June 6, 2002	Thursday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 24,1423

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KOHAT, June 5: Of the 12,615 registered Afghan families living in Kohat and Hangu districts and the Orakzai Agency, only 198 have been repatriated by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees during the last two months, it has been officially learnt.

The government and the UNHCR had devised a in last July to repatriate all Afghans living within city limits by the end of 2001, but following the Sept 11 attacks the programme was abandoned by the UNHCR.

However, in Kohat and Peshawar a few camps had been forcibly vacated by the district administrations for the construction of educational institutions and government offices and development of residential areas.

Meanwhile, the UNHCR had decided to stop its repatriation operations by  the end of June due to shortage of funds.

The administrator of Afghan refugees for Kohat region, Dr Mirza Ali Mahsood, told Dawn on Wednesday that 70 per cent of the repatriated families belonged to northern and central Afghanistan.

He said refugees from Khost and Paktia were reluctant to leave Pakistan due  to continuing operations being conducted by the allied forces in eastern Afghanistan.

He disclosed that the Commissionerate for Afghan Refugees had stopped issuing permits to Afghans since 1990, therefore those who had crossed into Pakistan after that were living here illegally.

They were economic migrants and not refugees, he said and added that they were a burden on the state and harming the interests of the business community.

The UNHCR has suspended all aid to refugees since 1996.

He said that to discourage the crossing back of the refugees into Pakistan, the CAR officials first cancelled the registration of those families followed by demolition of their houses at the time of repatriation.

  The UNHCR then disbursed $100 to the head of the family once it had reached Afghanistan, he said.

The police and other law enforcement agencies are also hunting  down unregistered refugees and booking them under the Foreigners Act to stop the refugees from returning to Pakistan.

Those trying to return are pushed back by the authorities of the tribal areas, where army personnel are patrolling the border with Afghanistan.

He said there were more than 200,000 unregistered refugees in the settled areas and the tribal territory, against whom action would be taken at an appropriate time.

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