Afghan+Refugees

=Afghan Refugees=

Reasons For Leaving
At the moment in Pakistan, there are thousands of refugees coming from Afghanistan. [See statistics section for how many.] There are many reasons for why they are leaving, but the main problem is the Taliban. The Taliban regime is involved in extensive human rights violations, as long as many other things.

This is a scene from the documentary "The Return" by director Joost Verhey on the Taliban. media type="custom" key="365921"

Another reason for the Afghan refugees leaving is the giant risk of famine. There are many diseases from the horrible living conditions. If you read the book, __The Kite Runner__, you would see that there was not much food, there were many wild animals roaming the streets, and even dead bodies that were not covred or moved. One scene that one would remember from the book is when the Taliban would kill families, and a person would not be able to even go out and get the body because they would then be shot too.

These french clowns go to the Afghan refugee camps and try to cheer up the refugees that are staying there.

media type="custom" key="365899"

Leaving Experiences
During the long, dangerous trip from Afghanistan to Indonesia, Great Britian, China, the Afghan refugees face many difficulties on the journy that will take them far from their homeland.In Afghan refugee camps, the conitions are poor for those who reside there. A camp with "good conditions" means it has water. A camp with stable health conditions means that people aren't dying by the hundreds. The journey that these refugees experience are usually very difficult and unforgetable. If the refugees plan on leaving for a country far away, they will either take a boat or go stop by stop on different types of land transportation such as trucks or caravans. If they are going to use a boat, it might look something like this. A small, crowded ship will take these people from the shores of Pakistan to the tip of Indonesia, Australia, or even New Zealand. The trips are long, crowded, and dangerous. The refugees are left with minimum food, water, medicine, cloathing, and space. Some refugees still face the possibility of running over a land mine set by the Afghanis to stop the Soviet attacks. If the refugees take a land rout as meens of escaping, they might use a refugee truck that looks like the image seen here. It is a crowded, tight, small truck that will sometimes have to travel thousands of miles to make it to it's destination, sometimes only to be stopped, pulled over, or even sent all the way back to Afghanistan. After reading the book "The Kite Runner", we get a similar perspective of the difficultios that Afghan refugees face on their journy. Amir and Baba were crammed in a tiny fuel tank for a week with no light, no space, no food, no water, and a foul smell. Amir recalls that journy away from Afghanistan as the worst experience of his life. He especially could not stand the claustrophobic feeling of being in a pitch black tank with much too many people all crammed in, practically laying on top of eachother. As you can see, Afghan refugees face numerous hardships when it comes to the journey that they experience.

Today, Afghanis make up 21% of the world's total refugee population (that's 2.1 million afghans to the world total of around 10 million refugees), so that's alot of people that need to find a new home. Only about seven years ago, Afghan refugees made up more than 30% of the world's refugee population. The number of Afghan refugees has significantly dropped since the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. However, there are still 2 million more that are still waiting for their country to stablilize.

Work Cited

Laldin, Eileen. "A Journey for Survival." 5 Oct. 2001. 13 Dec. 2007 .

"The Long Journey Home." IRIN. 20 Nov. 2007. 12 Dec. 2007 .

Statistics
How many people could possibly leave Afghan? The answer? A lot. As we know from our novel, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, people escaped from Afghan to escape from persecution from the new inhabitant, the Taliban. What we didn't learn was the massive amount of people that actually fled. Afghan alone holds the record for "Most refugees, asylum seekers, and missed-placed persons from a single country", nearing almost three million, a good 30% of the refugee population.

How many leave their home country? Where do they go? From the year 2000 to 2004, many Afghans have applied for "asylum" in numerous countries. The table below shows you just how many applied and to which countries they escaped.

//Asylum Applicants in Selected Countries// +Estimate ξ Included applicants still in the region
 * || 2000 || 2001 || 2002 || 2003 || 2004 ||
 * Germany || 5,400 || 5,850 || 2,750 || 1,450 || 900 ||
 * Netherlands || 5,050 || 3,600 || 1,050 || 500 || 700 ||
 * U.K. (cases) || 5,550 || 9,000 || 7,200 || 2,300 || 1,400+ ||
 * Austria || 4,200 || 12,950ξ || 6,650 || 2,350 || 750 ||
 * Hungary || 2,200 || 4,300 || 2,350 || 450 || 50 ||
 * Denmark || 3,750 || 3,750 || 1,200 || 650 || 300 ||

As you can see from the graph above, the number of "asylum" applicants from Afghanistan is now steadily declining.

The country with the most recorded Afghan Refugees is Iran, with an estimated 930,000 number of refugees, but they are also common in Iraq and Pakistan.

Now one might wonder what happens to them after the escape from their homes. They stay in camps, duh. But they don't stay forever. The refugees evenutally relocate back home. After the millions that fled during the war with the Taliban in 2001, thousands are returing home with high expectation, all in hope of rebuilding their homeland. Slowly the rates of people leaving the country is decreasing, and the rate of returners is increasing