Repatriation of Afghan Bam survivors continues

The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said on Thursday that more than 400 hundred Afghans who had survived the devastating earthquake which occurred in the southwestern Iranian city of Bam in late December, were repatriated to the country on Tuesday. “A convoy of 11 buses, five trucks and four trailers, carrying 171 men, 79 women and 165 children left Bam the day before, crossing the Afghan border at Malik [the western Afghanistan border with Iran],” Peter Kessler a UNHCR spokesperson, told IRIN on Thursday. Most are reported heading to Kabul to an uncertain future. Kessler said some of the survivors had sustained injuries caused by the earthquake while many of them had lost their loved ones. “An 8-year-old boy, whose parents, brothers and sisters all perished in the earthquake, is travelling back to Afghanistan with one of his uncles.” UNHCR said there were no exact figures on how many Afghans had died as a result of the devastating quake, which reportedly killed 30,000 people. But surveys indicate that at the time of the incident, there were 3,300 registered Afghan refugees living among the local population in Bam. These latest Afghan returnees from Bam joined hundreds of other Afghan survivors who have gone back to Afghanistan on their own in recent weeks, many of them accompanying the bodies of their loved ones for burial. UNHCR announced on 2 Jan that it had assisted in the repartition of around 300 Afghan families who had been affected by the earthquake. UNHCR said many of those returned to the western Afghan province of Farah which had the highest number of victims so far. The UN refugee agency said in a departure from the usual practice, the Iranian authorities had agreed to waive the repatriation fee of approximately US $4 per person that is normally collected from Afghans who go back. “The returning refugees received an additional 50 percent more on top of the usual travel grant,” the UNHCR spokesperson maintained. Another repatriation convoy is scheduled to leave Bam in coming days, as UNHCR said it had received 256 new repatriation requests from Afghan refugees living there. Abdul Hafiz, a travel agent in the western city of Herat, told IRIN refugees he had met had appeared very traumatised and had very few belongings on them after the earthquake. “They were very sad with tragic stories of losing loved ones, while some of them did not have a clear idea of where to go," said the travel agent, who had talked to some of the returnees as they changed buses for Kabul. So far this year, some 1,000 Afghans have returned from Iran under the joint UNHCR - Afghan government-facilitated repatriation initiative.