Updated on 3/23/2002 9:35:37 AM
KABUL (SANA): The rented bus hummed with excitement.
Mojeeb, 12, clutched a parrot cage and a certificate from an English language course. Shazia, 22, glowed in a royal blue velvet dress, her infant daughter dozing in her lap. Kobra, 36, balanced a niece in one arm and a box of family portraits in the other.Two days before, the Sawan family had left their home of six years, a refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, and set out for Kabul.
They joined a swelling stream of nearly 200,000 Afghans - including 50,000 in the past two weeks alone - who have crossed the border and headed home since November, when the Taliban Islamic movement was driven from Kabul, reports The Washington Post.
Some are middle-class families with government jobs and houses waiting for them in the capital. Others are former villagers who have few belongings or plans for the future, except to crowd in with urban relatives and seek a modest niche in the burgeoning, chaotic economic scene of post-Taliban city life.
Already, relief officials here said, their numbers are far higher than anyone had predicted. Kabul may be flooded with homeless job-seekers, they say, just as it begins to recover from two decades of turmoil and isolation. And the countryside offers even less; four years of crippling drought have destroyed farms and displaced a half-million Afghans.
"We try to encourage people to return to their villages, but we can't stop them from coming to the city, even though it has little capacity to absorb them," said Yusuf Hassan, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which recently set up a registration center for returnees just inside the Afghan-Pakistani border.
On the other hand, U.N. officials said, the capital needs to replenish the ranks of skilled workers and professionals who fled en masse over the years, and they noted approvingly that a small but noticeable minority of the newly registered arrivals clearly fit that category.
"We are seeing young women with nail polish and stockings, young men who have graduated [from college] and say they want to help their country," said Fernando del Mundo, a U.N. aide.
"They still stop to pick up the wheat and cash we provide, but it seems like the Kabul cafe society is beginning to return." The Sawans, a lower-middle-class Kabul family that includes a policeman and a tailor, planned their return carefully.
Two older male relatives came back in January after the new interim government announced it would reinstate employees fired by the Taliban.
They fixed up their neglected houses and sent word for their wives, children and younger relatives to join them.
On Monday, the extended family of 12 crossed the border and registered at the U.N. station.
On Tuesday their bus reached the outskirts of Kabul, where they paused at a second U.N. welcome center and stuffed donated sacks of wheat, quilts and plastic sheets into the jumble of household goods that filled every unoccupied seat.
Twenty minutes later, as the city came into sight, the passengers glued their faces to the windows, searching for familiar landmarks.
Mojeeb crouched beside the driver, instructing him where to turn.
Shazia pointed with amazement at soldiers in clean new uniforms, and with delight at women walking in the streets unveiled. "That's good," she exclaimed. Her own full-length burqa was turned back over her hair, but she was poised to yank it across her face in case it was still needed after five years of strict Islamic rule. "I don't want to wear the burqa. It's like a sack of flour," she said with a grimace.
"After a while, you become unconscious." Several younger sisters and female cousins said they were looking forward to going to school, now that the Taliban era was over.
Their family had fled Kabul in part because the Taliban barred female education after seizing the capital in 1996, but the Sawan girls kept up with their studies in Peshawar and brought their academic records on the bus.
Turiali, 22, Shazia's husband, was both eager and worried.
Like many youthful refugees, he had abandoned his education and worked at menial jobs in Peshawar, loading carts and weaving carpets.
Now, with a wife and child to support, he wondered where he would find a decent job and whether he could afford English lessons.
"I want to make a new life for myself in Kabul, but it's not going to be easy," Turiali said.
"There are thousands of trucks coming across the border, with six or seven families in each one.
Peshawar will be empty soon, and Kabul will be full.
"But even if we end up with our pockets bleeding, it's better to be home," he said.
"Even if I die now, I'll be happy." Halfway across the city, the bus stopped to let off another family, bound for Kunduz province in the north.
As their bundles were being tossed from the roof, Shazia leapt off the bus, her new velvet dress shimmering as she knelt and kissed the ground.
"Praise God, I'm back in my beloved homeland, and damn Pakistan," she declared bitterly, echoing the complaints of many returning refugees who said they had endured constant snubs by Peshawar residents over the years, as well as harassment by police who routinely extorted them for money.
During two decades of conflict and hardship, more than 4 million Afghans fled to Pakistan and Iran.
The largest number settled in the dusty neighborhoods and crowded camps of Peshawar, where they received some foreign aid but burdened public services and competed for low-level jobs in the impoverished border city.
Now the tide has begun to turn, with thousands of families streaming out of the camps and massing in trucks and buses at the U.N. registration center inside the border.
About half give their destinations as rural villages, but many have instead aimed for Kabul, though no jobs or homes await them there.
"I don't know what to do.
There are 450 families heading to Kabul today, and no houses to rent.
I have to find some tents to give them shelter," Akram Garib, the leader of one refugee camp, said today.
He stood at the U.N. welcome center outside Kabul, surrounded by anxious men whose families waited in crowded trucks and buses nearby.
One of the travelers, 32-year-old Zahmat Shah, decided to continue on to the city with his extended family of 10, vaguely hoping to find shelter with relatives.
Hopping off the bus at a city fruit market, he vanished into an alley and returned with a distant cousin, who smiled gamely and invited them all to stay.
Soon the Shahs were unloading carpets, bicycles and a washing machine in the cousin's yard, promising to stay only a few days.
Zahmat, who had sold chickens in Peshawar, said he hoped to open a butcher shop.
The family was originally from Kunduz, but their village had been destroyed and he saw no future for them there.
"I am starting with zero," said Zahmat, who limps from several old bullet wounds suffered while he was fighting in the anti-Taliban militia.
"My jihad is to feed my children, but if we have to live on bread and water, we still want to be back in Afghanistan." While the Shahs were setting up camp at their cousin's, the Sawans were across the city, settling into the three-room mud house they had abandoned in 1996.
In the intervening years, the adobe walls had been damaged by militia rockets and the kitchen charred black by nomad squatters.
But in January, Turiali's brother-in-law Ghulam, a wiry man of 42, returned from Peshawar to take up his old job as a police sergeant.
By this week, he had cleaned out the house, rebricked the half-collapsed walls and planted three apple trees in the yard.
There was no furniture, electricity or running water in the house, but the family seemed unfazed.
As the men lugged bundles and trunks from the bus, the women unrolled a carpet in the yard and set the babies down.
Kobra opened her box of family photos; Mojeeb fed the parrot and raced off to play with neighborhood boys; Shazia dug out some glass cups and poured tea from a thermos.
"I guess it seems like a small place, but in Pakistan we were five families crowded in one house," said Kobra, surveying the barren yard with satisfaction.
"We're going to love it here."