Hopes of better life among Afghan refugees dim

KABUL - A shanty with mud as walls and plastic sheet as roof is all Fazl Ahmad can call a home in a refugee camp on the outskirts of this capital.

Fazl, who lives with his six children, is among the estimated 800 families who live in the camp, with nowhere to go when their lives have been disrupted and their dreams shattered after Afghanistan went through a series of wars.

"I lived in Pakistan for 16 years as a refugee but I hated the refugee life there. So, five years ago, I decided to come home," Fazl said.

But when Fazl returned to his home village in eastern province of Nangarhar, he found the Taliban insurgents fighting NATO troops every day in his village.

He had no choice but to leave home again and moved to Kabul thinking that life would be better but he ended up in another refugee camp.

"Life is really difficult in these tents," Fazl sighed, "It's very hard to adapt to the extreme weather here, excruciatingly hot in summer and harshly cold in winter."

He said that there seemed to be no one - from the Afghan government or from international agencies - that are working to extricate them from their sad fate.

Fazl's wife died four years ago, leaving their six children to him. "But I don't have enough income to support all of them. When they get sick, I couldn't even afford to buy medicine. I really hope our country could get better and there will be peace but it seems things are getting worse," he said.

Fazl is not the only father facing difficulties living in a refugee camp. Hundreds of other families also live in mud huts that clang to one another.

"It's very hard to live here. There is no running water nor electricity here," Mohammad, another refugee, said.

All the refugees have a common complaint: they don't have jobs and therefore no income to feed their children.

Only the little children, who are unaware of the dire conditions of their surrounding, can be heard laughing and playing in alleyways that separate clusters of mud houses.

But some kids have to work at an early age in order to help support their families.

Many of these children are forced to work as child laborers at local brick factories for over 12 hours a day.

"I have been forced to join hundreds of child workers at the brick factory to be the bread earner for my family because my father is sick," said Mohammad Qadir, a child in the camp, said.

He said that he had no recourse but to work to pay off loans of the family, to buy basic necessities and medicine of his father.

Ahmad Zai, another child laborer, said he wanted to go to school to be able to read and write but he was forced to work at an early age to help his family.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there are more than 5.7 million Afghan refugees, 4.6 million of whom have returned to Afghanistan with UNHCR assistance.

Markus Cott, deputy head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), told Xinhua in an interview that the ICRC Afghanistan will do whatever it can to help domestic refugees in Afghanistan by providing them with much needed humanitarian aid such as food and medicine.