'Invisible refugees' moving to new camp

Some 250 newly arrived Afghans termed "invisible refugees" by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) were moved on Thursday from the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta to a camp 85 km away.

It was the start of the refugee agency's campaign to move so called invisible refugees - Afghans who have crossed into Pakistan but do not have refugees status. "We have teams out in the city who are gathering information about these refugees," UNHCR spokeswoman in Islamabad, Fatoumata Kaba told IRIN.

These refugees crossed into Pakistan unofficially, through back roads and across mountains, fleeing the US-led air strikes on Afghanistan. Most travelled to Pakistani cities to live with relatives in cramped conditions, often with little food or medical assistance.

Kaba added that many of the refugees paid anything from the equivalent of between US $4 and US $10 per person to be smuggled into Pakistan. Many have not sought help as they fear they could be deported by Pakistani authorities, she explained. UNHCR has called on the government of Pakistan to ensure that these new arrivals are not deported, as the situation in Afghanistan remains volatile.

Pakistan closed its borders with Afghanistan soon after the bombings started in October in fear of a huge influx of refugees. The country is already home to nearly 3 million Afghans. Although the authorities agreed to allow the vulnerable, including women and children and those with documents, to cross, thousands stuck at the border crossed unofficially.

On arrival at the Mohammed Khel camp, which has a capacity of 40,000, the refugees were given food, tents, sleeping mats, kerosene lamps, stoves, fuel, blankets and jerry cans. There are already 8,000 at the site, Kaba said, adding that the refugee agency was planning to move some 10,000 of the estimated 75,000 invisible refugees in and around Quetta to the new site.

Transfers from the Killi Faizo temporary staging camp outside Quetta to the Roghani camp were also continuing, she said, bringing the number of refugees there to more than 13,000, according to UNHCR.

Afghans continue to cross into Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP) at the rate of about a 1,000 a day. A newly prepared camp, with a capacity of 12,000 at Kotkai, about 175 km north of Peshawar, in the NWFP is now home to 4,600 refugees.

With an estimated 150,000 additional refugees having entered Pakistan over the past two months, UNHCR has planned to set up 30 camps in the south of the country and the NWFP.

Meanwhile, many refugees have begun to return to Afghanistan with reports of an estimated 2,500 civilians crossing back daily. However, it is not clear how many of these returnees are refugees. In Iran, more than 1,000 refugees were voluntarily returning daily to western Afghanistan through the Dogharoun border, but there were fears that there could also be deportations, a UNHCR statement said.