Chaman refugees set to return

In a surprise move, following an emotional appeal by an Afghan diplomat on Tuesday, elders representing up to 40,000 Afghan refugees stuck for months at the Pakistani-Afghan border crossing of Chaman have decided to go back to Afghanistan, either to their villages or to a displacement camp close to the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.

"I am glad that my countrymen listened to me and decided to return," Habibullah Allahyar, head of the Afghan consulate in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta, told IRIN on Friday. He added that the Afghan government had selected a very good site near Kandahar to resettle these refugees.

The solution to the months-long plight of the up to 40,000 stranded Afghans came after a tripartite task force consisting of the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Afghan government and Pakistan's Comissionerate for Afghan Refugees decided to talk to the refugee elders. Some 80 refugee elders agreed to return to their areas of origin or to go to a camp after listening to an emotional appeal by Allahyar.

Fleeing ethnic persecution, war and the worst drought in living memory, the refugees, mainly ethnic Pashtuns, have been stuck in the "waiting area" on no-man's-land close to Pakistan's official border crossing with Afghanistan at Chaman.

The announcement follows what many aid workers said was a dramatic deterioration in basic living conditions. With the increasing summer heat, aid workers feared epidemics in the overcrowded environment. Besides lacking proper shelter and enough assistance, the refugees have had to cope with an inadequate water supply.

Reacting to the development, Vicky Hawkins, a project coordinator with the international medical relief organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in Chaman, told IRIN that they would not comment on people's decision. "However, our main concern is that whether the people had sufficient information before making that decision, with particular regard to their places of origin," she said. MSF has been contributing to the health care availed to the refugees.

"There are a lot of things to be taken into account, such as the security of the place they will be moving into," Hawkins explained, adding that there might be people in that group who did not want to go back. MSF maintains that before relocating the population, the views of these people should be considered, to establish who had a legitimate claim to asylum.

Commenting on the move, a UNHCR spokeswoman, Melita Sunjic, called it "a sign of confidence in the developments in Afghanistan", which would further strengthen the ongoing Afghan refugee repatriation programme. UNHCR would assist the people in resettling them in their areas of origin or in a displacement camp close to Kandahar, she told IRIN in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

Indeed, many Pashtuns who have fled ethnic persecution in northern Afghanistan may be unwilling to return to their villages.

UNHCR has accepted a site close to Kandahar on condition that only the population from Spin Boldak and Killi Faizo on Chaman border crossing would be relocated there. "We don't want to make it a mega-camp," she said, adding that militarisation of the camp should be prevented.