ISLAMABAD: More than 380,000 registered Afghan refugees have returned from Pakistan this year, the highest number since 2007, the United Nations said on Friday.
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spokesperson Duniya Aslam Khan said that fears of a crackdown on refugees in the country along with a doubling of the UN’s cash grant for voluntary returnees to $400 saw a surge over the border after July. She said, “These are unprecedented numbers we did not anticipate. In October alone some 148,000 returned, which is the highest number of returns in one months (sic) since August 2005.”
At one point the UNHCR was processing an average of 5,500 refugees per day, she added. She also mentioned that it handed out $135 million in cash assistance in the last three months alone.
Estimates suggest that a further half million unregistered refugees may also have returned this year, though the figure could not be verified by officials. The returnees face an uncertain future in an Afghanistan still torn apart by decades of war, where according to UN figures a record half million people were internally displaced by the fighting in 2016. The mass migrations are draining local resources especially in safer urban areas, officials have said.
The organisation said that the voluntary repatriations would be halted from December 1 for a routine winter break, resuming in March. The break would also allow the agency time to mobilise additional resources, said Khan. UNHCR had estimated just 50,000 refugees would return in 2016, based on trends from previous years.
Khan added that some 1.34 million registered refugees still reside in Pakistan. A further half a million undocumented refugees are also estimated to still be in the country, making Pakistan one of the largest refugee-hosting nations in the world, she said.
