Lingering in Jalozai Camp

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By Zaigham Khan, Thursday, April 24, 2008

jalo.jpgIt was like a tumour on the body of Peshawar, a cancer that had to be removed sooner or later. The surgeon’s knife is working swiftly to eliminate the last traces of the Jalozai Camp, a mini-Afghanistan, from the soil of Pakistan. Its graveyard, where the dead are buried in the order of the Afghan provinces, may be allowed to stay on. In today’s world, dead Afghans have some privileges that living Afghans do not enjoy.

Located about 20 miles southwest of Peshawar, Jalozai was set up in 1980 to receive refugees fleeing from Afghanistan. It was a time when Pakistan under Zia-ul-Haq was a champion of the free world’s struggle against the evil empire occupying Afghanistan. Dignity and human rights for Afghan people were high on the agenda of the Pakistani government even though Pakistanis were living in indignity and ignominy. Jalozai was a significant square on the huge chessboard laid out to give a bloody nose to the Soviet Union. It was the centre of Arab fighters, who flocked to it to participate in the holy struggle, and seven Afghan jihadi organisations, generously supported by the CIA. It was here that the foremost jihadi ideologue of our times, Abdullah Azzam, founded a Jihad University, which promoted a new and radical interpretation of the Islamic concept of jihad. Abdullah Azzam and a number of other prominent jihadi leaders now lie in peace at the Jalozai graveyard.

As is the case with all refugees, the residents of Jalozai camp were motivated by a number of push-and-pull factors. The push factors included the brutality of the Russian army and the not-so-humane activities of the Mujahideen. In fact, the Mujahideen’s terms of reference included pushing a sizable Afghan population out of the country to destabilise the communist regime, and this was done by luring or threatening the Afghan villagers. Once in Pakistan, Afghans were a strategic asset, both for the free world and for Pakistan. They were the gun fodder for the latest Great Game being played on their soil. While billions of dollars were spent on the game itself, scant resources were available for their human development. As time passed and the world changed, aid for them turned into a trickle and finally dried out.

The new generation of Afghans born in Jalozai had no access to any productive skills. They were supposed to get their education at madrassas, generously supported by the Arab brethren, as if mullahs were the only human resource a free Afghanistan would need. The children of Afghan refugees were kept out of Pakistan’s education system and the job of providing higher education to the children of Afghan elite was left to Indians. No wonder, Indians were able to forge strong linkages with future leaders of the country, people who now hold sway in Kabul.

Jihad was the only skill taught to the refugee children. Very often, it was the best, if not the only, employment available to young Afghans. The jihad industry benefited Pakistan’s establishment, Afghan warlords and a section of the Pakhtoon elite, including drug barons, smugglers and Maulanas. What was death, destruction and displacement for common Afghans meant politics, foreign policy and business to many people. War is indeed a heroic thing when it is fought in someone else’s territory.

In 1988, Pakistan came close to putting an end to the misery of Afghan refugees when Geneva Accord led to the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. The establishment led by General Zia was unhappy as the accord did not include the transfer of power from the communist rulers to the seven-party mujahideen leaders. It was considered an outrageous accord that denied the Mujahideen their divine right to rule Kabul and, by extension, denied Pakistan the much-needed strategic depth. Junejo, the protagonist of the accord, was kicked out and the Mujahideen were given time to fight their way to Kabul.

Four years later, in April 1992, Kabul finally fell to the Mujahideen. Their victory, however, had no resemblance to the conquest of Mecca. If anything, it resembled the scene of Mongol hordes occupying Baghdad. When the Mujahideen overran Kabul, the Jamaat-e-Islami arranged a jashn, a celebration of victory. The mission accomplished was captured in an immortal slogan: “Ham jashn-e-Kabul mana-chuke, ab ao chalo Kashmir chalain” (We have celebrated our victory in Kabul, let’s go to Kashmir now). Kashmir was the new front assigned by the establishment to the Jamaat and its allied jihadi groups. Kashmiris were the new guests at the joint banquet of the establishment and the religious parties.

Jashn-e-Kabul, however, turned out to be an orgy of death and destruction that far surpassed anything the communists had done. The greatest of the great Mujahids, Gulbudin Hikmatyar, unleashed hell on the city and destroyed it as it had never been devastated in modern history. With the disintegration of Soviet Union, the civil war in Afghanistan became a side story that no longer interested the world community and the international media. Nor did the Afghan refugees interest the aid agencies anymore. The ISI, the Mujahideen warlords and jihadi ideologues were now on their own, free from any international compulsions. The people in Jalozai, however, keenly observed every twist and turn in the story of their country, their ears glued to the Pushto service of BBC. The camp took an imprint of all events taking place in their country, its population swelling and declining with every new hope and every new disappointment.

With the war on terror, some interest has been revived in Afghan refugees, as potential source of terrorism. As a Western diplomat in Islamabad told The Washington Post anonymously last week, “They provide the perfect location for disappearing and recruiting, which is why we have been pushing for closure of these camps. You don’t want to create a humanitarian crisis, but the security there is an issue.” Amazing, news from Peshawar can take three decades to reach a Western embassy in Islamabad.

The UNHCR has warned that pushing out too many Afghan refugees in a short time, without any support for rebuilding their lives, can create an ideal ground for breeding more extremism. There may be no money for the UNHCR to support refugees, but if they become terrorists there will be no dearth of resources and firepower to fight them. That is the beauty of the war on terror.

The Pakistani people have been generous to Afghan refugees, but the Afghan refugees have never been very popular here. In fact, a refugee can never hope to win the hearts and minds of their hosts as he is always looked at with some suspicion. Anthropologists say this is because they are in a state of “liminality,” an ambiguous situation of identity.

They are betwixt and between, belonging neither here nor there, like the ghost of a recently dead person who left dispatched this world but has not arrived in the other world. This unfortunately applies to Afghans who were born here and even to those whose parents were born here as well. They have not been allowed to end their stay in Jalozai, except in its graveyard, of course. They must go back to their villages, many of which have been wiped out from the face of earth, to the communities that don’t exist any longer, to the professions they have long forgotten and to the pain and suffering that is only theirs. We are living in a world without empathy.

The writer is an Islamabad-based development consultant with a background in journalism. Email: zaighmkhan@yahoo.com

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Anwaar’s articles appear simultaneously here at Truth Spring and at Soul Vibes in The Pakistan Tribune.


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