By KIM SENGUPTA
HERAT - They descended on the car in frenzied waves from their improvised tents of plastic sheeting, beating on the windows, waving tattered pieces of registration paper as proof that they were entitled to be members of Afghanistan's Maslakh centre, the largest refugee camp in the world.
Desperate for help, these women, some carrying babies, were just a few hundred of the 120,000 Afghans stuck at the Maslakh centre, a vast, sprawling and anarchic camp outside Herat in western Afghanistan. The camp has seen the biggest influx of the dispossessed. Its inhabitants face disaster as winter takes grip.
Every week a few hundred come to join those already at Maslakh. They are what the aid agencies call IDPs (internally displaced people). People who had seen drought turn fertile land into dust and stone in the provinces of Badghis, Ghor and Fariah. The numbers exploded with the war: before September there were no more than 30,000 there.
Maslakh has become a byword for the chaos and confusion that has accompanied much of the aid effort in Afghanistan in the past. The camp was started nine years ago by a local aid agency. It was soon growing out of control. There was little help from international aid agencies, whose efforts were undermined by systematic harassment from the Taleban.
Dr Syed Abubakr Rasooli, now the director of the World Health Organisation in Herat, worked then for the Ministry of Public Health. He recalls: "A mullah, a Pashtun peasant from the Kandahar area, was made my boss.
The WHO gave us three motorcycles to visit the refugees. My boss, the mullah, gave them to the Taleban. Soon the mullah was driving around in an air-conditioned Land Cruiser, and the refugees were not getting what little they had before."
The Taleban enforced their harsh regime in the camps. Amina Tolah, a 37-year-old health education teacher at Maslakh, said: "Men and women were working together. The situation was so serious we simply had to. Then the Talibs came, they beat the men and took them away and abused us, calling us prostitutes. We were told to go home."
In September, with the number of refugees doubling by the week, and facing a humanitarian disaster, the International Organisation for Migration took over the running of the camp. Dan Gill, the organisation's director in Herat, said: "What we discovered was shocking. It was a complete disaster. It was the worst example of a bad situation. The international agencies had basically given up on Afghanistan, it was a lost cause.
"Maslakh is not a camp, it's a city. We are trying to get these people to go back home, with support."
But most people at Maslakh have nowhere to go back to. For many this "city" of scorched earth and dust is still better than what they came from.
Noorjahan, a frail, bent woman in her sixties from Badghis, squats in front of the tent of 12 square feet she shares with her daughter and eight grandchildren. There are a few tattered blankets for warmth. It is she and the younger children who suffer most in the freezing nights. "It's cold, always so cold, there is no warmth left in our bodies," she said, hugging her youngest grandchild, a pretty girl of two.
"We get very little to eat, but back home we would not get anything at all. We sold everything, our sheep, our land, but that was not enough. My son died, and we decided to come for shelter here. But then on the way my husband died too."
Workers for World Vision who have just visited Badghis found a land laid bare by the drought. Abdullah Salamar and his wife, Gulsh, have just come from there. Three of their children had died, one on the long trek to Maslakh. "It was our baby," said Gulsh, looking into the distance, her eyes vacant. "I was so weak I couldn't suckle my baby, and she went away."
Dr Rasooli said: "They should close the camp, it is out of control."
"But where do we go to?" asked Mohammed Bassat, who had arrived with his four children, leaving the home where his wife had died. "There is nothing left for us at home, nothing. Everything is gone. We live in an accursed land."
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