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On the night of August 30 the Taliban raided all of our homes and offices, sealed them and put them under armed guard,” said John*, Afghanistan director of the Christian relief and development agency SERVE, or Serving Emergency Relief and Vocational Enterprises.

In a recent interview, John described how Taliban police placed him and other team members under house arrest. “Our communications equipment including the satellite phone and radios were confiscated, effectively cutting all our links to the outside world.”

John and his group were not mistreated by the Taliban, he said. “We’ve always been treated well by the Afghans,” he said. “There was no place for negotiation for keeping SERVE open, but they said they were just doing their job and carrying out orders.”

While SERVE workers were placed under house arrest, religious police moved against the International Assistance Mission (IAM). IAM’s 117 volunteer expatriate workers and the 20 with SERVE were accused of links with Shelter Now International (SNI), another relief agency raided earlier in August. Eight foreigners and 16 Afghans working for SNI have been held ever since, charged with trying to convert Muslim Afghans to Christianity. The Taliban expelled SERVE and IAM staff members from the country, and took 35 of the approximately 300 Afghans employed by the IAM into custody.

“The government has always known we are Christians,” said the SERVE director, who had lived for the last five years in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, with his family. “The kinds of relief and development we were doing were simply a Christian response to desperate need. We’re not ashamed of that. We were helping about 25,000 people-focusing on the poor, disabled and disadvantaged-and we’d like to be able to do that again. We hoped to go back, but I heard the Taliban has taken everything we owned.”

John said that some of his staff have returned, at least temporarily, to their homelands. Others want to remain as close as they can to Afghanistan and perhaps help Afghans who have crossed the border. But their greatest concern is for those who were left behind.

“There’s been a very real fear among the 150 Afghans who worked with us,” he said. “They know they are now falsely being accused by the Taliban and the local Mullahs [mosque leaders] of becoming Christians just by association. About 80 of them have already fled across the border to Pakistan.”

John said that whatever happens in the future must mark a departure from the past. “It needs to be stated that most of the Afghan people want a change,” he said. “They wanted it even before the terrorist attacks. They are a people waiting to be freed. There’s a groundswell feeling of, ‘Why hasn’t America or the UN come before and solved this situation?'”

He will be going to Pakistan in a few weeks to start laying the groundwork for SERVE staff to return and work with refugees on the Pakistan border and possibly on the Afghan side as well. “The whole SERVE team is ready to go back,” he said. “We’re hoping everything will be in place by the end of January.” The project will include straight relief, complementing the work of other aid agencies and filling some of the gaps with items such as cooking stoves and blankets. SERVE will also concentrate on helping the disabled, since that was what the group was doing in Afghanistan, and will continue prevention of blindness work with eye screenings. Basic health education classes will be offered to women and girls. SERVE staff hopes this will also enable staff to identify and reach malnourished children.

The SERVE director said that he and other workers are holding on to the hope that the present crisis will prove a positive turning point in Afghanistan’s history. “I think among us all there’s a sense of, ‘Who knows what God is going to do in all of this?'”

Mercy for Afghan refugees
Meanwhile in Tajikistan, the Central Asia Development Agency (CADA) reports that more than 900 journalists have flooded the capital city of Dushanbe as action increases over the country’s southern border in Northern Afghanistan. Representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are meeting weekly with the UN to monitor security there. The organizations report that in general the situation in the country is calm, and their work goes on as normal. Local Tajiks continue to express grief at the events of September 11. The US Embassy is fully functioning again after months of partial closure due to recent violence from rebels in the capital.

Tajikistan itself is suffering one of the worst famines to strike Central Asia in decades. Its government has issued an appeal for aid after losing 50 percent of the wheat crop because of drought. One million Tajiks face starvation. CADA and the Christian relief and development NGO Operation Mercy have worked together to bring emergency relief to 2,750 of the most desperate families, mostly widows with children, and segments of society which have been largely overlooked such as the blind, lepers and prisoners.

Last year CADA/Operation Mercy provided 100 tons of clothing to Afghan refugees at the border. Working jointly, the agencies opened an office in Northern Afghanistan in late October. From there, the group will begin providing food and clothing to an initial 75,000 Afghans who are suffering without food or shelter. Future plans include expanding this relief effort inside Afghanistan to 60,000 more families, plus educational development and other projects as soon as the country is secure.

*a pseudonym

November 23, 2001