from our homes. We left most of our belongings behind and just fled. We stopped at Herat but it seemed just as dangerous so we came here to get something to eat," said Mohammad Nabi, as he unloaded his children. "There was fighting between Uzbek, Tajik and Pashtun and until that is finished we cannot go back."

Yet Pakistan, which has taken at least 2m Afghan refugees in the past 20 years, is reluctant to admit any more and so kept Killi Faizo closed to new arrivals for as long as possible. Aid workers say the government plans a big repatriation programme in the weeks ahead, despite the poor conditions in southern Afghanistan.

Immediately after September 11, when a large refugee exodus was predicted, Pakistan insisted new camps would be set up only in the tribal areas along the Afghan border. Here refugees could be isolated from the local population and easily returned home when necessary.

Some of the camps, which house 130,000 people, are not suited to their role. Dera, near Killi Faizo, where the latest arrivals are being sent, has only a limited water supply. Most water has to be brought in by tractor. Armed guards are needed because of threats from local villagers, themselves in need of food.

This unexpected flood of new arrivals is likely to keep pouring in for several weeks. Even though aid agencies will return to Kandahar, villages in southern Afghanistan will be left without support as long as security remains poor .

"Clearly they are not accessing the assistance they need inside Afghanistan," said William Sakataka, head of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees office in the nearby city of Quetta. "A lot of assistance is going in but it takes time to reach them. Aid agencies will go back to Kandahar soon but even then they will be very careful about the roads they move on."