Mazaher, who did not want his full name published, is one of the newest arrivals among the approximately 2 million refugees who have come to Iran since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. (A similar number have gone to Pakistan.) But he is among the very few who has managed to make it into Iran since the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. The Iranian government announced immediately after the hijacked planes flew into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center that it would deport any Afghan refugee who tried to cross the border. Within days, it sent an additional 300,000 troops to join an undisclosed number already patrolling the border. Several detention centers were set up, and new checkpoints appear daily on major roads across the country. Yet for desperate refugees like Mazaher, there are still holes in the 560-mile line that divides Iran from Afghanistan. “There are many places where there are no patrol troops, or they just pass by every once in a while,” says Ghani, a brother of Mazaher who has lived in Iran since the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996. “So you just have to wait and then cross the border.”
Ghani has made several trips back to Afghanistan in the last five years, and was there attending his father-in-law’s funeral on Sept. 11. He decided to bring Mazaher back with him to Iran. “I thought he would have a miserable life, like other Afghans [here], but at least he can live,” says Ghani. The brothers followed a sparsely populated desert route from the Afghan border to Varamin, a town 100 miles south of Tehran. Unlike Afghanistan’s mountainous southern border with Pakistan, the landscape there is flat, and the crossing was made easier because the Hirmand River, which forms part of the border, has been dried up by drought. According to Mazaher, the actual border crossing was “as easy as crossing the street,” but the rest of the journey was a lot tougher. “You have to know the road, and you have to be a desperate Afghan to go through it,” says Ghani.
For Iran, the expected arrival of new refugees fleeing the U.S.-led strikes against Afghanistan presents numerous political problems. The Iranian News Agency quoted Iranian Deputy Health Minister Mohammad-Esmail Akbari as saying he was worried about the health problems that the influx of refugees would create. “In Afghanistan there are numerous diseases common to men and animals. An epidemic would take years to eradicate,” said Akbari. The epidemic scare adds to several problems such as unemployment, drug trafficking and crime that Iranian authorities blame on Afghan refugees in Iran.
Nonetheless, contrary to widely held beliefs in Iran, most Afghans who come here are assimilated in different communities across the country, with fewer than 5 percent living in camps. After his arrival in Tehran a few days ago, Mazaher immediately started to work illegally as a construction worker at the same site as Ghani. Construction is one of most common jobs for Afghan men in Iran, and most of the workers at the site come from the same village as the brothers. Many of them have paid up to $4,000 to the smugglers who brought them from Afghanistan to Iran. The illegal workers have to hide when government inspectors visit the site, but their employer doesn’t want to fire them. “Afghans work much harder than Iranians, and they expect much less,” says their employer, who did not want to be identified. He pays his Afghan workers the equivalent of $3 a day, but has to pay his Iranian workers a minimum of $8, plus insurance.
Last year, the Iranian government started a joint program with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to repatriate those Afghans who could not prove they had reasonable grounds to fear persecution in their country. The program failed because of a series of disagreements between Iranian authorities and UNHCR about defining genuine refugees. Several months ago, the Iranian government announced a long-term plan to repatriate all illegal immigrants and fine or imprison those who employ them. Prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, the ministries of labor and interior hired new staff to deal with illegal immigrants. “We started to have more inspections,” says Mazaher’s employer. “But as soon as the attacks happened we haven’t had even one.”
Tehran’s claim that illegal workers are the main cause of unemployment in the country is tough to prove–there are no studies on how many Iranians would be willing to do the backbreaking jobs that Afghans take. But there is no doubt that the country has suffered from an upsurge in drug-trafficking since the Taliban took control of Kabul. Afghanistan is the biggest producer of opium and heroin in the world, and Iran is a major transit point for the drugs which are produced in Afghanistan. More than 3,000 Iranian soldiers have been killed fighting drug dealers and 85 percent of the world’s opium seizures take place in Iran, yet the authorities admit that they can seize only 15 percent of the drugs that come through the country. Recently British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that the Taliban finances its war with the lives of young British boys and girls. But Iranian authorities complain that prior to Sept, 11 little attention was paid to the problem of drugs in Afghanistan. “We feel almost alone in our fight against drugs,” says an official from the Iranian Drug Control headquarters. “Although it is the people in Western countries that are the main target of the dealers, we have paid the highest price to fight them.”
Iranians also feel that the international community has turned its back on the refugee problem in Afghanistan and its neighboring countries. In the past 10 years, Europe and the United States severely cut their help to organizations such as UNHCR, which helps Afghan refugees in Iran. Last year, UNHCR’s office in Tehran had to stop many of its programs, and several of its staff had to be laid off because of lack of funds. “We were facing donor fatigue,” says UNHCR spokesman Muhammad Nouri. “It was as if different countries were thinking that the Afghan problem would never be solved, and they stopped helping.” But Nouri says there is a resurgence of interest in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks. “It is sad that we need a tragedy like this to regain the interest of the world in Afghanistan.”
Although Iran has announced that it will not accept any more refugees, it is helping several international aid agencies to set up camps inside Afghanistan. NEWSWEEK has learned that Iran has also agreed to transfer goods coming from American organizations. The government’s more lenient attitude toward Afghans may reflect a more general feeling on the street. In many interviews with ordinary Iranians, they say that they feel for Afghans now more than ever. “I used to think of them as criminals who take our jobs,” says Tehran bookkeeper Ahmad Fareghi. “But these days when I see the faces of Afghan children on television I see them as people like us. Just more miserable.” For Mazaher and the 2 million other refugees in Iran, this is good news. “Back in Afghanistan I used to hear that Iranians insult you on the street or give you bad looks,” says Mazaher. “But now a lot of people on the bus and street stop me and ask me how are things in Afghanistan. I see that they really care.”
