UNHCR operations to continue unimpeded, despite lay-offs

Despite the forced lay-off of about 160 staff due to budget constraints, operations of the office for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Pakistan were likely to continue unimpeded, an aid official said on Thursday. “Our budget, which has been shrinking ever since the emergency in 2001-02, was reduced further last year by almost 25 percent. So this reduction in our staff was part of the reaction to that,” Jack Redden, a UNHCR spokesman, told IRIN in the capital, Islamabad. But UNHCR operations in Pakistan, which include assisting the voluntary repatriation of Afghan refugees to their homeland from camps in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Balochistan which border war-ravaged Afghanistan, would not be affected, Redden stressed. “Continuing operations are not so drastically affected. But there are reductions and we’re finding other people to help provide some of the services that we provided a year ago, like education, and so on. We’re finding other people to help us to keep up the services,” he explained. Roughly 1.1 million registered Afghan refugees remain in Pakistan, some in camps that were first set up after the Soviet Union’s invasion in 1979 and most in camps set up after US-led coalition offensives against then Afghan rulers, the Taliban, in late 2001 prompted a mass exodus across the border. Once the situation was gauged to have settled down, the refugee agency started a voluntary repatriation process in March 2002, providing participants who registered with special centres in Peshawar, the NWFP capital, and the Balochi capital, Quetta, with assistance in kind, as well as cash, to facilitate their return home. By the end of 2003, almost 2 million Afghan refugees had been repatriated to their country with UNHCR assistance. Redden said he didn’t expect any problems with the voluntary repatriation programme, which is scheduled to run until 2005, because of the reduction in staff. “We expect that there are some people who don’t want to go back and will be here at the end of the programme, and how exactly they will be dealt with at that point is still a matter of discussion with the government,” he maintained.