UNHCR to resume repatriations to Afghanistan from Tuesday

The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is set to resume on Tuesday a repatriation process for Afghan refugees in Pakistan that was suspended last November following the murder of a UNHCR employee in Afghanistan. "The repatriation will resume tomorrow," UNHCR spokesman Jack Redden told IRIN in the Pakistani capital Islamabad on Monday. Refugees would be assisted in their effort to return from repatriation centres across Pakistan, he added. "The repatriation is under way from everywhere: Karachi, Quetta, Islamabad, Peshawar," Redden maintained. Roughly 1.9 million Afghan refugees have returned home under the UNHCR repatriation process since 2002. Redden said another 400,000 were expected to return home this year under the assistance programme. The programme was suspended following the murder by gunmen of Bettina Goislard, a UNHCR staffer, in the eastern Afghan city of Ghazni, following months of increasing violence against humanitarian workers in Afghanistan. The agency said last month that the decision to resume repatriation came after the UNHCR took additional security precautions for its staff and received assurances from the governments of both Afghanistan and Pakistan that they were combating militants who had targeted aid workers as part of a campaign against the interim government of Afghanistan. On Friday, a UNHCR spokesman stressed to reporters in Geneva that the decision to resume repatriations had come only after the assurances from both countries' governments and the introduction of extra security precautions by the agency itself. Refugees from Pakistan are given a travel grant, food and other items of assistance on arrival at UNHCR encashment centres in Afghanistan. A tripartite agreement between the refugee agency and the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan governs the voluntary repatriation process that is scheduled to run until 2005. It enshrines the principles of voluntary, gradual returns to ensure that the numbers of who go home can be absorbed in Afghanistan and do not flow back into Pakistan. However, not all refugees opt to return home to a country devastated by over two decades of war and internal strife, choosing instead to relocate to other camps, should one be in imminent likelihood of being closed down. Redden said a survey in Shalman camp, in the Khyber Agency along Pakistan's rugged, mountainous border with Afghanistan, showed that about 53 percent of the inmates wanted to relocate to another camp in the Bajaur Agency rather than go back to Afghanistan. "From Shalman, 47 percent said they wanted to go back to Afghanistan. Fifty-three percent said they wanted to be shifted to Bajaur. It's a pretty even split in that particular camp," Redden said. Shalman, holding about 10,000 Afghan refugees, is closing because of a dwindling population and an isolated, waterless location near the Khyber Pass that has made the provision of humanitarian assistance difficult and expensive. The survey, which covered 96 percent of the population thought to still live in the camp, was carried out in January.