Afghan refugees agree to leave Nasir Bagh camp

As the 30 June eviction deadline passed, Afghan elders agreed over the weekend to vacate Nasir Bagh, a refugee camp home to 120,000 Afghans in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). “They are willing to return home and have agreed to move,” Head of Pakistan’s Commission for Afghan Refugees, Naeem Khan, told IRIN on Monday. Khan said during a meeting in the provincial capital, Peshawar, some 40 elders reassured the commission that refugees who had been reluctant to leave were now “preparing to go”. He said it would take several months for all the 12,000 families to vacate the camp. The fact that they had ignored the deadline set several months ago “did not matter” as they had now been given an assurance by the refugees, Khan added. The move follows an earlier controversial proposal, which was scrapped. If endorsed it would have given the refugees a three-month extension to the deadline. During discussions, camp representatives also voiced concern over how they would survive economically once they left. But Khan maintained that the Pakistani government was unable to provide them with financial assistance. “The international community should be providing compensation for these people,” he said. He added that the move was part of Pakistan’s larger repatriation programme, for which officials were discussing a compensation package with UNHCR. The Pakistani government wants to build a new housing project on Nasir Bagh called Regi Lama, and maintains that work on the site has already been postponed due to eviction delays. Nasir Bagh is one of the oldest refugee camps in Pakistan. It emerged in the 1980s, as people fled the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The inhabitants of the camp, located in Peshawar, have since become a self-sufficient Afghan community. Pakistani newspapers reported that 40 to 50 families would be leaving Nasir Bagh daily, but Khan could not confirm this, and there are mixed ideas as to where the refugees would resettle. Khan said most of the refugees were from southern Afghanistan, which, he claimed was “free from fighting”, enabling Afghans to return to their homeland. However, it has also been suggested that some families have left the camp only to move to nearby areas. “We have heard that some families have relocated within the area,” UNHCR spokesman in Islamabad, Peter Kessler, told IRIN. The governor of the NWFP wants the refugees relocated to the Shamshatoo camp, 30 km from Peshawar and already home to 52,000 people. Pakistan is home to the largest number of Afghan refugees in the world, and government officials have long contended that the country simply cannot cope with the huge influx. The UN estimates there are some 2 million Afghans living in Pakistan today.