Don't forget the refugees

The news about a possible influx of 1.5 million Afghan refugees across the border into Pakistan soon should have sent shock waves throughout civilized nations.

Since the United States threatened to attack Afghanistan two weeks ago, about 20,000 Afghans have crossed the border into Pakistan, despite the border already being closed because Pakistan had already become home to three million long-term Afghan refugees. But the fear of mass murder by the modern American war machine has been so menacing for the simple people, who consist mostly of women and children, while their husbands or fathers have returned home once the former have reached the border.

Watching this drama, we should bear in mind that the Afghan people had earlier fallen victim to the narrow-minded Taliban rule that replaced 13 years of murderous occupation by the Soviet Union and its puppet regimes that ruled the landlocked country after the Soviets had quit. During that bloody period no less than two million Afghans were killed, beside another six million who were forced to leave the country.

Following the American threat, which has driven these people out of their homes due to the hunt for Osama bin Laden, we can assure ourselves that the ill-fated refugees must never have seen bin Laden, much less Washington's proof that the Saudi citizen had been the mastermind of the WTC and Pentagon attacks in the United States.

Whatever is in the mind of these Afghans and whatever the nature of the American attacks on their country, the refugees are suffering beyond words. Even in the most pessimistic scenario, the refugees will surely lose their property and sources of income at home, and their children will become a lost generation.

Whether Washington has threatened a war or not, the Afghan people have already been on the brink of widespread famine, with nearly a quarter of them desperately short of food, as the United Nations said recently, because food aid stocks were running out fast. The Rome-based World Food Program, the leading food aid agency operating in Afghanistan, was feeding around 3.5 million Afghans, before pulling out its expatriate staff last week amid fears of U.S. air strikes following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

To avert a humanitarian catastrophe United Nations Secretary- General Kofi Annan asked donor countries last week for US$584 million. The money, he said, was needed to help an estimated 7.5 million Afghans survive from October to March next year amid the likely breakdown of aid programs. Almost half the appeal, $273 million, is for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and other UN agencies, to handle an increase in people that are expected to flee the threat of U.S. military reprisals against Afghanistan.

The appeal should first have been responded to by Washington itself as a moral obligation because the Afghans would not have been at the border if the war threats had not been made. The same should be felt by rich Muslim Middle East countries that have the financial capability to help. If a Hollywood actress, Angelina Jolie, can donate $1 million to the Afghans, the affluent Muslim kingdoms should also have offered a helping hand.

Indonesians who threatened to go to Kabul to confront the American attackers need to consider the actual plight of the Afghan refugees. They are badly in need of food, shelter and medicine, not jihad warriors. Much less hollow slogans.