ISLAMABAD Jan 5: The UNHCR is planning to offer till March, incentives to those Afghan refugees who will opt to shift from urban centres to the newly-setup refugee camps near Pak-Afghan borders, chief commissioner for the refugees Syed Asif Shah told Dawn on Saturday.

The government would launch soon a drive to register all the displaced persons(DPs) and convince them to shift to the new camps where they could enjoy the status of refugees and avail facilities recently restored by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and other UN agencies.

Mr Shah said, five of these camps had become operative in the NWFP and four in Balochistan. The administration wanted to relieve the civic life from the extra burden of refugees and provide a chance to the DPs to easily repatriate being at the borders.

Some officials said that only about 185,000 new refugees could cross over the borders through regular routes as the administration strictly had implemented a total ban on their entry in last three moths.

The shifting of the non-Pakhtoon (Shia) refugees from Jallozai camp near Peshawar to a new camp located in predominantly Shia populated Kurram agency had also been resumed, the commissioner said.

The process had been suspended after the Pakhtoon and non-Pakhtoon conflict owing to massacre of Pakhtoon Pakistanis in northern Afghanistan.

Voluntary repatriation of the refugees was also in progress, he said, and so far some 22,000 of them had left various camps in Balochistan and the NWFP. He denied the reports that the process of repatriation had become slow due to the recent incidents of bombings in southern Afghanistan.

At present about 1.3 million Afghans were registered as refugees mainly concentrating in both Balochistan and the NWFP while about half million others were living in various cities and towns without registration.

Asif Shah said that as many as 75,000 new Afghan refugees had been shifted to the newly-erected refugees camps in both the provinces.