The Story of the Afghan Refugee

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jun 21 2012 (IPS) - UNITED NATIONS, June 20 — On World Refugee Day, the United Nations Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) Goodwill Envoy and best-selling author Khaled Hosseini assessed global efforts to tackle the plight of Afghan refugees and the lack of progress at the local level.

 According to the report, 42.5 million people ended 2011 as refugees, internally displaced or in the process of recovering from forced displacement due to humanitarian crises in states likeLibya,Somalia, andSudan.

 Since 2002 more than 5.7 million Afghans have returned to their home, with a large portion of that group receiving assistance from UNHCR, in an effort considered to be the largest repatriation operation in the agency’s history.

 Currently 36 percent of the population is living in poverty and the country is ranked 181 out of 182 on the human development scale.

 As of April 2012, an estimated 427,000 returnees have been identified as internally displaced persons and another 150,000 returnees are estimated to become IDP’s.

 Many Afghan refugees are returning home but the return home is met with the struggle to find employment, food and the ability to meet daily needs. 

 An elderly person that spoke with Hosseini on his 2007Afghanistantrip showed him, “essentially a hole in the ground, where [his] community had spent the last three winters and lost children every winter because of exposure to the freezing temperatures”.

 The rising level of insecurity inAfghanistanhas 2.7 million living in neighbouring countries, such as 1.7 million living inPakistanand almost a million inIranand 80 percent of the 2.7 million living in neighbouring countries have been in exile for decades.

 To improve the situation for returning refugees and others, there needs to be, “an environment conducive to returnees, such as conditions for providing employment opportunities, food security and good quality life”.

 Global projects have not “trickled down” to local villages inAfghanistan, according to the UNHCR’s Goodwill Envoy Hosseini who was born inKabulin 1965.

 Hosseini, author of the International bestseller, “Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, has experienced being a refugee first hand. With his family he fledAfghanistanand was granted in 1980 political asylum inUnited States.

 Inspired by a trip to Afghanistan with UNHCR in 2007 he founded his “Khaled Hosseini Foundation” which provides humanitarian assistant to Afghan people.