Thousands are Fleeing Afghanistan. What Happens to Their Property?

In the days since Afghanistan’s swift fall to the Taliban, news coverage has focused on the thousands of Afghans desperately attempting to leave the country. This frantic rush is a grim hallmark of most wars. Conflicts spur large population movements, as civilians scramble out of harm's way. In fact, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there were 82.4 million forcibly displaced people around the world at the end of last year.

When families flee, they abandon homes, land, and expensive personal property like cars, machinery, and furniture.

Sometimes, escapes are planned far enough in advance for families to make accommodations: sell the car, rent out the apartment, draw up documents passing the farm to a relative. The more common case, however, is the one we are seeing unfold in Afghanistan: A sudden deterioration sends a panic through the country and families have days—sometimes hours—to pack up and go, leaving everything behind.

What happens to all of these valuables?

In most Western countries, property records ensure that even if something is left behind, it can eventually be recovered. For example, I have a deed showing I own my home, and more importantly, the County Recorder’s office has a record of my home deed. I can hop online and pull that record up from anywhere in the world.

But the countries most refugees come from (currently, two-thirds of all global refugees hail from Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Myanmar) don’t have these systems in place. According to the Global Property Rights Index, a quarter of Myanmar’s population has no formal property documents. In Afghanistan and Venezuela, a quarter of the population say it's likely they’ll be forced off their land or out of their homes in the next five years—meaning that even if they have documents, they don’t believe those documents would protect them. Not to mention that women and other vulnerable groups are often less likely than men to have titles to their homes and land.

The United Nations sees the return of property as a critical part of peace building, and has set rules for restoring the possessions people leave behind once a conflict has ended. These rules, called the Pinheiro Principles, establish the state’s duty to restore taken property, and, if it's impossible to restore that property (for example, if it was destroyed in a bombing), to provide compensation.

It will likely be years before fleeing refugees can use these bits of evidence to prove where they lived and apply for compensation.

But that’s more easily said than done.

Even for those with documents, in many countries, property documents aren’t stored, centralized, or backed up. That means the property owner has the only copy, and if they’ve fled in a hurry, or misplaced their document, there’s no other record to be found.

On top of that, abandoned homes and land are often subsequently occupied by squatters from an opposing ethnic group or political party. For example, roughly 7 million Colombians—or 15 percent of the population—were internally displaced as a result of the country’s decades-long conflict between the state, right-wing paramilitary groups, and Marxist guerrilla groups. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and other guerrilla and paramilitary groups seized valuable land from fleeing farmers, indigenous communities, and Afro-Colombian minorities, illegally acquiring an estimated 8 million hectares of land—4 percent of Colombian territory.

Indeed, these occupations often have an intergenerational ripple effect. In Burundi, a civil war between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnicities raged from 1993 to 2005, and conflict intermittently continues to simmer. When the first of the Hutu refugees fled in the early 90s, Tutsis occupied their homes. Nearly two generations later, more than 330,000 Burundian refugees remain abroad. Yet, it's hard to untangle what to do about young Tutsi adults who were born in and have lived their entire lives in homes that were once Hutu property.

“Among the most problematic aspects of any return process is the reclaiming, reoccupation and reconstruction of housing, land and property (HLP) for the hundreds of thousands to millions that will attempt this in today’s dislocation scenarios,” writes scholar Jon Unruh, noting that the destruction or secondary occupation of homes left behind can infinitely complicate any HLP process.

Generally, once a conflict is over, the United Nations and other international organizations partner with the post-conflict country to set up a land commission and establish a mass claims restitution process.

Unfortunately, because of the sheer number of claims and the difficulty of proving ownership, these processes can span decades. There are efforts underway to speed up the process— including New America’s research showing that in the absence of formal documents, families can use their digital trails to prove where they lived. But we have a long way to go.

So where does this leave Afghanistan?

New America International Security Program fellow John Dempsey wrote in 2017 of his experience as a property law expert in Afghanistan that “stability in the country will remain elusive until the most intractable and overlooked driver of conflict in Afghanistan is addressed: the prevalence of land and housing disputes.”

Four years later, the Taliban’s rule threatens to undo any of the progress to women’s property rights that the country had made over the last two decades. Thomson Reuters Foundation reports that widows and female-led households are now at grave risk of property dispossession, since the Taliban in the past has prohibited women from owning property.

As the Taliban take power, new waves of Afghan refugees will now be joining the roughly 8 million Afghans who have fled successive waves of war since the Soviet invasion in 1979.

For now, fleeing Afghans can only do one thing: try their utmost to capture any record—anything at all—of the property they left behind.

The Pinheiro Principles, which govern land restitution, allow countries to accept a broad spectrum of evidence of property ownership. In the absence of a formal property record, the more documents you can tie together to prove you lived somewhere, the better.

A property tax receipt. A will. A utility bill. A record of paying to replace a roof or install a fence. A Google Maps location history, showing you’ve spent every night for the last 5 years in the location of the home you are claiming. A Facebook photograph that shows you and your family inside your house. The oral or written testimony of neighbors.

It will likely be years before fleeing refugees can use these bits of evidence to prove where they lived and apply for compensation. The key, however, is to store these morsels of proof now, and to keep them safe for when the time comes.

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