Shots fired as refugees mass on Pakistani border

Thousands of Afghan refugees who fled the war over the weekend face death from starvation and disease unless Pakistan opens its borders, the United Nations has warned.

The first wave of the long- expected flood of war refugees, as many as 15,000, massed at the Pakistani frontier crossing of Chaman about 60 miles north of Quetta yesterday. After opening the border for two days, Pakistani guards slammed it shut again for most of yesterday, leaving the refugees stranded on the Afghan side without adequate food, water or sanitation.

Aid workers now fear a repeat of the squalid scenes in Macedonia in 1999, where tens of thousands of Kosovo Albanians were trapped in a field when border guards refused them entry. "They could be dying already," said Peter Kessler, a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. "And these are not well-fed people like the Kosovo Albanians. They've already lived through three years of drought and now they find themselves in an extremely precarious situation. It is essential that the Pakistani government opens the frontier and lets them through."

As tension mounted on the border, Pakistani frontier guards fired into the air, injuring an 11-year-old boy as crowds of angry refugees surged forward and pelted them with stones.

Since the American attacks on the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar over the weekend, half the population of the city are believed to have fled. Until then about 2,000 people had crossed from Kandahar, a few of them by the official border crossing point, but most through the mountains. On Friday and Saturday, however, some 9,000 made the crossing when the border was unexpectedly opened to people with Pakistani travel documents, or those willing to pay a bribe.

Yet it was inexplicably closed again yesterday as new refugees backed up on the Afghanistan side close to the frontier village of Spin Buldak. "It's a very barren area and especially difficult for women and girls," Mr Kessler said. "There isn't enough water, or supplies of food. The conditions are completely unsuitable for this number of people. We are concerned that thousands of people are approaching the border."

Kandahar is the headquarters of the Taliban and the base of members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network, and over the past week it has come in for especially intense aerial bombardment. On Friday night, 200 US rangers made the first ground incursion into Afghanistan before being whisked away in helicopters. But the American attacks are not the only reason people are struggling to escape the province.

Aid organisations report widespread banditry in the towns and cities, much of it perpetrated by the Taliban or by Arab members of al-Qa'ida. More than 100 vehicles have been stolen from aid organisations, many of them by the Taliban, and the headquarters of the UN World Food Programme in Kandahar has been under the control of government soldiers since last month.

The Taliban seized control last week of the WFP's warehouse, where 1,640 tons of wheat is stored. "None of the local aid workers are able to work, or are even present in the city," said Khaled Mansour, a WFP spokesman. The charity is moving food supplies to the Pakistani side of the border, but it is unable to reach people in Afghanistan. "If you don't have workers in the country, you can't work," Mr Mansour said.

Some 2.5 million Afghan refugees already live in Pakistan, and the government is reluctant to accept any more, especially at a time of angry demonstrations against its support for the bombing attacks.

More than 50,000 Afghans have crossed the border into Pakistan since the crisis began.