Author: Jelena Bjelica
Date: 22 December 2016
More than half a million Afghan refugees have returned from Pakistan since July 2016, a huge number, on a scale not seen for a decade. United Nations agencies and human rights organisations have blamed fear of harassment and oppression by the Pakistani authorities, or in the case of undocumented refugees, fear of expulsion for the mass returns. Pakistani hostility towards Afghan refugees had already been growing, but has strengthened markedly as friendship between Afghanistan and Pakistan’s old enemy, India, blossomed this year. The Afghan government, reports AAN’s Jelena Bjelica, has also been encouraging Afghans to come home (with reporting from Jalalabad by AAN’s Fazal Muzhary and input from Thomas Ruttig).
The returnee crisis: facts and consequences
By mid-December, more than half a million Afghans had crossed from Pakistan into Afghanistan – all officially called ‘returnees’ even if they were born in Pakistan. According to the UN’s humanitarian coordination agency, UNOCHA, 370,102 were ‘registered’, ie registered as refugees with the Pakistani authorities and UNHCR, and 244,309 were ‘undocumented’. The majority (96 per cent of the undocumented and 75 per cent of the registered) had been living in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province.
Most – more than 90 per cent – of those 614,411 people moved to Afghanistan after July 2016. Between July and early November 2016, UNOCHA reported, it was not uncommon to see as many as 4,000 people – sometimes more – pass through the border crossings at Torkham and Spin Boldak in a single day. Many returned at short notice, after receiving 48-hour and/or a week’s notice to leave the country. Many had been living in Pakistan since the Soviet invasion when millions of Afghan refugees fled the country. The younger ‘returnees’ include those who have never lived in Afghanistan. Some are even the children of those who have never lived in Afghanistan. Many of the returning Afghans now find themselves in a desperate situation in their homeland, with neither jobs or proper housing.
Returns since 2001
Pakistan has been a generous, albeit sometimes reluctant host to Afghan refugees for almost four decades. Since 2001, more than 3.9 million Afghan refugees have returned home from Pakistan. There was a huge push to bring the refugees home by UNHCR, international donors and the Afghan government after the fall of the Taleban – it was seen as proof that the new regime was popular and in the first years after the Taleban regime was overthrown, conditions also seemed amenable. That left, according to UNHCR estimates, about 2.6 million Afghans still residing in Pakistan (1.5 million registered and one million unregistered). (1)
In 2007, after the Pakistan authorities started providing Afghans with individualised computerised identity cards called Proof of Registration (PoR), the number of voluntary returns decreased. Although the cards were granted for a limited period (the first POR cards expired in December 2009), they did enable holders to open bank accounts, purchase mobile phone SIM cards and get driving licenses. This improved the lives of many Afghans in Pakistan. Following the second extension of PoR cards from December 2009 to June 2013, in combination with the ‘wait and see’ approach taken by refugees, themselves, during the security transition phase (ie the withdrawal of foreign troops in the period 2010 to 2014) and with insecurity growing in Afghanistan, the number of returns decreased even further.