Statement of Hassan Ghulam, A. R. C.

The Young Man’s experiences with offices in Pakistan was that the pace of work was not frantic. When he went to the Special Branch of the police station in Peshawar to get the document which he was required to carry as an alien, the police chief and his subordinates all knocked off and had him take snapshot after snapshot of them. They made him promise to send copies. — “We make everybody take pictures, but they never send them to us, ” the police chief lamented. — The Young Man did not send his snapshots to them either, because in every one the police chief looked quite sinister in his dark sunglasses. — In the post offices in Karachi and Peshawar, they sent you from window to window whenever they could, opened late, closed early, and took long lunches. To transact business at the office of the state tourist bureau in Peshawar, it was necessary to bang on the door for a long time, because the official, a gentle, boyish-looking fellow with dark hair, would lock the door, turn on the air conditioning, and stretch out on the carpet to sleep away the long, happy day.

The Afghan Refugee Office was another matter. It was housed in a huge building full of guards, waiting rooms and variously stamped passes. True, Commissioner Abdullah did keep the Young Man sitting for three hours after his appointment — but this was due less to a relaxed attitude than to the pressure of more important business. Abdullah was an imposing, brisk man who was not at all impressed with his guest; why, the Young Man felt just as if he were back in his own country! — He was said, this Abdullah, to be a supporter of the Gulbuddin faction, and to direct some of his office’s resources toward it (for it was of course impossible to separate refugees from Mujahideen). — The Young Man hoped that he could draw Abdullah out on this with clever and subtle questions. He failed utterly.

The office had a wide wooden desk that was piled with papers. The phone rang several times. Many people needed to see the Commissioner. In the waiting room were racks of brochures about the different camps, almost as if they were summer camps.

“Are you getting everything that you need from the relief organizations? ” the Young Man asked.

“Not everything that we need, ” Abdullah frowned, “but we are getting substantial assistance in many sectors. Our basic problem is that our population always exceeds the level of assistance that we receive from outside, from the U.N.H.C.R. or the voluntary organizations. (We have about sixteen of them in our province, including this I.R.C. that you’re talking about.) And that complicates the problem of distribution; we have increasingly more people to feed; and it’s very difficult to plan when you are dealing with such quantities as appear in the Afghan question. But fortunately in the last two years we have managed to evolve a workable pattern of distribution in planning the requirements of the refugees, particularly in the health sector. So we do get the assistance, and we hope it continues, but it wouldn’t be quite correct to say that we get everything that we need. We are dealing with a continuing emergency, and the world outside should see it like that.”

“So you want a continuation of the same level of aid or an increase? ”

“Obviously the level must increase. We have more people to feed, we have more people to heal, we have more people to clothe, to give drinking water to; we have more cattle — and the logistical problems involved are enormous, you know. We had only 300, 000 people in 1979; that is our base, that is the benchmark. And in the last one and a half years, we have about 2.2 million people …”^†

“Do you have much of a problem with dishonesty — refugees reporting larger families than they have, and so forth? ”

“No, ” cried Abdullah, annoyed, “that is a human factor; you always find it in all refugee theaters in the world. I don’t think it’s the kind of factor which should affect our planning or the basic health of this operation. We have been fully cognizant of the situation right from the beginning, and in this last reevaluation operation, which continued more than five months (and even now it is continuing in some areas), we have become very sure of our figures. Those unverifiable families have not been counted.”

Commissioner Abdullah, it seemed, spoke on so lofty a level that the Young Man could not relate the words to anything in his experience. For the life of him he could not get a single concrete picture from what the man said.

“How possible do you think it is to separate refugee aid from political aid for the Afghans? ” he said, hoping to hear some reference to Gulbuddin.

“Well, that question need not be asked at this forum, for we basically deal with the refugees, not with the politicians. But when you help the refugees, you, in a way, directly or indirectly, are helping their cause also. So, the greatest help for the refugees would be to create conditions where they could go back to their country and live there peacefully and honorably.”

“I was under the impression that certain political groups … were doing a great deal for the refugees on their own …”

“… Yes, they do…, ” said Abdullah. “We treat them all alike …”^‡

At the end of the interview, Abdullah made him play the tape back for him, listened very carefully, approved it, and dismissed him.

Going back out, he lost his way and passed through a suite of do-nothing clerks whose desks were clean of papers, pencils, or anything other than their bare feet. They were rolling cigarettes on their knees.