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UNHCR starts closing refugee camp near Khyber Pass

March 06, 2004

ISLAMABAD, 6 March (UNHCR) - The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) will assist more than 400 Afghan refugees to return home from Shalman Refugee camp on Sunday, initiating a programme that will see the camp in a waterless valley near the Khyber Pass closed before the end of March.

The repatriation will be followed on Monday by the relocation of about 50 families to another refugee camp inside Pakistan - the other option given to the 10,000 residents of Shalman. Both repatriation and relocation will then continue, with all 1,656 families expected to be moved by 23 March.

A UNHCR survey in January found that 47 percent of the residents wanted to return to Afghanistan with the remainder asking to move to Kotkai Camp, another of the refugee camps established for those fleeing the conflict in Afghanistan that was triggered by the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States.

Shalman was chosen as the first of the "new" camps to close, in what will be a continuing process. It was located in a particularly hostile location where assistance was expensive and difficult to provide. All water is brought daily by tanker trucks.

UNHCR expects to continue the process of consolidating camps, which have shrunk in population during the voluntary repatriation programme that it has operated for the past two years. Shalman was built to hold up to 26,000 refugees but now has a population of 10,347.

The 67 families, with 417 individuals, who asked to return to Afghanistan on Sunday are going home under this year's UNHCR voluntary repatriation programme. The programme, which has assisted more than 1.9 million Afghans to return from Pakistan since 2002, began its third season on 3 March.

All returning refugees over the age of six are given a computerised iris test that verifies no one has previously been tested and received assistance to return to Afghanistan. Each returnee receives a travel allowance, which varies with the distance home, and $8 instead of the food and other material assistance given in previous years.

While those returning to Afghanistan use the UNHCR grant to arrange their own transportation, the UN Refugee Agency will form the convoys to take refugees to Kotkai camp.

The camp is in Bajaur agency, also in Pakistan's tribal belt but in an area with ample local water. It can easily accommodate the 819 families from Shalman who asked to relocate. UNHCR will move about 50 families per day, with all 5,372 individuals who chose to relocate moving in about 16 days.

The "new" camps initially sheltered 300,000 refugees fleeing the 2001 war in Afghanistan, but the total population - nine camps, including Shalman, in North West Frontier Province and six in Balochistan - now house about 200,000 refugees.

UNHCR intends to continue the process of consolidating the new camps this year and next. Plans for closing two camps in Balochistan await agreement with the government of Pakistan on the alternative camp where those who do not wish to repatriate will be relocated. Further consolidation in NFWP is also planned.

UNHCR last year closed the "waiting area," an unofficial camp at Chaman on the border between Balochistan and Afghanistan. More than half the 19,000 residents opted to return to Afghanistan, while the rest were relocated to the existing "new" camp of Mohammad Kheil.

Under its voluntary repatriation programme, UNHCR has assisted some 1.9 million Afghans to return to Afghanistan from Pakistan since the fall of the Taliban and has made provision to assist up to 400,000 more to go home this year.

Most of those returns have been from urban areas of Pakistan. But hundreds of thousands of residents of the camps, which number some 200 counting long-established camps, have also gone home in the past two years.

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