In order to understand the current situation faced by Afghan refugees in the Middle East, Wang Chih-hung, editor-in-chief of Rhythms Magazine, visited Iran, where two million displaced Afghans had taken refuge, as well as two refugee camps in Afghanistan. Iran and Afghanistan are famous for the severe "black winds" (strong sandstorms) that assail these regions in winter. With the black wind blowing, millions of refugees, deprived of food and shelter, are left without any means of surviving the brutal winter.

When I asked Konnan Mahedi what his greatest wish was, his humble request surprised me: "My daughter says she wants to eat vegetables," he said. The five members of his family lived in a tent with a total area of seventy-two square feet. When I visited his temporary home, Mahedi's five-year-old daughter was washing clothes at the entrance. "I was a driver in my hometown of Herat, Afghanistan," he murmured. "I was proud of being the master of my family because I could satisfy almost all of their material needs. But now, when my daughter tells me she wants to eat vegetables, I can do nothing about it."

A displaced people

Mahedi's tent was one of more than seven hundred in a refugee camp called Mile 46. This refugee camp harbored more than three thousand refugees who had fled from the conflict in southwest Afghanistan. Situated on an expansive gravel desert, with literally no shelter against the strong desert wind, this did not seem to be a place fit for human habitation. I really hoped that what I had seen was merely a mirage.

Because of the invasion by the Soviet Union, the ensuing civil wars, and the many other anti-human rights actions that have taken place in Afghanistan, over six million people--one fifth of the population--have been forced to leave their homes over the past twenty years. Most have taken refuge in other areas of the country, in Iran, or in Pakistan. Afghanistan has thus produced the largest number of refugees in the world. However, although they are classed as refugees, this term is not strictly correct. Because they still live within the borders of Afghanistan, they should, according to international law, be classed as "internally displaced people."

On September 4 this year, the United Nations and its humanitarian agencies released a report entitled "The Deepening Crisis." This report stresses the worsening condition of the Afghan people and outlines a plan of action aimed at assisting them. This assistance plan includes provisions for the distribution of much needed food, blankets and plastic sheets to these internally displaced people, and also seeks to help them remain in their own homes so as to stabilize the country's population.

The September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States have made the refugee problem even worse. Following the declaration of war by the United States, all staff members of the United Nations, Red Cross, and other non-governmental organizations have withdrawn from Afghanistan. The deteriorating security situation in the region has made it too difficult for the Afghan staff of those organizations to continue their duties. As a result, almost all the activities included in the "Deepening Crisis" plan have come to a halt.

It is estimated that the war will result in the displacement of a further 2.5 million Afghans. Due to the inability of international humanitarian organizations to provide assistance, the lives of these new refugees, along with the existing five million, will be put in great danger.

Embargo on American products

Since the September 11 attacks, the Iranian government has set up five refugee camps in its northeastern province of Khorassan, which borders on Afghanistan. It has also planned to set up two or three refugee camps in Sistan Baluchistan, in the southeast of the country.

At the same time, however, the Iranian government has announced that it will not open its border to refugees from Afghanistan. This has stopped the stream of Afghan refugees from crowding the border. Most of them have now chosen to stay in Herat and wait patiently for assistance from Iran, because it is impossible for them to survive in the severe living conditions on the border, with no water or shelter.

For some Afghan refugees, Iran is the ideal place to go. That country provided assistance for between 1.5 and 2 million Afghan refugees in the past, and the language spoken in Iran--Farsi--is similar to that--Dari--used by many Afghans.

When we arrived at Zahedan, in southern Iran, a European relief worker who had been in the area for some time warned me that I should take off my baseball cap. "In Afghanistan," he said, "the Taliban is offering $50,000 to anyone who kills an American. Baseball caps are typical American products. You had better not wear anything that might be associated with the United States, unless you want to be pierced by bullets." His words cast a shadow over those of us who were preparing to visit refugee camps in Afghanistan.

Iran's Red Crescent Society (the Islamic counterpart of the Red Cross), in cooperation with the former Taliban regime, has set up a refugee camp called Makaki in Afghanistan, three kilometers [1.8 mi] away from Dorst-Mohammad, a small city in Iran, and another camp called Mile 46, about thirty-five kilometers [21.7 mi] to the south of the Makaki camp. The two camps are operated by the Iranian Red Crescent Society and watched over by Taliban troops. The Iranian Shiite government was once the mortal enemy of the fundamentalist Taliban regime, but humanitarian issues have pushed them to work together.

We arrived at the border town of Zabol after driving more than three hundred kilometers [186 mi] in a Red Crescent Society four-wheel-drive vehicle from Zahedan. After a complicated immigration procedure, we finally crossed the heavily guarded Iranian border. Welcomed by an armed, smiling Afghan refugee, we entered the Makaki camp, which with its 1,500 tents provides a haven for nearly 10,000 refugees.

An overcrowded refugee camp

Yellow dust clouded the air. On the right side of the camp was a Red Crescent clinic with a long line of refugees out the front. On the left side of the camp was another health clinic set up by Medecins du Monde (MDM) of Canada. The medical staff there told me that they needed to double the current health facilities as soon as possible if they were to improve the dire health condition of the camp's inhabitants. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that in the Makaki camp, one child dies from acute respiratory infection, diarrhoeal diseases, or malnutrition every day.

The camp contained row after row of tents. Each tent, with an area of less than 108 square feet, housed five people. Mohammad and his family of nine from Herat had lived in two tents for over six weeks. In order to flee the American bombing, they paid the astronomical sum of US$100 to be trucked into Makaki. However, the trip used up all of their savings. Now even if they wanted to go home, they couldn't.

Amir Hanzel and the families of his four siblings moved from Farah to Makaki one month ago. He told me that everyone received two blankets and a fixed ration of canned beans and nan bread every day. The Red Crescent also trucked water in every day. He said that although food was not a problem for them, he was worried that their scanty clothing would not be enough to see them through the winter. Most inhabitants of the camp were busy fencing their tents to protect themselves against another sandstorm.

Although life in the camp was difficult, life outside the camp was even more horrible. Abdul Rayman and his family of seven from Mazar-e-Sharif slept on the outskirts of the Makaki camp with hardly any shelter. He was not alone; two thousand people were subject to the same ill fate. All they asked from life were a small tent and a little food, but for them even that was too much of a demand.

We left Afghanistan and entered Iran, then headed south along the border for thirty-five kilometers [21.7 mi]. After obtaining the necessary documents, we left Iran and entered Afghanistan again. This time we arrived at the Mile 46 refugee camp.

Both the Red Crescent and Medecins du Monde had been providing medical services here for one and a half months. Dr. Frances said that since Afghan women were not accustomed to being treated by male doctors, Medecins du Monde had recruited a number of female medical workers.

"What a catastrophe! What could befall refugees in this land that has nothing?" said Oman Tashler, director of the Turkish Red Crescent Society. His convoy of trucks, carrying six thousand blankets and other goods, had traveled for sixteen days to arrive here. They distributed three kilograms of sugar, rice, oil, and twenty-five kilograms of flour to each household in Mile 46. "Look at the smeared faces of these poor children, and how the sandy wind has made their eyes red and swollen," Oman exclaimed. "They should not live like this anymore. We must help them."

The Mile 46 camp already housed three thousand refugees. However, the staff of the Red Crescent Society continued to set up more tents so they could move the two thousand refugees sleeping on the outskirts of Makaki inside.

UNHCR reported that there was a high level of malnutrition amongst children under five at both Makaki and Mile 46. It planned to provide winter clothes for children in the camps as well as equipment for supplying water. UNHCR in Iran hoped to use the winter months to work with a committee made up of representatives from the organization, Iranian authorities and Afghan people on forming a comprehensive repatriation plan for the Afghans in Iran.

Death comes very easily

Yonnes Ani was in charge of the Red Crescent office in Khorasan Province. Some days ago, he brought some relief goods to Herat in Afghanistan, some 120 kilometers [74 mi] from the border of Iran. He also inspected the sanitation, nutrition, and drinking water situation in seven refugee camps around Herat, and his conclusion was that things were "disastrous."

"We are getting ready to send in a second batch of relief goods. We will help the refugees in three steps: one, distribution of food; two, building new refugee camps; and three, helping the refugees to go home with food and seeds."

He described how the Taliban forces had hung two opposition members in front of his relief teams. We then watched a videotape he had filmed inside Afghanistan. One child had mistakenly picked up a cluster bomb and was seriously hurt. His mother wept by his side. "In the refugee camps, death comes very easily" he said.

Thomas Durieux of the French Medecins du Monde, who had become a friend of Tzu Chi three years ago when MDM and Tzu Chi cooperated in delivering aid to Kosovo, was in charge of an assistance plan in Herat. MDM had nine clinics in Afghanistan. Durieux had worked for three months in Herat, until the situation after the September 11 terrorist attacks forced him to withdraw. Fifty Afghan medical workers in five MDM clinics in Herat had remained behind to keep the clinics running.

"We are ready to go back at any moment," Durieux said proudly. "The supplies we have left behind can still last the clinics for a month." He felt quite frustrated that he had to wait in Mashhad and couldn't go back to work. A few days after we met, he went back to Herat as he had wished.

Seamus Meagher, from the International Red Cross Society, told me they had been speeding up delivery of their supplies. He was helping to organize the storage of newly arrived goods in Red Crescent warehouses in the suburbs of Mashhad. There were six warehouses there, which stored emergency medical supplies, cooking tools, tents, blankets, canned food, rice, beans, and other food items which were waiting for distribution.

Torbat-e-Jam

Torbat-e-Jam, a refugee camp established seven years ago 120 kilometers [74 mi] east of Mashhad, housed ten thousand refugees from all different parts of Afghanistan.

Saei and his family of seven had walked for sixteen days from Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan to the Iranian border five years ago, and were then trucked to this place. They now lived in a tent in the camp. He said the tent could shelter them from the wind and rain, but it was very hot in the summer and extremely cold in the winter.

Saei shelled pistachio nuts while we talked. In the middle of the tent, which had an area of about 108 square feet, was a bag of pistachio nuts. It was the main source of income for the family. One kilogram of nuts could earn them around 255 Iranian Rials [US$0.19]. The family could shell ten kilograms of nuts a day, so they made ten times that amount. While peeling off the shells, Saei told me that if possible, his family still wanted to return to their home in Afghanistan.

Saei from Kabul was very fortunate, because he had been allotted a newly built brick house with an area of 216 square feet. It contained two bedrooms and a storage room.

There were clinics, a medical center, and a shopping district in the refugee camp. More than six hundred students attended classes in a school made of corrugated steel sheets. Twenty Iranian teachers were teaching here. A new school made of bricks and cement was about to be opened. I heard children laughing all the time. It seemed that people here were more fortunate than the refugees I had seen in other places.

Winter was setting in. UNICEF warned that on average, 300,000 children died in Afghanistan every year, and it was possible for the number to increase by a further 100,000. "Half of the children in Afghanistan are already chronically malnourished," said Nigel Fisher of UNICEF. "The situation might get extremely critical if aid cannot be promptly delivered to the needy."

Spring is far away

The sky of Mashhad was covered with black fog. The temperature suddenly began to drop from a previously pleasant twenty degrees Celsius [68 F], and then it began to rain. I had read somewhere that in wintertime, the desert regions are often assailed by gusts of freezing, bitter, black, sandy wind. I wondered if this was it.

The temperature continued to drop during the night and all of a sudden snowflakes began to fall along with the rain. I suddenly felt depressed. I had been happy about the prospect of going home, because I had nearly completed my mission. But now my mood was low. I hoped the snow was not coming from the east.

Hussein, who had served as our translator, led a group of travelers back to the hotel where I was staying. They kept talking about how they had just braved a snowstorm in eastern Iran. I responded to them absent-mindedly. I was thinking of the refugees I had seen in the past few days, wondering whether or not the thousands of thin tents in the Mile 46 camp could protect the refugees from the snow. Two thousand people in the Makaki camp had no blankets or tents. And what about the 200,000 refugees living around Herat? And the 7.5 million refugees still inside Afghanistan?

"The border station in Dogharoun (an Iranian city close to Herat) reopened on November 20, and some three hundred commercial trucks, which had previously been blocked from entering Afghanistan, have passed through," Millicent Mutuli, a UNHCR official reported.

She also said that the Iranian Red Crescent Society and the UNHCR had dispatched fifteen trucks loaded with relief supplies to Afghanistan on November 21. The convoy carried two thousand plastic sheets and ten thousand blankets, which would go to a refugee camp outside of Herat that hosted more than twelve thousand refugees. It was estimated that there were a further 200,000 refugees living around Herat.

"We were here when the Russians were finally thrown out, and there was an immense hope that things were getting better, peace was coming soon, and we could finally offer some help with local development," said Kjell Godtfredsen, director of the emergency program for Norwegian Church Aid. "Yet, within a very short period of time, stability fell apart and the country plunged into civil war again."

Now the Northern Alliance has entered Kabul, and its militia groups have occupied many sections of the city. Four foreign journalists were killed a few days ago. "It's starting to feel as though the miserable history we had experienced before is being repeated all over again," Godtfredsen said with a sigh. Because of the tense situation, four hundred tents which were to be transported by NCA had been stalled at the border for more than a week.

The black wind was blowing and winter had set in. Afghanistan had suffered twenty years of civil war and three years of drought. There were still thousands of mines lying around the country, and at least 7.5 million refugees waiting for help.

On my way home, I could hardly wait to read all the information I had obtained about Afghanistan. I tried to recall each and every scene in which I had met with Afghan refugees and those who had devoted themselves to delivering humanitarian aid.

"When winter comes, can spring be far behind?" The arrival of the distant spring must be a dream for all Afghans, and for you and me.

(The Tzu Chi Foundation and other charitable organizations in Taiwan have decided to send emergency relief goods, such as winter clothes, blankets, shoes and medicine, to Afghanistan in the shortest time possible.)