Afghans repatriated from Jalozai

With little more than the clothes on their backs, the first group of 59 Afghan families left the makeshift refugee camp at Jalozai on Wednesday for Afghanistan. The group is the first of what could be many more UNHCR-facilitated repatriations from the site, near the provincial capital, Peshawar, in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, currently housing some 60,000 newly arrived Afghans. “They experienced that the Pakistan welcome mat was no longer out,” UNHCR spokesman Peter Kessler told IRIN. Stressing that this was a self-organised UNHCR-facilitated return, he explained: “This is not a UN organised repatriation. These people have opted to return home.” The refugees left for the homeward journey in a convoy of 13 trucks carrying up to 300 men, women and children. Kessler said the families had each received a package of US $117 to hire transport and to purchase food and other items on arriving in Afghanistan. UN and Pakistani officials have wrangled over the status of Afghanistan’s newest refugees for months, and the question of screening residents to determine their refugee status has yet to be determined. More than 170,000 have fled to Pakistan since September, making it the largest influx since the fall of the Afghan capital, Kabul, to the Taliban Islamic movement in September 1996. Many of these people found their way to Jalozai, where conditions have been called “deplorable” and “inhumane”. Pakistan maintains that most of these people are economic migrants and consequently do not qualify for refugee status. While Islamabad has called on the UN to facilitate their return, UNHCR has requested that all Afghans in Jalozai be properly screened to determine their status. Asked to explain why the Afghans had opted to return, Kessler said: “Better than anyone, they know what is happening in their home country.” They had also seen a hardening attitude by Pakistan authorities towards their presence, and it was undoubtedly a combination of both these factors which had influenced their decision to return, he added. By contrast, however, a survey conducted at Jalozai by the US-based International Rescue Committee in early June, found that two-thirds of residents cited “armed conflict and persecution” as the main reason for fleeing their homes in Afghanistan in the first place. Meanwhile on Tuesday, UNHCR expressed concern over the increasing lack of hospitality - and in some cases downright hostility - towards Afghan refugees, not only in the immediate region, but all over the world. “When arriving in industrialised countries, Afghans - like other asylum-seekers - are facing an ever-increasing barricade of exclusionary measures designed to keep them out,” UNHCR spokesman Rupert Colville told reporters in Geneva. “In some countries, they find themselves slapped straight into detention, in others they simply fold into a wider group generally stigmatised as bogus and unwanted.” As conditions inside Afghanistan continue to deteriorate, the number of Afghan asylum-seekers spreading out beyond the neighbouring asylum countries has climbed dramatically over the past four years, particularly in Europe. “That they are moving further and wider is not surprising, since the climate of hospitality in neighbouring countries is virtually extinct,” Colville said. All five countries neighbouring Afghanistan have closed their borders, despite the fact that the conflict is still raging in some parts of the country, and serious human rights abuses were occurring on a daily basis, he added. The UN estimates there are over four million Afghan refugees in the world today, predominately in Pakistan and Iran, each of which hosts two million of them, and have called for greater international assistance to shoulder the burden.