IRIN
AFGHANISTAN: IDPs willing to settle in south
27 December 2004


[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

ZHARE DASHT, 27 December (IRIN) - Tens of thousands of internally 
displaced persons [IDPs] in the southern border camp of Zhare Dasht are 
seeking assistance to help them settle in an area they have lived in 
temporarily over the last two years.

With drought conditions continuing in the areas these IDPs came from, the 
destitute families prefer to stay in Zhare Dasht rather than return to 
their places of origin. Although the desert area is cold during the winter 
and isolated from southern Kandahar city, people say they can manage to 
earn a living or receive some aid assistance in the troubled IDP camp.

"We cannot live forever as IDPs, nor can we return to our lost lands, 
pasture and cattle. We want to settle here," Abdul Quam, the chief of the 
IDPs, told IRIN in Zhare Dasht, 45 km west of Kandahar.

The IDP camp hosts nearly 45,000 people who took refuge in the desert in 
early 2002 after harassment by local commanders and incidents of 
systematic ethnic discrimination in the country's northern provinces.

According to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for 
Refugees (UNHCR), 45 percent of the IDPs are Kochee nomads from the south. 
The Kochees, whose livelihood depends on livestock breeding, were 
displaced after losing their cattle and pastures following years of 
prolonged drought.

Nearly three years after the fall of the Taliban, conditions in 
Afghanistan still do not allow for the return of all IDPs.

According to the Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation (MORR), 
after another year of drought and crop failures, more than a third of the 
Afghan population remains dependent on food aid. Among them are at least 
167,000 IDPs, most of them living in camps in the south and west of the 
country. Persistent drought, a lack of infrastructure and slow 
reconstruction has considerably slowed the pace of return in 2004.

Only 17,000 IDPs have made the journey home since the beginning of the 
year. Unable or unwilling to return to their homes, the remaining IDPs, 
most of them drought-affected nomadic Kochees, are now in need of 
long-term solutions that go beyond humanitarian assistance.

"My husband died and I am vulnerable and have no place to return. I need 
assistance for longer settlement here," Taj Bibi, a widowed 
mother-of-five, told IRIN. Bibi said there was no work or aid assistance 
in her northern hometown of Maimana. "Here, at least there is some 
assistance and some jobs for my sons to earn a living," she maintained.

Meanwhile, the provincial authorities in Kandahar said the government was 
working on a plan to identify Zhare Dasht as a new district and assist 
some of the most vulnerable to settle in the area. The plan was that some 
500 families would be locally reintegrated and house plots would be 
donated after a further review of the general situation in Zhare Dasht and 
their places of origin, Mohammad Hassan Rahimi, Kandahar's head of 
planning and statistics, told IRIN.

But UNHCR officials said they would continue to assist the families who 
still wanted to return to their places of origin. "We will wait for the 
decision of the government. If they [the IDPs] are locally integrated we 
will decrease assistance," Ahmad Shah, an information assistant for the UN 
refugee agency, told IRIN.

Shah said, if the IDPs stayed in Zhare Dasht, UNHCR would increase 
vocational training programmes to help them become self-reliant.

The United Nations International Organisation for Migration (IOM) is 
trying to revive the nomadic life for some of the Kochee IDPs who want to 
restart their traditional way of living. The agency is planning to lend 
sheep and other forms of assistance to help them return to their pastures.

"But those Kochees who do not want to resume their nomadic life will be 
provided with vocational training, such as in tractor repairs, carpentry, 
cycle repairs, radio repairs, embroidery, tailoring and some handicrafts 
skills," Mohammad Naseem, an IOM official, told IRIN in Kandahar.

Officials at MORR said that the number of IDPs in Afghanistan fell sharply 
from 724,000 in December 2002 to 184,000 a year later. So far in 2004, 
only 17,000 IDPs have been assisted to return, leaving 167,000 people 
displaced in camps. The main areas of IDP concentration are in Zhare 
Dasht, Panjwai and other settlements in the south, Maslakh camp in the 
west, and a number of smaller camps in the north of the country.


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Copyright (c) UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 2004


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