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UNHCR resuming voluntary Afghan repatriation from Pakistan in March

February 10, 2004

ISLAMABAD, 10 Feb (UNHCR) -- The U.N. Refugee Agency in March will resume assisting refugees who want to return from Pakistan to Afghanistan, restarting the voluntary repatriation programme that was suspended after the murder of a staff member in November.

The programme, which has assisted about 1.9 million Afghans to return home from Pakistan in the past two years, is expected to help about 400,000 more refugees to repatriate during 2004.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) suspended the repatriation programme after Bettina Goislard was killed by gunmen in the Afghan city of Ghazni in November, a shooting that had followed months of increasing violence against humanitarian workers in Afghanistan.

The decision to resume repatriation came after UNHCR took additional security precautions for its staff and received assurances from the governments of both Afghanistan and Pakistan that they are combating militants who have targeted aid workers as part of a campaign against the Interim Government of Afghanistan. Control in the border area of the countries has been tightened.

Training of UNHCR repatriation staff began this week and assistance to refugees wanting to return will start on 1 March. Initially repatriation from throughout Pakistan will be facilitated through the main border crossings at Chaman in Balochistan Province and Torkham in the Khyber Pass from North West Frontier Province.

Registration before proceeding to the border - including iris recognition tests to prevent anyone receiving assistance a second time - will be carried out at UNHCR repatriation centres in Peshawar and Quetta.

Refugees who pass through the procedures in Pakistan will received a travel grant, food and some other items of assistance on arrival at UNHCR encashment centres in Afghanistan.

More than 1.5 million Afghans were assisted to return home from Pakistan in 2002 following the removal of the Taliban government in Kabul. A further 350,000 refugees went back last year. Although the current suspension of the programme coincided with the winter when few refugees return to Afghanistan, several thousand Afghans have moved back without UNHCR assistance since November.

The voluntary repatriation programme is carried out under a Tripartite Agreement with UNHCR and the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan that runs through 2005. It enshrines the principle of voluntary, gradual returns to ensure the numbers who go home can be absorbed in Afghanistan and not flow back into Pakistan.

UNHCR has also assisted the return of more than 400,000 Afghan refugees from Iran since the start of repatriation in 2002. Another quarter million Afghans have gone home from Iran without UNHCR help during the past two years.