KABUL — Canadian paratroopers used gentle persuasion and delicate manoeuvring to head off a potentially ugly confrontation Sunday between residents and squatters in a neighbouring tent camp.

Some waqils, or community representatives, had threatened to use force if thousands of former refugees didn't abandon the mountainside above their neighbourhood by Sunday.

Paratroopers, led by Maj. John Vass, 32, had been brokering the situation for weeks, trying to strike a delicate balance between protecting the tent people and maintaining the critical support of residents.

On Sunday, Vass, accompanied by a handful of his troops and local police officers, convinced mountainside leaders to move about 60 tents away from two cemeteries where locals said they were soiling the graves of the dead.

The compromise has not solved the dispute, but it bought people some time.

"I don't think it will be 100 per cent secure for them until they move to an area where they are able to establish permanent residence," said Vass, one of 1,950 Canadians serving under the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force that is protecting Kabul and the Afghan interim government.

Whether new lands will be found for the squatters -- or where -- is anyone's guess. Small homes have already sprung up on the mountain, and a brick-making operation is thriving.

Abdul Samad and his assistant are producing 300 bricks a day -- it takes 700 to build a home -- from clay dug out of the mountainside and water hauled from wells up to two kilometres away. It takes three days to dry the bricks.

There are almost 1,000 tents scattered across the mountainside toward the eastern edge of the Canadian peacekeepers' area of operations -- 6,000 people who have come from Pakistan, Iran and other provinces of Afghanistan.

Ghosidine Bakhtiar and his cousin Rahim Daad were out on the mountainside all weekend long with pick and shovel, digging the foundation of Bakhtiar's new home and levelling a floor 50 metres up a 30-degree slope.

Sweating under a blistering sun, the doctor's assistant said he brought his wife and four children back from Iran eight months ago.

"We hope to live here and build a good future for my family and my country," said Bakhtiar, 26. "We are not afraid.

"Why should we fight? We have government and the law on our side."

He said it will take him about two months to build the small house, in time for winter's onset.

That's provided Bakhtiar or his cousin don't blow themselves up. On Sunday, the pick-swinging Daad unearthed a live tank shell. Canadian engineers were expected to dispose of it.

The UN High Commission for Refugees won't help the squatters as it did elsewhere because it says they are no longer refugees, but rather economically or internally displaced persons who are here only because they can't find work.

The Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation says they can stay until a community is built for them, probably within two years. But Afghan power officials say they have reserved the land for other purposes.

Meanwhile, the camp has almost doubled in size in recent weeks. The waqils say many of the squatters are just land speculators, who have homes elsewhere, grabbing what they can in the fast-rising market of Kabul.

In a letter written some time ago, village leaders told the squatters they had to be out by Sept. 16. The Canadians and area police got that delayed five days until Sunday, when Vass and civic project soldiers met with the waqils.

"These people are causing insecurity and instability," said the letter, written in Pashtun. "They should leave this place.

"Otherwise, we will take very serious, unexpected steps against them."

They complained Sunday about sewage and garbage. There are no toilets and no wells in the camp. Human waste is spread across the mountainside.

The squatters live among snakes and scorpions as well as unexploded bombs. They claim they have been denied access to local water and must walk up to four kilometres to the nearest well.

A woman in a burka approached a female Canadian soldier on Sunday and told her leaders in the community below were extorting money from the squatters.

The squatters have forged an alliance with the area police chief. There are rumours weapons have been circulated among them.

The squatters, many former refugees who left Afghanistan to escape the Soviet occupation, the subsequent civil war or the Taliban, say this is not why they came back.

"The government said, 'Return to Afghanistan and live in peace and freedom,'" said Alia, a tearful mother of six who was washed several hundred metres away with her tent in a flash flood two weeks ago.

"We came here with that hope in our hearts. We want a good home, a good life. In Pakistan and Iran, we had good lives. But here we are poor. We live like foreigners in our own country."

The Canadians find themselves in a quandary -- compelled to act out of humanitarian concern, yet hesitant to do so for security reasons.

Civilian-Military Co-operation (CIMIC) teams could drill wells for the squatters, but that could undermine their hard-earned credibility with locals.

"Like anyone else, (the squatters) just want an area to call home," said Vass, a native of Kingston, Ont. "It does put us in a bit of a complicated situation.

"We're here to provide a stable environment and security for the people who live here. Now we find ourselves having to protect these displaced persons from the very people for whom we are supposed to provide security."