Pakistan: The Bigger Battle

As war rages through the Swat valley with the government finally having grown a spine and doing what it should have done long ago by fighting the Taliban; an even bigger battle is now being waged. The bigger battle is to care for what is perhaps the largest single sudden movement of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the history of the nation; with numbers on the move getting revised upwards almost hourly. According to the 1998 census there were 1,257,602 people living in the valley, a decade later there are perhaps 1.5 million and it is possible that between one third and a half of that number are fleeing for their lives. Thus between half and three-quarters of a million people are going to need food, shelter, water, medical care and, most importantly, security; within the next ten days to a fortnight. As if this were not enough – and no government anywhere would find an adequate quick response to numbers of IDPs of that magnitude – we are already host to a large refugee population that shows no early sign of going back to where they came from. Perhaps to our fortune both the provincial government of NWFP and the UNHCR as well as other NGOs and national organizations have long experience of handling refugees and IDPs and it is obvious that the machinery of care is already clicking into gear.

It is difficult to conceptualise the sheer scale of the refugee and IDP burden that Pakistan has borne for decades and continues to bear today. As rolling news channels cover the latest influx, the last wave of human unhappiness disappears into a cloud of unknowing there to be administered and managed by the agencies whose job it is to do so. For instance, how many will remember that in early March this year the Pakistan government signed a pact with the UN refugee agency to continue to host 1.7 million Afghan refugees until 2012 – another three years hence? Under the agreement the UNHCR will raise $140 million from the international community to fund the Refugee Affected and Hosting Areas (RAHA) programme, which includes development projects aimed at boosting employment prospects, reviving agricultural and irrigation systems, repairing farm to market roads, improving crop and livestock production, and marketing produce. Which is all very well and we are pleased that the UNHCR is helping us with the hosting of Afghan refugees as they are – but the fact remains that they are still in Pakistan, are here until at least 2012 and with the way things are going in Afghanistan today the likelihood of them wanting to up-sticks and wend their way home – ever – is slim.

Within the month it is possible that the total number of refugees and IDPs of all sorts and origins within Pakistan is going to top three million, and one of the world's poorest countries will be hosting one of the worlds largest populations of displaced persons. Most refugees and IDPs do eventually return to their homes, and as long as the army does the job thoroughly and cleanses Swat of the Taliban cancer, and as long as the politicians do not discard their newly-grown spinal column, then the Swatis can go home. Their home will have been substantially damaged by warfare, and they are going to need post-conflict reconstructive help for decades to come – which will be neither cheap nor easy to fund. The rueful irony is that we would never have got to this position but for bungling and gutless governance. No wonder the rest of the world looks at us and shakes its head in bemused puzzlement.