Shalman Camp, which must be supplied with water by tanker trucks provided by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), suffers from extremely high temperatures in the summer and bitterly cold winters. The move from Shalman will take place in March as the winter ends and before temperatures rise.

The refugees, who have been consulted over recent months about the plan to consolidate the population into other camps, were told that they could return to Afghanistan under the assisted voluntary repatriation programme or they could move in transportation provided by UNHCR to one of three locations elsewhere in Pakistan's Tribal Areas.

Shalman Camp, which has two separate locations in the barren valley, was designed to hold up to 26,000 refugees but now has just 1,656 families composed of 10,347 people.

The alternative locations on offer include Kotkai in Bajaur Agency, which consists of two adjacent camps now holding about 13,500 people. Barkali Camp, also in Bajaur Agency, has a similar number of residents. The Shalman Camp refugees can also chose to go to Asgharo Camp in Kurram Agency, which now has 10,000 residents.

These new camps are well supplied with water and, with the return of some refugees over the past two years, also have space available to absorb the refugees who choose to move there from Shalman.

All the camps offered to refugees as alternatives were established at the same time as Shalman, when some 300,000 Afghans fled the fighting in their homeland. Last July the UN Refugee Agency relocated about 20,000 refugees from a makeshift camp on the Pakistani border in Balochistan at Chaman. Nearly 60 percent of those refugees chose to move to Afghanistan and 40 percent relocated to a refugee camp deeper in Pakistan.

There are still about 200,000 of the refugees from 2001 living in Pakistan, while the rest were among more than 1.9 million Afghan refugees who have returned to Afghanistan since March 2002 under the UNHCR voluntary repatriation programme. More than 342,000 Afghan refugees returned this year from Pakistan to Afghanistan.

Pakistan still has about 1.1 million Afghan refugees in camps, some dating back nearly a quarter century. A substantial, but unknown number, of Afghans live in urban areas of Pakistan but not all are refugees.

The voluntary repatriation programme, which handles minimal numbers of refugees at this time of year because of the Afghan winter, has been suspended since the murder of a UNHCR employee in Afghanistan last month. The programme will resume when UNHCR is satisfied that staff will be safe.