Moscow’s Afghans Watch Anxiously

By Kevin O’Flynn
STAFF WRITER

If it weren’t for the typical Soviet ugliness

of the Sevastopol Hotel, a visitor
roaming its shabby corridors might believe
he was no longer in Moscow:
Along the walls, signs in Arabic script
abound, young dark-haired men walk
around holding hands, the spicy smell of
Central Asian cooking wafts in from an
outdoor cafe and improvised shops are
packed with specially imported rice and
sugar-coated almonds.
The hotel, a bleak monstrosity at the
southern edge of the city, has become
the unofficial base for thousands of
refugees who fled Afghanistan during
more than 20 years of war, most of them
within the last decade. Now, as the
United States prepares for a military operation
against the small mountainous
nation in response to this month’s terrorist
attacks, the Afghan refugees here
are waiting and wondering what will
happen to their country.
Few actually live in the hotel; instead,
the Afghans — along with Chinese,
Indian and Pakistani immigrants
— rent the dilapidated rooms as unofficial
shops where they sell in bulk everything
from clocks and calculators to
foodstuffs imported from Asia and the
Middle East.
Naweed, a daily newspaper published
in both the Pashto and Dari languages
and based in the hotel, reflects
the anxiety of the refugee community.
Front page stories are dominated by
news of Osama bin Laden and the possibility
of U.S. attacks, as the relatives of
those left behind watch Washington
with trepidation.
In the Naweed office, Sultan Rikwaeda,
a former lecturer at Kabul University,
snatches up a ringing phone. Rikwaeda,
a refugee, came to Moscow from
London with the belief that events in
Afghanistan could be better tracked
from here. The call is from his brother
who still lives in Kabul and needs money.
People are fleeing the cities as fear of
air strikes mounts, Rikwaeda said in a
recent interview, adding that peoplesmugglers
operating on the Pakistani
border have hiked their prices.
Fear for the safety of the many relatives
left in Afghanistan has overwhelmed
Farouk Farda, Naweed’s editor.
“I don’t call because then I will have
to cry,” he said, downplaying the likelihood
of a U.S. invasion.
“I don’t think the Americans will act
like that,” Farda said. “I speak like an
optimist. I don’t want it to happen.”
Farda, like many of the Afghan
refugees in Russia, is a former member
of the communist elite that once ruled
the country with the backing of the Soviet
Union. Once the deputy leader of
the Afghan counterpart to the Komsomol
youth movement, Farda came to
Russia in 1992, three years after the Soviet
Union withdrew its troops and just
after the Soviet-backed government was
overrun by the mujahedin.
According to the office of the United
Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees, some 20,000 Afghan asylumseekers
arrived in Russia in the early
1990s, but only about 9,000 of them remain.
Farda estimated that 1,500 work at
the hotel with another 2,000 or so passing
through on a regular basis.
With little to no help from Russian
authorities, the Afghan community is
left to provide for itself. As asylum seekers,
they have little access to health care
and housing, and most of the children
cannot go to school because they lack
the necessary documents.
“We can’t get any medical treatment
and they don’t accept children into
school,” said Farda, adding that plans for
opening a school of their own are under
way. “That’s why it’s very tough for
Afghans.”
Discrimination and bureaucratic hassles
are also common problems.
According to Equilibre-Solidarity,
the UNHCR’s local partner, only about
600 Afghans in all of Russia have received
refugee status since 1993, when
Russia signed on to the UN convention
on refugees.
When considering their country’s political
situation, few of the Afghans here
have any sympathies for either the ruling
Taliban, which is seen as dominated by
foreign Islamic extremists who have
plunged the country into a virtual Stone
Age, or the opposition Northern Alliance,
which is made up of mujahedin
groups that fought against Soviet troops.
“The [Taliban] minister signs [documents]
with his thumbprint,” said General
Gulam Mohammed, a former officer
in the Afghan Interior Ministry and
former governor of Kunar, a region on
the border with Pakistan, who now
works at the Sevastopol’s Afghan Business
Center.
“What kind of minister is that?” he
added with disgust, as a television set in
the corner of his office aired a pre-Taliban
Afghan film broadcast on the
refugee community’s own station, also
based in the hotel.
But the idea of intervention by Washington
is not welcomed.
“If they send an army without the
permission of the United Nations, without
the agreement of the people, all the
people of Afghanistan will be against it,”
said Farda. “It doesn’t mean we support
the Taliban. These are separate problems
— with the Taliban and with American
forces.”
“Afghanistan is not such a simple
country that [its problems] can be decided
in the Pentagon,” said General
Mohammed.
The refugees remember well what
happened when the United States fired
missiles on Afghanistan in an attempt to
hit bin Laden’s bases in 1998.
“They didn’t even kill any Arabs.
They killed only Afghans,” said Farda.
“They can’t bomb bin Laden. They will
bomb the people.”
“For one man they’ll kill a whole
city,” said a scornful Bashir Khan, a former
electrical engineer from Kabul who
now sells clocks and nail files in the hotel.
And the refugees, like many Russian
Afghan veterans, warn that the United
States will come unstuck as the Soviet
army did during its bloody but fruitless
10-year war there.
“The United States has extremely accurate
missiles, but Afghanistan has a
billion very accurate rocks,” said Mohammed.
“And under every rock there
is a hole where you can hide. Only an
atomic bomb will do the trick.”
“How much did Russia pay [for invading
Afghanistan]?” Khan asked
rhetorically. “America will pay more. We
know our people. … If they say jihad,
then women, men, children will fight.”
Many of the refugees blame the
United States for Afghanistan’s collapse,
saying Washington supported the mujahedin
— including bin Laden himself —
in the fight against the Soviet Union with
billions of dollars.
“It’s America who sent bin Laden to
Afghanistan and bin Laden was a hero
for America,” said Farda.
He and many others at the Sevastopol
believe that military success
against Afghanistan is impossible without
a comprehensive approach, including
the support of the UN and the émigré
population.
“If you arrest bin Laden there’ll be
another hundred to take his place,” said
Farda. “If you want to resolve the problem,
you must resolve the whole problem
of Afghanistan
.”