Refugees

Little was known in late 1985 of the situation of internal refugees; however, much had been written on the refugees in Pakistan. Information on Afghan refugees in Iran amounted to little more than rumors. Poorer Afghans seeking asylum in Pakistan were assigned to camps by the Pakistani government. The camps were usually arranged by village and ethnic group and sect. If there was more than one ethnic group in a camp, the groups arranged their living space so that members of the same group lived only among like group members. Accounts of one camp report that it is composed solely of women and children from the same Afghan village whose husbands and sons had been killed. 

Dupree, who together with Nancy Dupree has spent much time in Pakistan since the Afghan Revolution, reports that the first Afghan refugees were members of the royal family and their associates. By April 1979, he reports, 85,000 Afghans had fled the country. The influx of refugees to Pakistan swelled after the Soviets sent troops into Afghanistan and, in the mid1980s, the flow of refugees continued unabated. Most refugees in Pakistan were not the urban Kabuli literati (some of whom supported the PDPA government) but rather rural, nonliterate pastoralists and farmers. 

Dupree reports that as of February 1, 1985, there were 235 refugee tented villages (RTVs) in the NWFP, as well as 61 in Baluchistan Province, and 10 in Punjab Province. Journalists observed that the Pakistani government in 1985 initiated the policy of sending refugees to Punjab, where camps were mixed with various regional, ethnic, and sectarian groups, unlike the camps in the north of the country. Although the term for the camps, RTVs, suggests impermanent dwellings, some of the older camps in 1985 represented mud﷓brick villages "with individual walled compounds." 

Social life continued in the RTVs. Dupree reports that in 1985 marriages still occurred, although with a greatly diminished bride-price. The birth rate in refugee camps was reportedly very high. Because many men are away from the camps fighting with the mujahidiin, some women and girls attended literacy classes that educated Afghan women volunteered to teach. In some cases the seclusion of women had increased because the Afghan village was an extension of the family, where veiling and seclusion were not rigorous. Women in camps lived among strangers, and seclusion and veiling became more intense. Not all Afghans lived in RTVs. Pakistan allowed the refugees to live where they wished, and urbanites from Afghanistan chose to live in urban areas if at all financially possible. Finally, sources observed that the mullahs had become much more powerful in the RTVs than they had ever been in their homeland, filling a power vacuum caused by gravitation of the charismatic religious figures toward political leadership. The mullahs' rise to power was apparently accompanied by increased restrictions on women's freedom of movement as mullahs sought to control the women and children who formed a large portion of the camps' inhabitants.

This page maintained by Luke Griffin and last updated on 01/14/2002 .