Afghan census starts

The Pakistan government and the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on Wednesday launched the first ever census of Afghans who have arrived in Pakistan over the past 25 years. The 10-day exercise will continue until 4 March. "It has started only in Peshawar, but it'll be under way in every place in Pakistan by the end of the week," Jack Redden, a UNHCR spokesman, told IRIN in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. In January, Islamabad and the UN refugee agency formally agreed to conduct a census and record vital information about all Afghan refugees in Pakistan who arrived after December 1979. About three million Afghans now live in Pakistan, according to the Pakistani government, with nearly one million living in UNHCR-administered refugee camps. The UNHCR-funded census, costing about US $750,000, will record the number and profiles of all Afghans in the country, including details of their arrival, place of origin, where they live now, current livelihoods, as well as their intention to repatriate. Nearly 2,000 enumerators of the Pakistan Census Organisation (PCO), in teams of one man and one woman, will conduct house-to-house surveys throughout the country. A "mapping" exercise to identify Afghan concentrations across all four provinces of the country has already been conducted over the past two months. Last week, a pilot testing exercise was conducted in four districts to check operational procedures. "After the pilot testing last week, we felt the need for more training of enumerators at some places, as this is a huge logistical operation that we've been planning for about the last six months," Redden said. Participation in the census is mandatory for all Afghans who arrived in Pakistan following the December 1979 Soviet invasion of their country, with others fleeing internal conflict in later years. "Those who do not participate in the census will be excluded from a proposed subsequent registration designed to provide individual documents to every Afghan later in the year," Redden explained. The UNHCR teams will be monitoring the entire process in the field to ensure that agreed procedures are followed. The information collected through the census will be entered into a database, with results to be made available for detailed analysis by the middle of March. "After receiving the final findings, the government and the UNHCR would be in a position to formulate any future policies about Afghans beyond March 2006, when the tripartite voluntary repatriation agreement expires," Dr Imran Zeb, director at the office of the Chief Commission for Afghan Refugees (CCAR), told IRIN in Islamabad. The tripartite agreement between the governments of Pakistan, Afghanistan and the UNHCR that governs the voluntary repatriation of Afghans runs until March 2006. Under the voluntary repatriation programme, the UN refugee agency has assisted some 2.3 millions Afghans to repatriate from Pakistan over the past three years. Meanwhile, the UNHCR has announced the resumption of its repatriation programme from 7 March. The programme was suspended in December due to the harsh winter weather in Afghanistan.