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SOCIETY AND TRENDS: AFGHAN REFUGEES
Living On The Edge
Suspicion, poverty, ill-health and lack of work
dog Afghan asylum seekers in India. With war breaking out in Afghanistan,
it could only get worse.
— By Anna M.M. Vetticad
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MOHD ZAHER OMAR, 56
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Omar, an engineer, was once an army officer in Afghanistan. He
fled his country 10 years back, "afraid of the missiles landing
all around". Denied a work permit in India, the family tried
migrating to Australia. His wife died in 1993. The children left
in 1994. Omar would like to join them but he has not yet got a visa.
"I'm old and alone. I earn about Rs
50-70 a day repairing bicycles. I can't live like this."
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It's easy to spot him. On a dusty footpath at
one of the less fashionable addresses in south Delhi, Mohammed Zaher Omar,
56, is busy repairing bicycles. In his neatly pressed grey trousers and
faded but spotless tee, he doesn't look the part. But he plays it anyway.
Watching this man seated amidst the debris of his life, it's still not
hard to believe that he is an engineer, that he was once an army officer
in Afghanistan. "We don't know what you call his rank in India, but
he was a three-star officer, one notch below general," his friend
translates from Persian to broken English. In a whisper he adds, "Sometimes
when I visit him, he is crying to himself."
These are the images we do not see. Far removed
from the armed terrorists and bearded fanatics, these are tragic visuals
of war-torn Afghanistan that are not beamed into our homes. If Omar weeps
in private, it is for his past and the country he fled in 1991, "afraid
of the missiles landing all around". But freedom spent in poverty
is not a pleasant thing. Denied a work permit in India, the family tried
moving to Australia. His wife died in 1993, the children left in 1994.
Omar has not yet got a visa to join them. "I'm old and alone. I earn
Rs 50-70 a day. I can't live like this," he murmurs, a sad widower
in a single room with his thoughts and some photographs for company.
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| MANOHAR
SINGH, 35 |
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Singh
(above right) left a promising cloth business in Kabul. Today he shares
a single room with wife Har Kaur (left) and six others. He hasn't
worked since he broke a leg in an accident five years back. The rent
for six months is unpaid. They eat at the local gurdwara.
"My wife wants to attend needlework
classes. But her eyes are weak and there's no money for glasses." |
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Like Omar, most Afghan refugees in India inhabit
an unhappy middle ground. They may have got away from the hell that was
once home, but India is a wearying purgatory. There are 11,684 Afghans
registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) here. About
30,000 names could be going unrecorded. Most are based in Delhi. Earlier,
their visas were routinely renewed. That changed in recent years. The
Home Ministry has now promised visa extensions on a yearly basis. But
refugees still don't get work permits. Worse, after global budget cuts,
the UNHCR stopped their subsistence allowance in 1994. Now the dole goes
only to "extremely vulnerable individuals".
As frightening as the penury is the feeling
of being a marked people. "The word Afghan has become synonymous
with terrorist now. After the New York crashes, I fear it might be even
worse for Afghans in the US than in India," laments Augustine P.
Mahiga, UNHCR's India chief. Adds Ghulam M. Azamy, an accountant in a
government department during president M. Najibullah's regime: "With
the ongoing attacks on Afghanistan, we are afraid-for relatives there
and in the US who might suffer in this conflict, for ourselves because
the average Indian thinks that Osama bin Laden is an Afghan." In
a sparsely furnished room in Delhi's Savitri Nagar, he is at a meeting
of the Association of Afghan Refugees in Malviya Nagar and Savitri Nagar.
The group nods as a member recalls that during the Kargil war and Kandahar
hijacking, "some people spat at us on the streets. Don't they know
that every Afghan is not a Talib? Why else would we run away from them?"
But run away to what? Stepping gingerly through
the galis of a crowded mohalla in the city, one wonders. In a tiny barsati
flat in the area, Mohammad Awaz clutches his tazbe in silent prayer right
through an hour-long interview. Once he was the lord of a transport company
that commanded over 200 trucks in Afghanistan. Son Javed, 15, drifts back
to memories of flying kites as a carefree seven-year-old on the terrace
of their spacious Kabul home. Another son was captured by the Taliban
when he returned to Kabul to sell some property in 1996. Nothing was heard
of him for a year till he called one day to say he had escaped to Pakistan.
They have not had a telephone conversation since. "I long to hear
my son's voice," says Awaz's wife Ozara. "But std calls are
costly. So we write to each other and hope that one day he will come back."
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