PHOTO ESSAY
Into the Arms of Hardship
Photographer John Stanmeyer documents the difficult lives of Afghan refugee brickmakers in Pakistan
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Burden of Sanctuary
Fleeing famine and constant war, Afghans cross the border—to become near slaves
By TERRY MCCARTHY Karkhla
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JOHN STANMEYER/VII for TIME
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Afghan refugee laborers at a brickmaking factory near Peshawar, Pakistan
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Farras Khan Shinwari starts work early, before the sun has risen over the red plains of Karkhla, 15 km east of Peshawar in northwest Pakistan. After a meager breakfast of tea and dry nan with his brothers, he starts sprinkling water on the mound of red clay they will mix and form into bricks. All around him on the plain, hundreds of illegal Afghan migrants squat barefoot in the clay, forming bricks with their hands for less than a dollar a day. Even the pittance they get here is more than they could make at home in Afghanistan. Farras will work for 13 hours today.
Farras is four years old.
Karkhla plain is a stark portrait of Afghanistan's plight: one of the world's poorest and most battle-scarred people, plagued by superpower struggles and their own tribal and ethnic feuds, reduced to fleeing to neighboring countries to do menial work for a beggar's wage. Afghans are on their knees, and only international aid can help them back to their feet. "There is nothing in Afghanistan," says Ibrahim Khan Shinwari, Farras' father, who brought his family from the village of Battan in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province two years ago to make bricks for the GI Brick Co., owned by a relatively well-off businessman from nearby Hayatabad. "We are waiting to go back, if conditions get better."
Afghanistan was in a crisis well before the Sept. 11 attacks raised the prospect of U.S. military reprisals. After 23 years of war, Afghans are desperately poor—per capita GDP is estimated at $800, illiteracy is more than 70% and life expectancy for males is just under 47 years. The country has suffered drought for three years, food supplies have almost been exhausted and, under the Taliban, the economy has been reduced to little more than subsistence farming and smuggling.
Ibrahim, a veteran of the mujahedin struggle against the Soviets from 1979-89, has a small farm at the base of the mountains in Nangarhar. He used to harvest wheat and corn and grow walnuts, apricots and grapes on his land. But since the onset of drought, he hasn't been able to grow enough to live on, so he came to Karkhla. He is not officially registered as a refugee and has no ID papers, but the Pakistani police leave people like him alone as long as they don't try to make their way to a major city. Local employers clearly like the cheap labor. Some of the money Ibrahim and his sons earn making bricks he sends back to relatives in his village to help them buy food.
The United Nations estimates that there are some 3 million internally displaced Afghans on top of the 3.5 million Afghan refugees living in camps in Pakistan and Iran. The World Food Program was already feeding 3.8 million people inside the country before Sept. 11. Aid workers now say perhaps double that number risk starvation when winter comes. So far there has been no huge surge of dispossessed into Pakistan, but the U.N. High Commission for Refugees is making contingency plans for up to 1.5 million Afghans it says might flee the country after an expected U.S. military strike begins.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has appealed for $584 million in emergency aid for Afghanistan, and American President George W. Bush announced that the U.S. would donate up to $320 million in economic assistance. Last week the World Food Program sent more than 700 tons of food by road to Kabul; the group says it will need to ship in 372,000 tons over the course of the winter. But since the middle of September, foreign aid workers have been forced out of the country, and supervising the distribution of food aid is becoming more difficult. The Bush Administration is anxious to soften any military attack on Afghanistan with humanitarian aid to civilians—there are even plans to air-drop food supplies to people who cannot be reached by road.
These are desperate times for the Afghans. Even the migrants working for the brickmakers in Pakistan say they cannot see any way forward for their country. "I cannot say it will be peaceful again in my lifetime—only God knows," says Ahmed Shah, who left his village of Bachkot in Nangarhar a year ago. The despondency is widespread. Farras has a constant cough, a runny nose and an open sore on his cheek. His mother puts kohl around his eyes to ward off bad spirits—they cannot afford medicine. Neither Farras nor any of his 10 brothers have gone to school—there is no school in their village and, like their father, they will likely be illiterate all their lives. Farras has never had any toys—at home the ruling Taliban banned even kite flying, and here in Pakistan they cannot afford such things in the bazaar.
As the sun goes down at the end of a long day, Ibrahim's family of 12 has made 2,400 bricks. They are paid $1.60 per thousand. The workers kneel down and pray in the field. Tomorrow they will start the same routine over again—mixing clay, molding bricks and drying, stacking and loading them onto packhorses to carry to the kiln. The product of their labor goes mostly to build merchants' houses in Peshawar or Hayatabad. The Shinwari family can only dream of the day when bricks made by their hands can be used to rebuild their own shattered country.
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