Afghan Refugees Quotes

They are a testament not only to the Afghans' hunger for literacy, but also to their willingness to pour scarce resources into this effort, even during a time of war. I have seen children studying in classrooms set up inside animal sheds, windowless basements, garages, and even an abandoned public toilet. We ourselves have run schools out of refugee tents, shipping containers, and the shells of bombed-out Soviet armored personnel carriers. The thirst for education over there is limitless. The Afghans want their children to go to school because literacy represents what neither we not anyone else has so far managed to offer them: hope, progress, and the possibility of controlling their own destiny.

Alyce asks about my religion ... she listens without interruption. Then she tells me what she believes, and I listen. I see nothing wrong with listening to each other's beliefs. I want to know about her religion, just as she wants to know about mine. We can talk about our beliefs without pushing each other to feel wrong.

The women in that ward were simple, ordinary refugee women. They came from villages or very small towns. Even before becoming refugees, they had been poor. They had no education. They had no notion of an outside world where life might be different. They were being treated for various ailments, but in the end, their gender was their ailment. In the first bed, a skinny fourteen-year-old girl lay rolled into her sheets in a state of almost catatonic unresponsiveness, eyes closed, not speaking even in reply to the doctor’s gentle greeting. Her family had brought her to be treated for mental illness, the doctor explained with regret. They had recently married her to a man in his seventies, a wealthy and influential personage by their standards. In their version of things, something had started mysteriously to go wrong with her mind as soon as the marriage was agreed upon – a case of demon possession, her family supposed. When, after repeated beatings, she still failed to cooperate gracefully with her new husband’s sexual demands, he had angrily returned her to her family and ordered them to fix this problem. They had taken the girl to a mullah, who had tried to expel the demon through prayers and by writing Quranic passages on little pieces of paper that had to be dissolved in water and then drunk, but this had brought no improvement, so the mullah had abandoned his diagnosis of demon possession and decided that the girl was sick. The family had brought her to the clinic, to be treated for insanity.

Even before the first Soviet tanks crossed into Afghanistan in 1979, a movement of Islamists had sprung up nationwide in opposition to the Communist state. They were, at first, city-bound intellectuals, university students and professors with limited countryside appeal. But under unrelenting Soviet brutality they began to forge alliances with rural tribal leaders and clerics. The resulting Islamist insurgents—the mujahedeen—became proxies in a Cold War battle, with the Soviet Union on one side and the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia on the other. As the Soviets propped up the Afghan government, the CIA and other intelligence agencies funneled millions of dollars in aid to the mujahedeen, along with crate after crate of weaponry. In the process, traditional hierarchies came radically undone. When the Communists killed hundreds of tribal leaders and landlords, young men of more humble backgrounds used CIA money and arms to form a new warrior elite in their place. In the West, we would call such men “warlords.” In Afghanistan they are usually labeled “commanders.” Whatever the term, they represented a phenomenon previously unknown in Afghan history. Now, each valley and district had its own mujahedeen commanders, all fighting to free the country from Soviet rule but ultimately subservient to the CIA’s guns and money. The war revolutionized the very core of rural culture. With Afghan schools destroyed, millions of boys were instead educated across the border in Pakistani madrassas, or religious seminaries, where they were fed an extreme, violence-laden version of Islam. Looking to keep the war fueled, Washington—where the prevailing ethos was to bleed the Russians until the last Afghan—financed textbooks for schoolchildren in refugee camps festooned with illustrations of Kalashnikovs, swords, and overturned tanks. One edition declared: Jihad is a kind of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims.… If infidels invade, jihad is the obligation of every Muslim. An American text designed to teach children Farsi: Tey [is for] Tofang (rifle); Javed obtains rifles for the mujahedeen Jeem [is for] Jihad; Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad. The cult of martyrdom, the veneration of jihad, the casting of music and cinema as sinful—once heard only from the pulpits of a few zealots—now became the common vocabulary of resistance nationwide. The US-backed mujahedeen branded those supporting the Communist government, or even simply refusing to pick sides, as “infidels,” and justified the killing of civilians by labeling them apostates. They waged assassination campaigns against professors and civil servants, bombed movie theaters, and kidnapped humanitarian workers. They sabotaged basic infrastructure and even razed schools and clinics. With foreign backing, the Afghan resistance eventually proved too much for the Russians. The last Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, leaving a battered nation, a tottering government that was Communist in name only, and a countryside in the sway of the commanders. For three long years following the withdrawal, the CIA kept the weapons and money flowing to the mujahedeen, while working to block any peace deal between them and the Soviet-funded government. The CIA and Pakistan’s spy agency pushed the rebels to shell Afghan cities still under government control, including a major assault on the eastern city of Jalalabad that flattened whole neighborhoods. As long as Soviet patronage continued though, the government withstood the onslaught. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, however, Moscow and Washington agreed to cease all aid to their respective proxies. Within months, the Afghan government crumbled. The question of who would fill the vacuum, who would build a new state, has not been fully resolved to this day.

During a general assembly later that night, an activist led an Afghan refugee family into the squat’s reception area. They were fatigued and searching for a place to stay. Their bags were weatherworn, their clothes disheveled, and their faces drained. From Afghanistan, the father, mother, and their two daughters made the journey by land and sea, crossing mountains, rivers, borders, and fields. With the help of a translator, Marcos explained the politics of Notara. The family said they understood and wanted to stay until they could find their own accommodation. Macros flipped open a notebook and replied, ‘Let’s see if we can find an open room for you.

Many Americans were bewildered by having to accommodate themselves to the resettlement of Syrian, Somali, and Afghan refugees—their care and feeding—when many local communities were hard-up.

I know it's hard for American students to reach out to us refugees, and maybe you worry about being rejected or put on the spot. But here is one thing I want to say in this book: it's harder for us to reach out to you - we, with our clumsy English. I want to say, Don't be afraid of us - you have to understand: We're afraid of you. We want to make friends, but you have to take the first step.

This country was built by refugees. And yet look how it has advanced, look how it has developed! ... Here, where people from many cultures, many religions, and many parts of the planet have come together, they have built such an advanced society. It amazes me. ... Why has America done so well?

If Beirut was the supermarket of the left in the 1970s, where Marxists, communists, Egyptians, Iraqis, and all the Palestinian factions debated and theorized, published and drank in bars arguing over ideas and the fought in the streets, Peshawar was the supermarket of the Islamists in the 1980s without drinking: there the discussions were about Islamic law, fatwas, the war of the believers, the unity of the Muslim nation, and the humanitarian needs of Afghan refugees.

At the height of the exodus, as many as eight million Afghans were living abroad as refugees. Today, more than two million Afghan refugees remain in Pakistan.

I read a post on Palestinian Refugee ResearchNet’s blog claiming that Facebook was blocking the term “Palestinian” from being used in page titles. The post included a screenshot of an attempt to create a page called “Palestinian Refugee ResearchNet,” with a warning splashed across the top that read: “Our automated system will not allow the name ‘Palestinian Refugee ResearchNet.’ It may violate our Pages Guidelines or contain a word or phrase that is blocked to prevent the creation of unofficial or otherwise prohibited Pages. If you believe this is an error, please contact our Customer Support team.” The blogger, Rex Brynen, tested several similar titles, replacing “Palestinian” with “Israeli” and “Afghan.” Both worked, so he wrote to the support team.

The Soviets had lost fifteen thousand lives and suffered more than thirty thousand casualties. Between a million and two million Afghans perished, perhaps 90 percent of them civilians. Villages were razed, crops and livestock destroyed, the landscape studded with mines. A third of the population sheltered in refugee camps in Pakistan or Iran.

So, a penniless Obama traveled to a country under martial law, where the U.S. State Department had issued a travel advisory. Obama then ignored the millions of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, checked into the Hilton International, showered, shaved, and changed into a fresh set of thrift-store clothing to go bird hunting with the country's future prime minister.

The Saudis were already deeply involved in Pakistan. They had sent Zia large sums of money to open religious schools catering to both impoverished Pakistanis and Afghan refugees. To ensure that these schools taught only the puritanical Wahhabi form of Islam and that students were not exposed to such corrupting subjects as history or science, they also sent hundreds of mullahs, Koran readers, and religious teachers.

I recall taking a condom to school one day in Year 9 at the insistence of the hungry followers of my sex education class. My father used to hold free medical camps for the Afghan refugees, and I stumbled on a huge carton of condoms in his cupboard. As kids, I remember blowing them up as balloons, blissfully unaware of their intended use. Now, armed with the knowledge of that enlightening book, I opened the pack to a wide-eyed audience. We measured the length with a ruler, which was perhaps not advisable.

In 1989, there were only fifteen borders that were fortified with walls or fences in the world; by 2016, there were almost seventy, with more planned or under construction. Especially since the attacks of 9/11, these walls have been built in the name of security, and yet in practice they trace the line between rich and poor.