Focus on a quarter century of UN assistance to Afghan refugees

The office of the United Nations High Commissioner For Refugees (UNHCR) marked its twenty-fifth year working with Afghans in Pakistan on World Refugee Day last Monday. Now the agency see light at the end of the tunnel and hopes to reduce its activities in the country over coming years. This anniversary of working with refugees in Pakistan is documented in a new report titled, "Searching for Solutions - 25 years of UNHCR-Pakistan cooperation on Afghan Refugees." "Despite the enormity of the challenge, innovative approaches were adopted in which countries of origin, asylum and resettlement, as well as international agencies worked to share the burden. Innovations unique at the time have provided important lessons for subsequent refugee emergencies in other parts of the world," said the UNHCR representative in Pakistan, Antonio Guterres. The report appreciates Pakistan's contribution over the years despite the fact that the country never signed the 1951 Convention on Refugees. But, "it honoured its spirit and hosted millions of Afghans who fled the wars in their homeland," the report acknowledges. ORIGINS OF THE AFGHAN INFLUX Afghans started pouring into Pakistan in the late 1970s when fighting between the leftist government in Kabul and Islamic traditionalists increased and well before the Soviet Union intervened to shore up the flagging communist government. By the spring of 1979, the government of Pakistan was sufficiently concerned that they asked UNHCR to help with the influx, following a couple of brief assessment missions by the UN refugee agency, the report recounts. UNHCR signed the first assistance agreement in November 1979. However, just a month later, with the Soviet's invasion on 26 December 1979, the entire operation took a completely different turn. "What might have been a short-lived refugee problem turned into one lasting decades," the report states. It goes on to highlight how there was little understanding of how long the refugee community might remain in Pakistan. "I don't think that anybody saw how long this might last. There was no planning horizon possible. At the time, we were just dealing with lifesaving strategies," Utkan Hasim, who laid the foundations of UNHCR assistance programme for Afghans in Pakistan back in 1979 and later acted as country director, recalled. By the end of 1979 400,000 Afghans had crossed the border and with continued instability and conflict, the total of registered refugees rose to 2.4 million by 1981. "Though the rate of influx was slowed after that, the registered population peaked at nearly 3.3 million in 1990," said the UNHCR report. However, the population outside the camps who drifted to Pakistani cities in search of work was not registered and they subsequently were not entitled to receive any assistance from aid agencies. The Pakistan government estimated there to be some 500,000 Afghans in urban areas in 1990 but there was never any attempt to record the number of out-of-camp Afghans before a comprehensive census conducted earlier this year. Over the course of the 25 years, until the close of the 2004 programme budget, UNHCR spent more than US $1.1 billion on assisting refugees in Pakistan. "The annual programme budget of the refugee agency peaked in the second full year of operation, 1981, when $109 million was spent coping with the creation and upgrading of camps as the influx continued," the report said. But the report notes the conditions for most Afghan refugees in Pakistan did not show any real improvement until after 1985. By then, the tents provided by UNHCR began to be replaced by mud-houses as hopes for an early return to Afghanistan faded. "Where once clusters of tents in barren landscapes housed refugees totally dependent on emergency aid, new refugee villages with mud-walled houses are the norm, with basic amenities established within reasonable reach," observed a joint food assessment mission of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and UNHCR in 1986. LOGISTICAL CHALLENGES The size and speed of the refugee influx in the early days presented vast logistical challenges for the government of Pakistan and UNHCR. In the beginning, assistance consisted of little more than the hospitality extended by local tribesmen who shared the same language and traditions as many of the exiles. This eventually turned into assistance from the Pakistani government and other aid agencies distributed initially by Mujahideen forces. However, in late 1981, Islamabad, through its Commissionerate for Afghan Refugees (CAR) took overall charge of the expanding network of refugee villages, mainly in areas bordering Afghanistan, registering the arrivals and supervising the distribution of international aid. By 1985, there were more than 300 refugee villages, as they were referred to, with the exception of a single camp in Mianwali district of Punjab all were in either NWFP or Balochistan province. "All those [Afghans] staying at camps received monthly food rations from the WFP," the UNHCR report says. At the same time, UNHCR continued expanding non-food assistance beyond the immediate need for shelter, healthcare and bedding to areas such as education, vocational training and the provision of kerosene oil for cooking and heating. "Despite all the difficulties, by the middle of the 1980s, UNHCR, together with the Pakistan government had set up a network of over 650 primary schools where Afghan children were being taught in their native languages," the report says. IMPACT ON PAKISTAN The huge refugee influx put immense pressure on the host nation's meagre resources, noted the report. "Complaints of falling wages for labour, rising rents in urban areas and damage to the environment also emerged." In the summer of 1980, the UN refugee agency estimated a million lambs were born to the livestock of Afghan refugees who had arrived with their animals, producing a severe strain on scarce pastures. Refugees were accused of stripping the arid land of its limited wood supply, one of the reasons why UNHCR began providing kerosene in camps, according to the report. However, shared culture, the common bond of Islam and several other reasons contributed to a lack of any real conflict between the refugees and the host community. "All things considered, relations between Afghans and their hosts over the years have been remarkably peaceful. Conflict over natural resources has occurred but is relatively minor," concluded a consultant's report for the Swiss Development Corporation (SDC) in 1995. Towards the mid-1980s, some attempts to repair environmental damage caused by refugees were made under a joint venture between the World Bank and ten donor countries, eventually disbursing some $85.5 million in income-creating projects in reafforestation, watershed management, irrigation works and road construction. LOOKING TO THE FUTURE Queries concerning the future of Afghans living in Pakistan started to emerge as early as 1982, when the conflict grinding in on Afghanistan started turning into a Cold War struggle of attrition between the Soviet Union and the United States, leaving little prospects of an early return. In December 1982, the US Committee for Refugees issued a pamphlet under the title of 'Afghan Refuges in Pakistan: Will they Go Home Again?' The publication poses the question to donors of as to how many years they would want to be asked to support three million refugees and what damage might be done in the long run to an Afghan culture that puts a high value on independence and self-sufficiency. By the time of Soviet withdrawal in 1988, more than a third of the population of Afghanistan had been displaced. "Hopes were high for the early return of over three million Afghans, which failed to materialise. Instead, continued internecine conflict in Afghanistan [in the 1990s] caused more flows into Pakistan in the following years," the UNHCR account states. REPATRIATION In 1992, after the Mujahideen ousted the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, UNHCR did indeed facilitate the return of massive numbers of Afghans. "In a week alone, more than 100,000 Afghans headed home, with overall, some 1.3 million refugees returning to Afghanistan during the year 1992," the UNHCR recorded. However, the subsequent bloody civil war and the rise of the hard-line Taleban caused many to flee again seeking safety in Pakistan, along with a whole new generation of the displaced and dispossessed. With the fall of the Taleban regime in late 2001, with Western intervention in the wake of 9/11, the UN refugee agency started its voluntary repatriation programme under which so far, more than 2.4 million have been helped to return to their homeland. "Millions of Afghans have arrived in Pakistan, millions have returned. There has alternately been hostility and cooperation between Islamabad and different rulers in Afghanistan. There have been sometimes tough negotiations between UNHCR and Pakistan on how to proceed; there have been ebbs and flows in the amount of international assistance for Afghan refugees. But Pakistan never ceased to be a haven for Afghans fleeing the problems of their homeland," the report concluded. Now in the twenty- fifth year of cooperation in working with Afghan refugees, UNHCR, Islamabad and Kabul are working hard to ensure a positive end to the long and difficult story of refugees in Pakistan, through sustainable returns to a secure and prosperous Afghanistan.