Eviction deadline for Nasir Bagh approaches

Government officials in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) remain determined that the 30 June deadline for 120,000 Afghans to vacate the Nasir Bagh refugee camp in Peshawar be met as planned. “There has been no change in the order, and the deadline remains the same,” the head of the Commission for Afghan Refugees (CAR), Naeem Khan, told IRIN on Tuesday. The news follows the invalidation of an agreement reached earlier this month which would have allowed a three-month extension to the deadline. According to Khan, the 11 June agreement between the CAR and representatives of the camp was subject to approval by NWFP Governor Syed Iftikhar Hussain Shah, who refused to endorse it. Not only did he reject the agreement, which would have given residents a respite until October, but he ordered the suspension of the official who signed the document. Asked if there was any longer a possibility of a postponement, Khan said: “Ask the governor.” Government officials contend that Nasir Bagh must be razed to make room for a new housing development to be called Regi Lama, a project long on the municipal planning books. Most of the land it is to be built on is occupied by the camp, and work on the township has been postponed several times due to delays over the eviction of the refugees there. Moreover, in the face of the number of people who would be affected, past governments have not mustered sufficient resolve to act against them. However, the current governor wants Nasir Bagh vacated and the refugees moved to the Shamshatoo refugee camp, 30 km from Peshawar and already home to 52,000 people. What is more, a report in the Pakistani daily ‘The News’ of 17 March quoted him as warning that “Afghan refugees have to know that their stay at the new site will be entirely provisional, as they will have to go back to Afghanistan as early as possible”. First established in the 1980s, Nasir Bagh is one of the oldest refugee communities in Peshawar. Most of the residents arrived following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Many young people know no other home. Today, Nasir Bagh is no longer a camp at all, but a close-knit community of 12,000 families. In addition to some 100 schools and teaching centres, there are 150 mosques, four clinics and hundreds of small shops and stalls. But the long-standing issue of Nasir Bagh is far from over. Residents maintain they cannot be asked to leave unless they are fully compensated for their homes and provided with alternative locations to resettle. The director of the Afghanistan Study Centre in Peshawar, Resul Amin, who called any attempt to force the residents out “an insult”, admitted that Nasir Bagh was a complicated issue. Many of the residents had built and paid for their own houses in the area and, without compensation, would be unable to rebuild elsewhere, he explained. “The most important thing is that these people have established a livelihood for themselves within and around the camp,” Amin said. “You can’t just expect them to pack up and leave.” According to UNHCR, Pakistan hosts 2 million Afghan refugees, of whom 1.2 million live in 203 villages grouped in 127 key refugee clusters - 105 in the NWFP, 21 in the southwestern province of Baluchistan and one in the eastern Punjab Province.