June 02, 2008	Monday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 27, 1429

KABUL, June 1: More than 120,000 refugees have returned to Afghanistan this year with UN help, the world body’s refugee agency said on Sunday, warning the country had limited capacity to take people back.

Ninety-nine per cent of the 123,244 returnees had arrived from Pakistan and most of the remainder from Iran, UNHCR public information officer Mohammad Nadir Farhad said in a statement.

Most of the returning families had gone back to where they had originally come from, he said.

But several temporary settlements had sprung up as “some families have not been able to return to their place of origin because of tribal conflicts, landlessness or insecurity.” Strife-torn Afghanistan has one of the biggest refugee populations in the world.

People began to flee in the 1970s and eight million were outside their country by the 1990s.

Since 2002, the year after the fall of the Taliban government, the UNHCR has helped more than four million Afghans return home but there are still about two million in Pakistan and one million in Iran.

Afghanistan is battling to defeat a growing Taliban-led insurgency that is hampering development. Its weak economy and unemployment rate of about 40 per cent has led many men to cross into Iran illegally to work.

“Afghanistan’s capacity to absorb additional returns sustainably and avoid placing additional pressures on existing patterns of out-migration is limited,” Farhad said.—AFP