PESHAWAR, Jan 14: The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has sacked its 160 staffers in Pakistan amid a budgetary cut, officials said.

The UN refugee agency also directed the federal ministry of state and frontier regions to cut its staff working in various Afghan commissionerate offices and refugee camps in the country.

An official at Afghan commissionerate, Peshawar, said the ministry would soon reduce its staff in various offices, including project director health and refugee village administrators in the NWFP and the adjacent tribal areas.

UNHCR's senior public information officer in Islamabad Jack Redden told Dawn by phone on Wednesday that the agency had not renewed contracts of 160 employees all over the country.

"Its a question of annual budget," Mr Redden said and added that the refugee agency had slashed its budget by 24 per cent for year 2004. The UN sister organization will get $18.7 million for its programmes, including health, education and repatriation for the current year, in Pakistan.

Under the fresh downsizing plan, the UN agency has relieved 84 employees in Peshawar office, 49 in Quetta, 17 in Islamabad and 10 in Karachi office. The laid-off employees included Pakistanis and Afghans.

However, the UN agency will recruit seasonal staff for the next phase of voluntary repatriation programme to be started from Pakistan in March this year. The repatriation operation was suspended after assassination of a UN worker near Kabul in November last.

Despite a large scale voluntary and spontaneous repatriation during the last two years, Pakistan still hosts some 1.2 million registered Afghan refugees while the government has no data about the number of urban refugees, living outside camps. Under the tripartite agreement signed by Pakistan, Afghanistan and the UNHCR the remaining refugees would go back to their homeland by 2005.