Monday October 8, 2001

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan - Russia is preparing to send a massive shipment of humanitarian aid to 150,000 Afghans who have fled their homes and are living in miserable conditions near the Tajikistan border, officials said yesterday.

Tajik and Russian officials fear the refugees could try to cross into Tajikistan to seek better conditions, overwhelming the impoverished country's meager resources and sparking resentment that could undermine stability in potentially volatile Central Asia south of Russia.

Tajikistan's president, Emomali Rakhmonov, has vowed to keep all refugees out. Russia has some 25,000 troops in Tajikistan, many of them guarding the border, and its image could be tarnished if those troops were forced to turn back refugees.

Russia hopes a large infusion of aid can forestall a refugee influx.

It will send aid including more than 100 20-person tents, 11 tons each of rice and buckwheat, 5.5 tons of sugar and 15.4 tons of condensed milk, said Vladimir Fedin, head of the Russian Emergency Services Ministry operation in Tajikistan.

Most of the supplies have already been flown into Dushanbe, the Tajik capital, and plans are in the works to send it overland to refugee encampments in Afghanistan's Panjshir Valley and along the Pyandzh River, which forms part of the Afghan-Tajik border, he said.

A delivery date has not been set yet. "It's not a short undertaking, you understand," Fedin said.

Swift delivery could slake the growing restiveness of refugees. In interviews last week, refugees in far northern Afghanistan complained bitterly that they were receiving next to nothing.

Many said Russia had a moral obligation to aid them - because of the destruction Soviet forces wreaked on their country in a decade-long war in the 1980s - as well as a strategic one.

But the delivery presents significant logistical difficulties. Roads are in poor condition, where they exist at all. In many places, the refugees are not clustered together but spread out thinly over vast, bleak stretches of sand and scrub vegetation.

With its 750-mile border with Afghanistan, Tajikistan could provide key crossing points for military incursions.

Tajikistan has promised cooperation in the U.S.-led anti-terror campaign but has not gone as far as Uzbekistan, which is allowing 1,000 U.S. troops to use bases there.

Tajikistan is also a key meeting point for officials of Afghanistan's northern alliance of anti-Taliban fighters. Burhanuddin Rabbani, the exiled president most governments recognize as Afghanistan's leader, was in Dushanbe for consultations Friday, according to guards at the Afghan Embassy.