“And it’s going to get worse”

George Friou, executive director of the AIDS Project, remembers his time treating Afghan refugees in Pakistan, and offers insight on the current refugee crisis

By Gibson Fay-LeBlanc

A executive director of The AIDS Project in Portland, George Friou is busy directing services for hundreds of people living with HIV/AIDS in the city and planning a recently announced merger with the Peabody House, another AIDS nonprofit (and my current employer). He keeps a close eye on world news, however. He hears from his friends in Islamabad. He knows that our current “War on Terrorism” will have consequences far beyond civilians killed by stray ordinance.

Only 10 years ago, Friou was coordinating public health services for tens of thousands of Afghans in Pakistan who had fled their country as part of an earlier crisis — the power vacuum caused by the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan. He first went to Pakistan to work for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in 1987 and left in 1991 as the Gulf War was beginning.

The IRC is usually one of the first organizations to go into any situation — usually a war or natural disaster — that leaves mass amounts of people without homes. They set up temporary camps for the refugees to live in and take care of their basic needs. It is estimated that there are four million Afghan refugees from the 1980s and early 1990s still living in those camps in Pakistan and Iran, a few of which Friou helped set up.

The UN estimates that the current crisis could result in another 7.5 million refugees fleeing into Pakistan and Iran.

As we have been reminded in news reports over the

last several weeks, there has been war in Afghanistan for some time. Twenty years ago, the Afghans were fighting the Soviet Union, and the US was trying to help the Afghan “freedom fighters” prevent the Soviets from taking control of the country. Today, of course, the irony is that the US is allies with Russia and many of the former Soviet Republics, and we are at war with Afghanistan because of terrorists; some of whom, bin Laden included, we paid for Pakistani intelligence to train when they were fighting the Soviets.

It is, in George Friou’s words, “a mess.” As someone who has experienced it first hand, he should know. The Phoenix sat down with him this week for a glimpse into refugee life.

 

Phoenix: Where were you in Pakistan?

Friou: Near Peshawar. I was actually right on the border with Afghanistan. We wanted to be as close to the border as possible in the event that the refugees could go back.

 

Q: Were the refugees that you worked with fleeing as a result of Afghanistan’s war with the then Soviet Union?

A: The ones that I specifically came in for were fleeing Afghanistan because the Soviet Union was pulling out. They were fleeing the fighting that had broken out to see who would get control of the country. There already had been camps set up in Pakistan and Iran when the Soviet Union first invaded around 1980. Those camps became well entrenched, well situated over the years; they really became part of the infrastructure of the two countries. That poses other difficulties as well. Imagine getting another million people in Portland. Then all these guys start setting up shops along the waterfront, competing with the local shops. Suddenly, your shop’s sales are going down, and you get angry.

 

Q: What were some of the major medical and social issues that you dealt with in the refugee camps?

A: I was involved with the public health issues: setting up clinics, bathrooms, and food. You need to get those three things set up first, along with making sure that people can keep their head, hands, and feet warm. I coordinated a group of Pakistani doctors and nurses in the clinic system we set up. Once we had all that in motion, then we started to worry about how we were going to educate the children, set up schools, keep that part of society moving. Different organizations come in to take care of different aspects of the camp. An organization from Sweden would be in charge of education. The UN split up all the work and directed all the organizations. If we didn’t have the UN, we’d have been in trouble because each group always thinks they know how to do everything the best.

The lack of immunization among the refugees came into play as well. In a situation like that, you have the potential for epidemics of various kinds. And the refugees weren’t used to being immunized. All the agencies that used to do immunizations in Afghanistan were pulled out or blown up when the Soviet Union invaded. You had 10 years with no infrastructure for health.

 

Q: You and the other camp workers, all of whom were probably immunized as children, probably carried diseases you were immune to that would be lethal for the refugees.

A: That’s right. And we had to train women to do immunizations because, as a man, I could never give a woman a shot. It goes against their cultural beliefs.

 

Q: How long did it take to get the basic facilities set up?

A: We had a clinic up in three days. We had the latrines built in about two weeks. We had to do that for 30,000 people; had to plan it, spread it out, and consider the cultural aspect of things. You can’t just have one bathroom. The men and the women’s bathroom had to be far apart. We had to think about who was coming across, which groups of people. You can’t expect this particular group to get along with that one. So, we had to split the camp up into sub-groups, and they each had their chiefs, their mullahs. That whole cultural aspect of things is really tough.

 

Q: It’s like setting up a city the size of Lewiston, in a few weeks.

A: Yeah, and who’s running it? You couldn’t have just one person overseeing everything. You didn’t want to have fighting within the camp. You need power sharing. Mostly, the refugees were women and children and older men. Everybody else was in Afghanistan, fighting. So you had the mullahs sort of controlling the politics of the camp.

 

Q: What were some of the hardest things you had to deal with working in the refugee camps?

A: I was in a camp called Shindon. That camp had 30,000 people come across in a day and a half. The most traumatic part was that we lost about 19 or 20 kids in the first couple of hours. They had walked so far and were all dehydrated. Once you get that many people in one area with no place to go to the bathroom, dysentery sets in like wild fire. Even the clinics aren’t as important as having a place to go to the bathroom without having to live in it. That was hard for me. Losing kids is really hard to watch. They would bring the children up to me to show me that they were dead. That was hard to deal with.

I learned to be sensitive but not to become too involved. You have to teach yourself to do that or you’ll sort of shut down. I had to accept that the refugee situation, the people dying, it’s a part of war. We tried to stem the tide and make it a better situation.

We’d set up these burial sites, and as the number of dead increased, you’d see the sticks in the ground for each person that died off in the distance. It increased each day. But once we got control of things, we had to focus more on the political issues in the running of the camp.

 

FACES OF THE ENEMY?: “a lot of the kids that we worked with in the camps are now the Taliban.”

Q: What kind of political issues?

A: Once the camps were set up, we started having more serious well drilling. The local Pakistani people noticed that their water supply was disappearing. They figured out that here the UN was doing this massive, multi-million dollar project to provide water for the refugees . . . We started having fighting between the locals and the refugees. A few of us were driving down the road, and we got caught right in the middle of the crossfire. The windows were all blown out. We all shoved down into the bottom of the car, and the driver just floored it out of there. They weren’t fighting us; we were just caught in the middle. It was a serious situation — we were guilty of taking water from the locals and at the same time we were trying to take care of a critical situation with the refugees. The locals and the refugees had to share control of the new wells, so they could all have enough water.

 

Q: I’m just thinking about how hard it must have been to work in that situation and to never have it be enough, to see people suffering and dying around you.

A: It’s like trying to understand the catastrophe in New York City and Washington, DC. We’d watch these hordes of people coming over the border in this desert-like climate, just dropping. Then once we got things somewhat settled, we got involved with some of the children. You know, you ask them to draw some pictures, and all they’re drawing is helicopters shooting at them. That’s a telling story of how these kids have grown up. And a lot of the kids that we worked with in the camps are now the Taliban. They’re [former] refugees and students of them that were educated by the Pakistanis to go back over to Afghanistan and take over. And they did. All they’ve seen is war. And they’re good at it.

 

Q: You could say that the popularity of the Taliban grew out of this earlier refugee crisis.

A: They were educated in a hard-line way. It was a terrible situation, and the Pakistanis really took advantage of that. They’re regretting it now.

Q: Right now, Pakistan is trying to hold the border closed, and the Taliban are supposedly setting up refugee camps in Afghanistan. Recent reports said that 1000 to 2000 people were getting across the border a day, but that there were groups of 15,000 people who were waiting to be allowed into the country.

A: They won’t wait for long. Once they start dropping, they’ll move, they’ll have to. I don’t see the Taliban setting up refugee camps.

 

Q: How many people were in the camps you worked in?

A: The camp I was in was set up in addition to the camps that were already there. There were 250,000 in the area. But that includes the refugees that had been living there since the early 1980s.

 

Q: The UN has estimated that there could be 7.5 million refugees as a result of this situation.

A: I think the UN is going to have to play a huge part in taking care of people. [The refugees] are going to have to go somewhere, and most won’t be able to go back to Afghanistan.

All of those people that have been in Iran and Pakistan for all these years can’t go back. They’re getting educated in ways that the Taliban won’t support. They probably have their own cultural norms now. There needs to be some other form of government before they can go back.

A lot of the people that we worked with in the refugee camps, their lives would become endangered after a certain time. [My wife] educated women, and that’s so against the Afghan culture. It was our natural reaction that we needed to educate people. We hired Afghan men to teach as well. Many of those people had to be given political asylum in the US.

 

Q: We hear about it so much in the news, but what’s the city of Peshawar like?

A: Peshawar is comparable to the gun slinging old West. Everybody has weapons, and they show them. If there is an altercation, they take care of it there and then. We had to be very careful. And, of course, the Pakistanis didn’t like us. We were there with all this money for the Afghans. There was tons of money coming in to Peshawar, and [the local citizens] were poor. I could agree with [their anger]. You didn’t want to get in a political discussion about it, because you knew you’d lose.

 

Q: Unless you’ve been in a situation like that, it hard to have a good sense of how our country is viewed in other parts of the world.

A: It is. And we have no idea of how involved we are in this mess right now. I don’t want to go down [on record] about how involved we really are. I saw it over there.

 

Q: Right now, it’s hard to say anything critical in this country without being viewed as the enemy.

A: And it’s going to get worse. They’ve given the FBI and the CIA green lights to become much more involved in our lives. This guy, Tom Ridge [the new Director of Homeland Security], is tapping into local police departments and state troopers. Some of our freedoms are going away. Maybe it’s necessary, I don’t know.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc can be reached at riverbetweenus@hotmail.com.