HASAN MANSOOR
KARACHI: A gigantic exercise for the registration of all Afghan refugees in the country planned for next month under the National Action Plan will help identify over one million Afghans who the Sindh home department believed were illegally staying in the province, it emerged here on Sunday.
Of the estimated one million Afghan refugees in Sindh, only 67,000 are registered with the relevant authorities.
Most of the unregistered Afghans were living in the sprawling Sindh capital, believed home department officials, pointing out that if the illegal immigrants were identified and registered during the six-month drive, it would show how greater burden Sindh was carrying than what was being shown on papers. They said the Sindh government would make all-out efforts to get every Afghan documented in the planned campaign to rest its case with Islamabad.
The multi-million rupee exercise will be jointly conducted by the Ministry of State and Frontier Regions (SAFRON), Afghan Commissionerate and Afghanistan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriations through the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra). The government had carried out first registration campaign of Afghans through Nadra in 2006.
This year the documentation was to start in July but was postponed on an Afghan government request to extend the deadline for the refugees’ stay in Pakistan for two years. Both the governments are mulling over the Afghan proposal for extension in the deadline.
The officials said Pakistan currently hosted 1.6 million refugees, who had been issued Proof of Registration (PoR) cards by the government and their legal status would expire by the end of 2015.
“We believe that the number of illegal Afghans is much more than a million in Sindh only, but we want to stick to conservative estimates,” said a senior official.
The officials said 18 centres for registration of Afghan refugees had been established in Sindh — seven in Karachi, four in Hyderabad, two each in Sukkur, Benazirabad and Mirpurkhas and one in Larkana. They said the registration campaign would help identify the invisible burden on the Sindh government.
The officials said the registration of undocumented Afghans was part of the National Action Plan made in the wake of attack on the Army Public School Peshawar in December 2014.
They said the campaign would also include the Afghan children, aged five or more, as per a criterion set for the registration process.
It is estimated that 50,000 or more Afghan children are born in Pakistan every year, causing an increase in the number of refugees living here. The number of Afghans repatriating to their country is becoming smaller than their population growth since 2012.
In 2012, a total of 83,423 refugees — more than the number of refugee children born — returned to Afghanistan from Pakistan. Since then the figures are on the decline. The authorities cite security situation in the neighbouring landlocked country that still discourages many refugees to return home.
During his visit to Karachi earlier this year, the Afghan envoy Pakistan said that his government had managed to welcome five million of its refugees from Pakistan and Iran since 2002, which he described as the “largest return of refugees to their homeland in the history”.
The tripartite agreement signed by Pakistan, Afghanistan and the UNHCR, allows Afghan refugees stay in Pakistan till 2015.