Afghan voluntary repatriation starts anew

After a winter break of three months, the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on Wednesday resumed its voluntary repatriation assistance programme for Afghan refugees in Pakistan. The programme is now in its last operational year under the exiting tripartite agreement between Islamabad, Kabul and UNHCR that expires in December 2006. “The start of the repatriation season is slow, as some 15 Afghan families comprising about 75 individuals have left Pakistan over the last two days, including five families that returned on Wednesday. But this is quite usual,” Vivian Tan, a UNHCR spokeswoman, said in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad on Thursday. In 2002 the UN refugee agency launched its voluntary repatriation assistance programme from Pakistan and Iran following the collapse of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in late 2001. According to UNHCR, over 2.7 million Afghan refugees have returned from Pakistan since the start of the repatriation programme. More than 440,000 Afghans returned in 2005. A significant number also cross into Afghanistan without UNHCR assistance, but there are no records of the number of spontaneous repatriations. In February, Islamabad announced it would close three large Afghan refugee settlements, including two in southern Balochistan province and one in North West Frontier Province (NWFP), giving the residents the option of repatriation through UNHCR’s programmes or relocation to other camps before the end of April. The UN refugee agency expects about 400,000 Afghans to return home in 2006. For those Afghans left in Pakistan beyond 2006, future arrangements are still under discussion with the governments involved, according to UNHCR.