Daily Times

KABUL: In recent years, there have been concerns about Pakistan’s stance towards Afghan refugees, as relations between the two countries sour, with the two neighbours regularly blaming each other for fomenting trouble inside their borders.

Pakistan has closed down old refugee settlements like Kacha Garhi and Jallozai in Peshawar’s suburbs amidst fears that they provide safe-havens to terrorists and deporting Afghan refugees.

“You may take us out of Peshawar but you can’t take the city out of our heart and soul,” says Asma, a 20-year-old who returned to Afghanistan a year ago, who is now a university student.

She often thinks about life in Peshawar, the town across the border in Pakistan, where she grew up attending school and college in different private academies. An education that, she says, made it possible for her to join a university in her own country.

Sirajuddin, Asma’s father, brought back his family to Kabul after living for 20 years as refugee in Peshawar. All his seven children were born during his stay there.

“We lived there, our children attended schools there and made friends but the authorities kept bothering us, asking for documents, so I had to return to Kabul,” said Sirajuddin, 57.

Asma’s family was among the 58,000 registered Afghan refugees that, according to the United Nation’s High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), were repatriated from Pakistan last year.

“Returnee monitoring continues to raise concerns about intimidation and pressure exerted on refugees coercing their return,” says Afghanistan Humanitarian Needs Overview for 2016.

Over the last 35 years, Pakistan has hosted the world’s largest refugee population. At the peak of refugee crisis in the wake of Afghan war and later conflicts in Afghanistan, more than four million Afghans have lived in refugee camps and settlements across Pakistan, mainly in the border provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan.

“Assistance packages provided to refugee returns at transit centrse typically last less than two months. Follow up of returnees highlight significant challenges and concerns around long-term reintegration. Circumstances for undocumented returns are exacerbated due to their lack of documentation and increased legal vulnerability.”

According to the Ministry of States and Frontier Regions (SAFRON), more than 3.9 million Afghan refugees have been voluntarily repatriated since 2002. Despite the return of a huge number of refugees, UNHCR estimates almost 1.5 million registered Afghan refugees remain in Pakistan, where they are allowed to stay till December 2017 under a tripartite arrangement between Kabul, Islamabad and UNHCR.

In addition to the “1.6 million” that are registered, “one million are unregistered Afghan refugees living in Pakistan illegally,” Syed Abrar Hussain, Pakistani Ambassador to Kabul, told News Lens.

Refugee returns pose “considerable challenges to the country’s absorption capacity”, according to the 2014 Humanitarian Needs Overview from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA).

While the number of returnees has reduced considerably since 2007 and 2008 when Pakistan closed down big refugee settlements in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Afghan government has repeatedly asked Pakistani authorities to extend the stay of Afghans in view of its limited capacity to absorb them.

Afghan minister for Refugees and Repatriation Syed Husain Alemi Balkhi visited Pakistan in April to ask the government for extension of stay of Afghan refugees in Pakistan. “We discussed the issues of Afghan refugees because we are not ready for the repatriation of Afghan refugees at the moment,” says Balkhi.

For repatriation to be sustainable returnees need incentives or what Afghan President Ashraf Ghani called the “pull factor”: land, jobs and basic services in the right place. So far, the returnees – who, according to UNHCR, make up around a quarter of Afghanistan’s current population – have been without these, forcing them to either return to Pakistan or become internally displaced in search of assistance and sustenance.

Increasingly, aid agencies speak of returnees living in a situation not much different from that of the IDPs inside Afghanistan displaced by internal conflict. Having lived away from their villages and homes for decades, the returnees find their lands grabbed by others and no prospect of employment or farming. Instead of returning to a steady, stable life, returnees move around the country looking for help and sustenance.

Head of the Jalalabad offices of the Directorate of Refugees and Repatriation, Alhaj Ghulam Haider Faqeerzai told IRIN, the UN news portal that reports on emergencies, in 2014 that they had registered 142,000 returnee families and 128,000 applications for land at the time, but had just two formal settlement sites with roughly 10,000 families. Many of the rest were squatting on land that did not belong to them.

Many refugees who fled the rural areas of Afghanistan during the years of war have grown used to a more urban environment in Pakistan. Even as they return, they choose to live close to urban centres, with suburbs of cities like Kabul and Jallalabad becoming urban slums for returnees. And then there is the problem with adjustment and reintegration.

Neill Wright, the UN Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) representative in Pakistan, told IRIN in 2014: “The three generations of Afghan refugees in Pakistan all have slightly different expectations. For the younger two generations who choose to repatriate, they have never lived in their own country, but they’ve decided that it’s time to try. For the older ones, they know more or less what they’re going back to, because they left it in the first place… but there remain huge challenges in reintegrating them successfully in Afghanistan.”

Asma’s father Sirajuddin may have found a job in an international non-government organisation on returning to Afghanistan but his children always ask him to arrange their vacations in Peshawar.

“Our people are accustomed to the society in Pakistan because they have lived there for nearly four decades now,” says Sirajuddin. “It would be some time before we could adjust to life in Kabul.”

Sirajuddin says security and lack of basic necessities like education, health and safety are the reasons that “irritate Afghan refugees that have returned home”.

In view of the above concerns, many refugees in Pakistan resist returning to Afghanistan. For Jawad Ahmed, a college student and part time tailor, his choice to stay back is determined by lack of security back home.

“The news of conflict and Taliban attacks is a sign that we would not have a peaceful life in Afghanistan,” says Jawad, 27. “It’s better to stay in Pakistan till the situation improves.”

According to Zahoor Rehman, an MPhil researcher with the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at Peshawar University, resettlement is not an easy decision for Afghans who have lived in Pakistan for many years. “We [Pakistan] should not push Afghan refugees to return because they are protected under international conventions and law,” said Rehman.

This article originally appeared in News Lens and has been reproduced with permission