Anyone reading this would not want to live in Afghanistan–you can pretty much forget about accessing the Web unless you’ve got a satellite phone–but a lot of people are heading there, and I don’t mean the aid workers and diplomats who are raising Kabul’s real-estate prices to Manhattan levels. The UNHCR press office emails updates to journalists, and its newest figures for returning refugees are astounding–more than a million Afghans have gone home since the Taliban fell. There are lots of problems in the country, and we read about them almost every day, but Afghans, voting with their feet, are happier with the way things are than with the way things were.
Excerpts from the UNHCR’s Afghanistan humanitarian update #62:
* More than 900,000 refugees have voluntarily repatriated to Afghanistan since March 1 when the Afghan Interim Administration and UNHCR started to assist returnees. More than 100,000 returned this week alone. Another 200,000 Afghans have gone back spontaneously since the Taliban fell, with most arriving from Pakistan and Iran. More than 160,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) have also been assisted home while many others have gone back on their own.
* UNHCR is not promoting return to Afghanistan, and warns Afghans about the security situation, the lack of basic services and the land-mine threat facing many areas.
* Despite precarious conditions inside their homeland, the Afghan repatriation is already the largest and fastest the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) has witnessed since Iraqi Kurds returned home in 1991, also surpassing the massive 1999 return to Kosovo. UNHCR estimated at the beginning of the year that there were some 3.7 million Afghan refugees world-wide, mainly 2 million in Pakistan and 1.5 million in Iran; governments put the refugee numbers even higher.
* The Afghans’ enthusiasm for return has exceeded expectations, straining aid agency resources and Afghanistan’s fragile absorption capacity. Meanwhile, the declining pace of donor contributions is affecting many agencies, with some unable to provide much-needed reintegration assistance, transport or food aid, jeopardizing the sustainability of the refugees’ return.
* UNHCR had planned to assist up to 1.2 million Afghans home this year, but it has now tripled the planning figure for Pakistan alone to 1.2 million, while also expecting 400,000 to return from Iran and that another 400,000 IDPs would be assisted homewards.
