The Twenty-Year Wait
On the other side of the Pakistani border, Peshawar was a sleepy town before the refugees came. It’s been transformed by the transit of drugs and guns, and as a center for humanitarian aid. Trucks, buses, taxis, even tractors are transformed into playful works of art. They make their clumsy way through the congested streets with an infinite variety of ornamental whimsy. Eye-popping colors depict a jungle of designs with dramatic birds, garlands of flowers, and magical visages staring out from the backs and sides and metal chain skirts dangling across front bumpers. Every square inch is decorated; even the tops are bedecked--with human cargo perched on mounds of parcels and young men, heads bare to the sun, holding on by one hand, hanging precariously over the edges. In a clash of form and function, even windshields are painted with patterns or embellished with colorful stickers.
The vehicles carry everything from water buffalo to petrol. They pass fields of tied bundles of grass, converted by sun and shadows into an open-air sculpture garden. Camels strolled by indolently, oblivious to their loads, led by white turbaned men. A wild boar lies on his back: exotic road kill. Amid the collusion of colors is a drab olive bus. In buttoned-down shirts, six-buttoned down boys, on their way to school. The purity of men's simple white robes provides visual calm. The women, even on the hottest tropical days, are draped in nine meters of cotton and silk, dyed bright ochre, fuchsia, Kelly green, yellow, fire engine red, and all hues of blue. In a natural balance, the flowing veils contribute graceful elegance to this hard life. Those elegant lines and rich colors belie the poverty of the people--or undermine the assumptions in the concept.
Shunted into semi-permanent mud villages, Afghanis have been taking refuge in Pakistan for two decades. Fleeing violence, physical devastation, and political oppression, millions have poured across the borders on their east and west, seriously taxing the already burdened governments of Pakistan and Iran. The conflicts they have fled are superimposed in layers: tribal warfare fanned by ethnic and linguistic differences; the superpower standoff between Soviets and Americans; and, more recently, the repression of the Taliban.
According to Rupert, life inside Afghanistan has become intolerable for whole groups. He describes the Hazaras, a people living in the central high mountains. With Mongolian features, they subsist on the lowest rung of the Afghan economy. The several million Hazaras–Iranian-backed Shia Muslims–are completely cut off by snow five months of the year. The Taliban are blocking the highway that is their lifeline, and they’re on the brink of starvation.
No less safe is northern Afghanistan, the battleground of several Mujahedin warlords who have consolidated into an uneasy alliance to face off against the Taliban, who, like their Pakistani neighbors, are ethnic Pashtun. The fractious northerners are supported by Iran, Russia, and India, once more making Afghanistan a theater for the conflict of greater powers. The Northern Alliance has components of ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks, who maintain natural ties to neighboring Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
I’m familiar with such cultural cacophony. One of many ironies punctuating this chaos is the connection to the war in Bosnia, where the very Mujahedin whose training the US supported to thwart communist expansion in Afghanistan were a major thorn in the side of US policymakers. As a diplomat, I was sent several times to insist to Muslim leaders in Sarajevo that the imported holy warriors should be expelled.
Plenty of other international subplots carve the geopolitical landscape in which the refugee camps are wedged: opium production that provides the economic lifeblood for the government, and which Western Europeans blame for the heroin flooding across their borders; heavy-handed multi-national corporations protecting their interests in a lucrative gas pipeline, whose development is dependent on a cessation of hostility and political stability; and the Iranian government, which has contributed arms to the Northen Alliance to protect their Shiite sympathies. Meanwhile, removed from all the behind-the-scenes maneuvering, the suffering of the Afghan people stretches on, unabated. They have the sense that they are pawns in a game of greed and power being played by outsiders at the expense of their families, their fields…and their future
These are the residents I encounter in Haripur, a Pakistani refugee encampment with 100,000 Afghanis. Wives are bought here, based on their ability to produce carpets or other marketable items. Horse-drawn carriages crowd the market, an odd parody on New York’s Central Park, where my 11-year-old and I strolled two weeks ago. Nine time zones away, and another life.
Peshawar hosts a sprawling Afghan market, but the refugees are increasingly resented by the Pakistanis, who fault them for the economic downturn. "It's the usual thing: blame the foreigners," says Rupert. Meanwhile, tall sunflowers nod their heads respectfully as we drive by, and children walk the road with loads of hay on their heads, bigger than their delicate bodies. Bicycles, loaded with impossible bundles, pass a horse-drawn cart, with a boy on the back, licking his ice cream cone. Storefronts boast ludicrous signs; “Oxford College” has apparently joined the Ivy League schools in opening extensions on this chaotic campus.
The roadside extends in one continuous, dense strip mall. "Khyber Sweets" the shop sign announces. At a restaurant for lunch, we are surrounded by about 40 men and only two women. Women are hardly seen at all. Men, on the other hand, hold hands and hug each other. But the true infatuation is with color. A rather unsuccessful effort at a park has a sign: "Green area; please preserve it." A vain wish for that worn patch--like many vain wishes, I imagine, in this dirt-poor country.
And everywhere, everywhere, the children. In a clinic, mothers hold babies who can’t gaze up and see their faces. The mystery of the cover entices me. I wade into an open market with my camera, though Rupert warns that men may hit me on the hip, to shame me. I don’t care. My interest is beyond the artistic. After each shutter click I reach out and take the hand of the woman whose veiled image is now on my film.