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Eyewitness: Refugee Camps of Despair
Wednesday, October 31, 2001
(14:33 GMT)
By Jill McGivering / BBC South Asia correspondent

All the refugees can do is sit and wait.
Photo Credit: The Associated Press.

They were planning to drill nine wells, the chief engineer said - but for each they would have to go down about 1,000 feet.

It is hard to imagine a more bleak, inhospitable land. We had driven for several hours across vast desert nothingness, an arid wasteland of dust with the distant stark mountains shimmering in the heat.

Our aim was a rare visit to one of the main crossing points from Afghanistan into Pakistan - Charman near Quetta - to see the desperate conditions greeting the most recent arrivals.

Everything - from our eyelashes to our clothes and equipment - was thickly coated with dirt.

When we veered off the track towards the tents, dust
billowed up around us, obscuring everything.

We stopped in front of a small settlement of newly-erected tents, dominated by two large marquees. They were pitched beside a boundary fence of curled barbed wire marking the limits of Pakistan territory.

Armed men stood thickly along it, guarding the no-man's land which led to Afghanistan.

The guards were face to face with another line - the bowed figures of refugees, sagging with belongings and fatigue, trying to talk or bribe their way past the guards into Pakistan.
(More: BBC News Source)
2001 © The British Broadcasting Corporation.

Dan