Afghan repatriation approaches one million

The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said that the number of Afghan refugees who had voluntarily returned to Afghanistan from Pakistan had officially surpassed 800,000.

"There had been speculation that the increasing heat and upcoming Loya Jirga [Grand Council] might slow [down] the return process," a UNHCR spokeswoman, Melita Sunjic, told IRIN on Tuesday in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. "However, Afghan refugees seem determined to return to their homeland," she said.

According to agency figures, as of Sunday, 802,000 returnees had made the journey back since the joint programme between the refugee agency and the Pakistani government was launched on 1 March. UNHCR currently maintains a series of voluntary repatriation centres throughout Pakistan, as well as mobile teams, with which refugees can register for the assistance programme. As part of the assistance package, returnees are provided with food and non-food items, as well as a small cash grant.

Once registered, the returnees make their way to Afghanistan via three exit points in Pakistan, these being Chaman in the southwestern Baluchistan Province, and Torkham and Nawa in the NWFP. Sunjic said that about one third of the returnees were returning to the Afghan capital, Kabul, with the rest returning to one or other of the main provincial capitals. Most believed they would find better infrastructure in the larger urban areas of the country, she added.

In a new development for May, although repatriation from the larger urban areas had only recently begun, already one in seven returnees - 117,000 individuals in all - were coming from cities. According to an agency statement on Monday, their absence in places like the southern city of Karachi and the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi was increasingly making itself felt. "Many of these people were living in particularly poor conditions," Sunjic explained.

In terms of the ethnic composition of the returnees, Tajiks clearly appear to be in the majority. Although they represent only 25 percent of the overall population, 36 percent of all returnees are Tajik, while Pashtuns, who comprise 45 percent of Afghanistan's population, constitute 49 percent of the returnees. UNHCR asserts that the other groups - Uzbek, Hazara and Turkmen - are under-represented in the repatriation movement.