Afghan repatriation slows with onset of winter

The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on Thursday reported that despite the onset of winter, and a clear and predictable drop in numbers returning during the Ramadan fasting month which ends this week, Afghans were still being repatriated from Iran. "We can expect the pace of voluntary repatriation to slow further until Nowruz, the Iranian new year, which falls in March," a UNHCR spokeswoman, Laura O'Mahony, told IRIN from the Iranian capital, Tehran. "In October, an average of 1,200 people were repatriating with support from UNHCR per crossing day. That number halved in November." Since the start in Iran of the joint UNHCR voluntary repatriation programme on 9 April, 362,949 Afghans have gone home. Of this number, over a quarter of million - or 255,876 people, including almost 37,000 family groups - have received assistance from UNHCR. The remaining number - just over 107,000 - returned spontaneously or without UNHCR assistance. As for the composition of the returnees, O'Mahony noted that during November, for the first time since the programme began, the number of Afghans returning in family groups dropped below the numbers returning as individuals. Currently, more than 50 percent of those going home with UNHCR help were single people, as opposed to family groups. "That, too, is understandable given the time of year," she explained. Meanwhile, spontaneous returns were also decreasing, despite a comparative rise over the past couple of weeks. The refugee agency saw the number of spontaneous - or unassisted - returns surpass assisted returns for the first time since the UNHCR programme began. Upon registering for the programme at one of 10 voluntary repatriation centres located throughout the country - these being the Suleymankhaneh and Varamin centres in Tehran, and those at Mashhad, Zahedan, Qom, Esfahan, Kerman, Shiraz, Yazd and Arak - returnees are provided with an assistance package, as well as a small monetary grant to facilitate their return, before travelling to one of two exit points along the country's 900-plus-km border with Afghanistan. Both border exit stations are open and functioning, but the vast majority of those repatriating with UNHCR support - 95 percent - are passing through the northern border crossing point at Dogharun in eastern Khorasan Province. On average, there are only one or two small convoys returning through the secondary border crossing at Milak in southeastern Baluchestan-Sistan Province. The majority of Afghans are concentrated in four of Iran's 28 provinces: About 33 percent in Tehran, 10 percent from the central province of Esfahan, 10 percent from Khorasan and 16 percent from Baluchestan-Sistan, the two last-named bordering Afghanistan. UNHCR maintains that this breakdown of the Afghan refugee population has been mirrored in the trend of those returning through the voluntary repatriation scheme. "Even though the figures are lower now, as we head towards the end of the year, Tehran remains the main departure point," the spokeswoman said. While the planning figure for the first operational year of the programme - up to Nowruz - is 400,000, O'Mahoney noted that for the second year of the programme beginning in April, the planning figure would be 500,000. According to figures supplied last year to IRIN by the Interior Ministry’s Bureau of Aliens and Foreign Immigrants Affairs Office, the coordinating body for refugee affairs, some 2.3 million Afghans were officially living in the country, making Iran - alongside Pakistan - one of the two countries hosting the largest number of Afghan refugees in the world.