Refugees Find New Home in ‘Outlaw’ Iran

TEHRAN —  Which country is the most magnanimous toward refugees? Not Sweden, Canada or Switzerland.

Although not generally regarded in the West as a charitable country, Iran for most of the last two decades has provided haven to more refugees than any other nation. Afghans, Tajiks, Azeris and Iraqi Arabs and Kurds have sought shelter here, escaping civil war, insecurity and oppression in their homelands.

In most cases, the refugees are not sequestered in camps but are allowed to live and work alongside Iranians. Many attend schools, and a few even attend universities.

Instances of discrimination and abuse of refugees have occurred, and such incidents may be on the rise, according to media accounts and refugee activists. However, overall, Iranian treatment of more than 2 million refugees appears commendable.

“Iran, believe it or not, outlaw of the world . . . has over the last 10 years been the most generous asylum country in the world,” Soren Jessen-Petersen, assistant high commissioner of the United Nations refugee agency, noted last year.

He praised Iran for being in the forefront “not only in terms of numbers but in the way” refugees are integrated into society.

Despite its willingness to shoulder the burden of refugees, Iran gets little credit and only limited financial aid from the international community.

The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, budgeted $17 million this year for programs in Iran, and donor nations have been slow to come up with even that.

In contrast, in the former Yugoslav federation, where UNHCR is faced with fewer than 1 million displaced people, governments have contributed $149 million this year alone as U.N. member states increasingly earmark donations for particular refugee crises.

“Iran complains that it does not get a large enough share of the pie, considering the number of refugees here,” said Pierre Bertrand, program director for UNHCR in Iran, who voices concern that the Iranians’ patience may be running out.

That is a concern because the tide of refugees shows signs of rising again as more Shiite Muslims flee Afghanistan’s strict Sunni Muslim regime, which denies women and girls an education and the right to work.

As part of Iranian President Mohammad Khatami’s policy of more openness to the world, his nation is hoping for greater international assistance to help it cope with refugees. Khatami’s government argues that caring for them is one field in which Iran and the West can cooperate.

Such cooperation might be more likely if the refugees here were not so invisible in the West--a situation caused in part by Iran’s past isolation and by the physical remoteness of Afghanistan, where civil war has put more than a million people to flight far from the attention of the world.

Family Faced Death at Hands of Taliban

Goul Ahmad is among those refugees. Last summer, as Taliban guerrillas marched inexorably closer to the northern Afghanistan stronghold where he was living, Goul decided that he had two choices: stay and be killed or take his family and run.

So the 52-year-old former army officer grew out his beard to try to make himself look more like a member of the fundamentalist Taliban. He made his way with his wife and eight children by foot and bus to Kabul, the Taliban-controlled capital, and from there through war-torn mountain passes. They completed the arduous journey in 50 days.

In September, Goul and his family arrived in Iran, joining his younger brother and more than 1.4 million other Afghan refugees.

The family landed in a one-room apartment in a lower-class area of southeastern Tehran. Twenty people, ranging from an infant to Goul’s 70-year-old mother, crowd the apartment, which is bare except for rugs. It cost $1,700 to obtain the lease, plus rent of $25 a month, and already the landlord is talking about evicting them because of their number.

The neighborhood is filled with Afghans, and many work illegally in small shops scattered among the homes. One house nearby contains a tailor and his helpers: half a dozen Afghan men and boys making suits.

“We are better tailors than Iranians and get paid less,” said Nashrullah, the head of the shop, recounting how he is paid about $6.50 for each suit his shop produces.

“We have to work hard in this place,” he said of Iran. “But I would rather be here than back home in the war.”

Recently the cash-strapped Iranian government has become reluctant to accept new refugees, said Morteza Sheikhzadeh, an Afghan political activist.

Newcomers, some of whom get into Iran with the help of smugglers charging $1,000 a person, have no chance to get green cards, which means they face the threat of arrest and deportation.

Furthermore, without legal status, newly arrived refugees cannot seek work permits or send their children to Iranian schools. On the other hand, authorities still tend to look the other way when they see refugees crossing into Iran and working illegally.

Iran first began absorbing large numbers of refugees in the late 1970s, with the outbreak of civil war in Afghanistan and a Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq. Over the last two decades, war ebbed and flowed across those two countries, and each new outbreak of fighting brought a new wave of people seeking refuge here.

Fighting in 1996 between the two main Kurdish factions in northern Iraq caused 65,000 Kurds to flee to Iran in a single month.

According to the UNHCR, the refugee population in Iran is 2.1 million, down from 4.5 million in the early 1990s. In addition to the Afghans, there are about 600,000 Iraqis. Refugees of other nationalities--Tajiks, Bosnians, Azeris, Eritreans and Somalis--make up the rest.

About 25,000 Afghans and 65,000 Iraqis are cared for in refugee camps, according to Bertrand of the UNHCR. Yet most refugees fend for themselves. They find jobs as domestic workers or cheap laborers, mainly in construction and agriculture.

Bertrand said that at its peak the Afghan refugee population in the country was 3 million. About half of those were voluntarily repatriated from 1992 through 1995, after the fall of Afghanistan’s Marxist government seemed briefly to herald the return of peace. Repatriations have slowed to a trickle; just 1,400 refugees have returned so far this year.

Shiite Muslims Fear Persecution at Home

The Afghans who remain in Iran are mainly ethnic Hazaras. They are Shiite Muslims, like their Iranian hosts, and they fear persecution in Afghanistan at the hands of Sunni Muslims of the ruling Taliban regime.

The Taliban deny that Shiites are harmed because of religious differences. Many Hazaras are skeptical, however, especially after hundreds of Shiites reportedly were massacred last summer after the fall of their northern stronghold, Mazar-i-Sharif, where Goul once lived.

Iranian diplomats and journalists also were killed during the takeover of the stronghold, sparking anti-Afghan riots in Iran. The backlash hit some of the refugees; in the city of Esfahan, dozens of Afghans reportedly were stabbed and beaten, despite a government appeal for restraint.

“The Afghan people and refugees are caught between two Taliban,” said Sheikhzadeh, the political activist. “One Taliban is in Afghanistan and are killing Afghans who are Shiites. The other is in Iran and is unfairly judging our people because of their [slain] diplomats.”

Goul, who is angry because his children cannot go to school and is uncertain how he will find work, recounted the taunts his family experienced soon after their arrival.

“They called us dirty Afghans,” he said. “We were in the bazaar, and as we left, two little girls chased after us. They were chanting, ‘Taliban, Taliban.’ ”

But most refugees interviewed said they are happy to be in Iran.

“It is much better than in Afghanistan. At least we have bread to eat,” Fatimeh Hadari, 38, said as she waited at the UNHCR office with her youngest son, hoping to receive financial help for medical treatment.

Part of the reason Iranians have been so generous about admitting refugees is that the first big waves came at the same time that Iran itself was in the throes of its revolution. Its borders were more or less open, especially to Shiites from Iraq and Afghanistan who were seen as sympathetic to the cause.

Welcoming fellow Muslims was viewed as in keeping with the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s vision of a worldwide Islamic revolution--one based on religion, not nationalism.

Then came the nation’s 1980-88 war with Iraq, and Iran was willing to admit Kurds and Iraqi Arabs fleeing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime.

“For Iranians, it was considered an Islamic duty to give refuge to people who had launched a jihad [holy war] against a foreign invader,” Bertrand said of the Afghan refugees.

After 20 years, the country’s welcome may be becoming strained, the UNHCR official admitted. And it is anyone’s guess whether the welcome mat will finally be pulled away.

For now, though, among people whose profession is to ease the plight of refugees around the world, Iran remains a country that is spoken of in tones of respect.

“Iran absolutely deserves credit,” said Robyn Groves, a UNHCR spokeswoman.

By accepting so many refugees and absorbing their costs itself, “Iran is one of the most hospitable countries in the world.”