Big Afghan refugee camp to close

Pakistani authorities are soon to close the large, well-established Jalozai Afghan refugee camp, home to 120,000 people and located in the Nowshera district of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP), some 140 km northwest of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. "On account of security concerns the camp has only been identified for closure. However, the formal closure will be announced only after consultation with the government of Afghanistan and the UN refugee agency [the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)]," Dr Imran Zeb, director of the Commissionerate for Afghan Refugees (CAR), a state body dealing with Afghan refugees, said in Islamabad on Thursday. Of about 200 refugee facilities meant for Afghans fleeing the Soviet invasion of 1979 and, later, internal strife inside Afghanistan, Pakistan now has only around 70 camps housing over 1 million refugees, mainly administered by UNHCR. Including Jalozai, there are currently four Afghan refugee camps facing closure for what Islamabad refers to as “security concerns”. Two of the camps are located in the southwestern province of Balochistan, home to 63,000 Afghans. The third is in NWFP, located in the provincial capital of Peshawar and housing 50,000 refugees. Since 2003, the closure of Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan has been proceeding alongside the repatriation operation that began in March 2002. Under the voluntary repatriation assistance programme of the UNHCR started in 2002, over 2.7 million Afghans have returned so far from Pakistan. Nearly 1.6 million repatriated in 2002, followed by some 340,000 in 2003 and more than 380,000 in 2004. This programme is governed by a tripartite agreement between Kabul, Islamabad and UNHCR that runs until December 2006. According to a comprehensive census of Afghans living in Pakistan carried out in March 2005, over 3 million Afghan nationals have been living in different parts of the country for over a quarter of a century. Many do not want to return to Afghanistan, citing insecurity, lack of jobs and infrastructure for their reluctance to leave their adopted country.