AFGHANISTAN-PAKISTAN: Efforts to assist Afghan repatriation continue

KARACHI, 27 Apr 2005 (IRIN) - The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has stepped up its efforts to assist voluntary returns under its ‘Facilitated Group Returns’ (FGR) programme to Afghanistan, aimed at removing some of the basic hurdles preventing repatriation.

UNHCR started the FGR programme in 2003 in support of the voluntary return of Afghans. Under the programme, refugee groups that come from one particular place inside Afghanistan are identified from among the refugee community in Pakistan and the refugee agency helps remove their concerns.

“Over the past two years, UNHCR has been assisting small groups of refugees from Pakistan to visit Afghanistan to see the situation over there," Jack Redden, a UNHCR spokesman, told IRIN in the southern port city of Karachi. "A few Afghan officials also visited [Afghan] refugees in Quetta [Balochistan province] last year. However, this is the first time that a delegation is visiting Afghans everywhere in Pakistan who actually originate from the north [of Afghanistan]."

Of the estimated 3 million Afghans in Pakistan today, according to UNHCR, over 400,000 refugees come from the northern parts of Afghanistan, with some 90,000 of them from the five provinces of Balkh, Jawzjan, Faryab, Samangan and Sar-i-Pul.

“Nearly 180,000 Afghans have repatriated to these five provinces so far, since UNHCR’s voluntary assistance programme started in 2002,” Redden explained.

The nine-member delegation from the Afghan Return Commission Working Group (RCWG) is comprised of members from various political and ethnic factions in northern Afghanistan, UN bodies and officials from government departments.

The profile of Afghans living in Pakistan’s largest city and business hub, Karachi, represents a highly diverse community in terms of its political, ethnic and economical background, according to a new study published in March 2005 by an independent Kabul-based Afghan think-tank, Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU).

“Afghans here [in Pakistan] are bringing us all sorts of problems ranging from security issues to land ownership, shelter, employment, provision of basic social services, mine clearance and ethnic bias,” Abdul Basir Marefat, a representative from the Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation, told IRIN after meeting a gathering of Afghans in Karachi.

However, Marefat said they were there to inform them about current living conditions inside the country and to encourage them to return as development gains momentum.

At the same time, the members of the Afghan delegation noted the challenge ahead. “The Afghans have established their new lives over the years. They are well settled here and it is quite difficult to convince them to go back. But, they’ve to decide whether they want to stay as refugees or as respectable citizens of their own country,” Shuja-ud-Din, an official from the Afghan refugee ministry in Kabul, told IRIN.

The Afghans originating from five northern parts of Afghanistan, whether rural or urban, are settled in the urban set-up of Karachi city, which increases their demand for more social services such as schooling, health and employment for skilled labour, Marefat said.

Meanwhile, UNHCR and the government of Pakistan are expected to release the findings of a comprehensive census carried out in February-March 2005 in order to have an updated profile of the Afghan population in Pakistan that arrived after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.

UNHCR's voluntary repatriation assistance programme operates under a tripartite agreement between the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the UN refugee agency that runs till March 2006. All three stakeholders are expected to meet again next month in the Pakistani capital Islamabad to have a discussion about policy after the expiry of the tripartite agreement.

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