Afghan refugees continue returning despite border

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced at the weekend that it has facilitated the return of more than 200,000 Afghan refugees from Pakistan to Afghanistan so far this year. Despite this, agency officials believe that only about half of the estimated 600,000 returns planned for this year will actually take place. "It's been pretty consistent at this rate since early May," UNHCR spokesman Jack Redden told IRIN in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Monday. Redden said that the ongoing border skirmishes between Afghan and Pakistani forces along the eastern Afghan border in Nangarhar Province, and the ransacking of the Pakistani embassy in the Afghan capital, Kabul, had not adversely affected the refugee flow. "Last week was consistent with the previous couple of months' pace," Redden said. On Sunday alone, about 2,000 Afghans returned home from Pakistan. "It will be too early to draw any conclusions about the problems between the two neighbours that developed over the last week," Redden said. UNHCR originally planned for some 600,000 Afghans to repatriate to their homes from Pakistan, but only half of that number are expected to make the journey home this year. According to Redden, the 1.5 million returnees last year included those who were most anxious to go back, and mainly consisted of people who were living in exile in Pakistan for a relatively short period of time. "The people who were left were people who were in Pakistan a lot longer, so they have deeper roots in this country," Redden said. Most of the refugees in the camps have lived in exile for over two decades. A major feature of the UNHCR exercise this year is that once again, most of the repatriating refugees come from outside the refugee camps. In the early part of 2003, UNHCR concentrated its repatriation effort on an estimated 1.2 million Afghan refugees living in some 200 camps across Pakistan. Gradually, it extended its effort to refugees living in the cities. As of Sunday, 208,048 Afghans have left for their homeland since January. During the same period, more than 113,000 Afghans have returned from Iran, with 67,000 of them going back with UNHCR's help and almost 46,000 heading back unaided. Iran and Pakistan have hosted millions of Afghan refugees since 1980. UNHCR believes that at the start of 2003, there were 1.1 million Afghan refugees in Iran and 1.2 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Both countries also have large numbers of Afghan nationals who are not considered refugees, but are economic migrants. In a separate development, UNHCR is expected to officially close the "waiting area" asylum seekers' camp in no-man's land at the southwestern Pakistani border crossing of Chaman. UNHCR is relocating more than 18,000 Afghan asylum seekers who have been stranded in the area on the Afghan-Pakistani border since early in 2002, taking some of them to a refugee camp inside Pakistan and the rest to a new community in Zhare Dasht, close to the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. Unlike Afghans returning through the repatriation programme, those stranded in the "waiting area" site were never formally termed refugees by UNHCR, because they had not officially entered Pakistan by the time the government decided to close the border to new arrivals in February 2002. The windswept plain at Chaman was always considered unsuitable for refugees by UNHCR. Last month, bodies from a battle inside Afghanistan were dumped in the "waiting area", and aid agencies were unable to provide full assistance because of Pakistan's insistence that it not become a permanent settlement. The last of the 7,801 residents of the "waiting area" who chose to move to Mohammad Kheil, a camp set up in Pakistan to host refugees from the 2001 war against the Taliban, were transported there in a UNHCR convoy on Saturday. Of the nearly 11,000 people who asked to move to the settlement of Zhare Dasht, the last are expected to be relocated by 23 July. The exercise began on 30 June, and by Sunday, 6,182 Afghans had been moved.