Author : Fazal Muzhary
Shamshatu refugee camp, headquarters of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islami in Pakistan since the 1980s, is increasingly empty. Many residents, including a number of important Hezb leaders, have left for Afghanistan, encouraged to return by the peace agreement signed by Hekmatyar and President Ashraf Ghani in September 2016. The deal paved the way for the return of those living in the camp and included promises of land and government posts. However, many residents fear the deal will not be fully implemented and are not yet ready to leave permanently. AAN’s Fazal Muzhary has been to the camp and describes the history, current mood and recent developments in this, Hekmatyar’s stronghold (with input from Thomas Ruttig and Kate Clark).
A look into Nasrat Mena (better known as Shamshatu)
After almost three and a half decades of existence, one of the best known and most significant Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan is slowly emptying. Following the peace agreement with the government – and the general pressure Afghan refugees are under from Pakistan to leave (on repatriation see AAN analysis here) – many are deciding to ‘go home’.
Although the camp is officially known as Nasrat Mena – which translates as the Victory Quarter, an allusion to the hope that Afghans would overcome the Soviet occupation – the camp is better known as Shamshatu. This is the name of the barren, desert-like area inhabited by tortoises in which it was set up in 1983. (Shamshatu means ‘tortoise’ in Pashto.) It was founded to host Afghan refugees who poured out of their country after the coup d’etat by leftists in 1978 and subsequent Soviet military invasion over Christmas, 1979. What was supposed to be a temporary refugee camp, where people lived in tents, developed into a full-blown town of mud buildings, a large sprawl to the southeast of the Pakistani province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s provincial capital, Peshawar. There was a bazaar, schools, mosques, small restaurants, two hospitals (one for men and one for women) and two universities, one military and another with a medical, engineering and education faculties.
Like many of the other Afghan refugee camps that were established in the 1980s, control over Shamshatu camp was handed to an Afghan mujahedin faction then fighting the Soviet occupation, in this case, Hezb-e Islami led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (or HIG) (1). Islamabad had become the funnel for large amounts of cash, weapons and other supplies from western and Arab countries and China to the mujahedin. Donors allowed Islamabad to distribute the aid as it saw fit. It chose to recognise only seven factions, all Sunni and all Islamist or with a ‘Muslim’ orientation, who became known as ‘the Seven’ or ‘the Peshawar Seven’, Haftgana in Dari. If refugees wanted humanitarian supplies, they had to join one of these factions and, in some camps, including Shamshatu, they had to ‘join’ the faction controlling the camp. Hezb-e Islami was Pakistan’s most favoured faction (until the rise of the Taleban in the mid-1990s) and it received the bulk of foreign arms and funding. Jamestown’s Terrorism Monitor quoted a financial officer for the camp’s administration in 2007 as saying that “Whoever lives or has lived in the camp is a supporter of Engineer Hekmatyar and a member of Hezb-e Islami Afghanistan, because this camp belongs to Hezb-e Islami.” This was not entirely the case; the population was always more mixed. However, it was Hezb’s stronghold and most people who lived there were ‘members’.