GENEVA, March 13: Pakistani villages hosting Afghan refugees will get $140 million to help them cope in exchange for letting the displaced people stay for nearly four more years, a United Nations agency said on Friday.

A resurgence of violence along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border has hindered efforts to repatriate nearly 2 million Afghan refugees, leading to the tentative agreement announced by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

To compensate for continuing to host the refugees until the end of 2012, communities in Balochistan and North West Frontier Province would get upgrades to their roads, schools, farms, and medical clinics.

Urban areas in Sindh and Punjab would also be compensated under the assistance plan, which UNHCR spokesman William Spindler said represented “support from the international community to Pakistan for hosting one of the largest refugee populations in the world”.

“The programme ... will improve social cohesion and local economies through community development and helping people to rebuild their livelihoods,” he told a news briefing.

“Projects will focus on boosting employment prospects, reviving agricultural and irrigation systems, repairing farm to market roads, improving crop and livestock production, and marketing produce.” Millions of Afghans fled to Pakistan and Iran in the 1980s to escape the Soviet occupation of their country.

More than 5 million refugees went home to Afghanistan after US-led invading forces overthrew the Taliban rulers in 2001, but an estimated 1.7 million remain in Pakistan.

In 2007, the UNHCR brokered a deal with the two countries that specified all Afghan refugee returns should be voluntary and gradual, with utmost concern for their safety in the border region where government and militant forces remain at war.

Spindler said the assistance for Pakistan was outlined in a letter of intent signed on Friday that would extend the validity of Afghan refugees’ registration cards to the end of 2012.

Pakistan, a key US ally in South Asia, is under pressure to root out militants from lawless north-western regions that Washington believes have generated much of the recent violence against Afghan government, US and Nato troops.—Reuters
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