Close to 400,000 Afghans have returned in 2005

About 394,000 Afghan refugees have repatriated so far this year from Pakistan under the voluntary repatriation programme of the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), an official from the refugee agency said on Wednesday. On the same day, the agency suspended its repatriation operation for about a week, ahead of Afghanistan's parliamentary election scheduled on 18 September. The programme will resume on 21 September. "We are getting close to the set estimates of this year's voluntary repatriation of about 400,000 Afghans from Pakistan," Babar Baloch, a UNHCR spokesman, said in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. A total of over 2.6 million Afghan refugees have returned from Pakistan since the UNHCR assistance programme started in 2002. Nearly 1.6 million Afghans returned in 2002 after international intervention in Afghanistan and the fall of the Taliban. Meanwhile, the UN refugee agency continued to process Afghan refugees without an iris test from the northwestern city of Peshawar after hundreds of Afghans waiting in long queues for registration attacked the agency's site office last week in protest against the slow pace of repatriation. According to reports, about 9,000 Afghans have been processed in four days over last weekend without an iris test from UNHCR's Peshawar repatriation centre. Iris tests are carried out to verify identity and to ensure returnees only claim the assistance package once. The iris testing will resume on 21 September. In 2005 so far, more than 263,000 Afghans have returned from Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP), over 65,000 from Balochistan, about 21,000 from Sindh while 44,000 went back from Punjab province. Over the past three months, Pakistani authorities have moved to close various refugee camps across the country. This has boosted the repatriation, as the alternative - relocation to another refugee camp in Pakistan - has not proved popular.