UN refugee agency faces deficit in Afghan repatriation funds

After recently announcing that it was tripling its cash assistance for repatriating Afghans, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said it may need to raise funds to live up to its promise in the last five days of the offer.

"UNHCR will need to do fund raising if the figures [of repatriating Afghans] go beyond the 200,000 mark," Babar Baloch, a spokesman for UNHCR in Pakistan, told IRIN in the capital, Islamabad, on Tuesday.

More than 145,000 unregistered Afghans have already returned from Pakistan and benefited from UNHCR's incentive package since this year's voluntary repatriation drive began on 1 March. But since the refugee agency announced an increased cash grant, from US $30 to US $100, for each returnee, thousands have been queuing up outside designated repatriation centres to undergo a verification process to make them eligible for a repatriation package.

Those who fail to register with the Pakistani authorities before 15 April will not be entitled to the incentive package, which includes transportation assistance, and risk becoming illegal persons in Pakistan.

“There will be no extension [in amnesty period] and all unregistered Afghans staying beyond 15 April will be considered illegal immigrants and will have to face the law of the land," said Nayyar Agha, head of Pakistan's Commissionerate for Afghan Refugees (CAR) in Islamabad.

The number of Afghans who had not registered with the Pakistani authorities at the start of the voluntary repatriation drive more than a month ago was thought to be as high as 400,000, according to Afghan embassy officials in Islamabad.

Illegal status

There are fears that many unregistered Afghans will soon have illegal status in Pakistan because of a shortage of time and funds to process them all.

Millions of Afghan refugees have been living in Pakistan for more than a quarter of a century, uprooted by conflict in Afghanistan.

In an effort to ascertain the number and profile of these exiled Afghans, Pakistani authorities carried out a four-month countrywide survey from October 2006 to February 2007.

More than 2.1 million Afghans were registered during the campaign and were issued with 'proof of registration' cards validating their stay in Pakistan until December 2009.

But it has been a big challenge for authorities processing thousands of Afghans every day to separate genuine returnees from those just coming for the cash grant.

Just imagine how some 400,000 people could have been processed in just six weeks of amnesty period.

An estimated 2,000 Afghans are being turned away daily for not meeting the assistance eligibility criteria, according to UNHCR officials.

A number of verification procedures have been put in place to prevent fraudulent claims.

"Several steps are taken at the repatriation centres to prevent recycling, which include thorough interviews of returning Afghan families, fingerprint biometrics, iris verification and the use of election ink," said Killian Kleinschmidt, UNHCR's Assistant Representative in Islamabad.

But this procedure takes time and with the deadline drawing near, hundreds of Afghan refugees have been approaching the Afghan embassy in Islamabad to seek a way out of this situation.

"Just imagine how some 400,000 people could have been processed in just six weeks of amnesty period," said Dr Aluzai Ghazi, a representative of the Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation at the Afghan embassy in Islamabad.

"We have been told that thousands of potential returnees are gathered outside repatriation centres in Peshawar," Ghazi said, noting that the embassy was not in a position to assist those Afghans. “This is something to be decided by the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan."

ts/at/ed