'After 30 years, Afghan refugees may not want to return': Salvatore Lombardo

Himal: October-November issue

By: Aunohita Mojumdar


Since 2002, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Taliban, the United Nations refugee agency’s Afghanistan office has been involved in the largest repatriation project in its history, attempting to assist longtime Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran to move back to their homeland. Some five million refugees have moved back, but some three million have yet to do so. For the past year and a half, Salvatore Lombardo has been at the centre of this massive operation, as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) representative in Afghanistan. As he prepared to leave his post, Lombardo sat down with Himal’s contributing editor in Kabul, Aunohita Mojumdar, to reflect on the situation of the millions of Afghans who remain outside of Afghanistan.

On the eve of your departure, how do you assess the situation of Afghan refugees?
What is very clear is that the era of mass returns is over, and we are now entering a situation – with two million registered Afghans in Pakistan, and one million in Iran – that is much more complicated, much more challenging. We must understand that those who have not yet come back are people who have been in exile for a very long time, who are almost second generation. The aspirations they have, the wishes they have, certainly do not find an answer in the Afghanistan of today. Because of insecurity, many of them cannot go back to the places they came from; and even if they did return, they would probably like to go to the cities.

Now, if conditions were better, would all the people start coming back? I am not so sure. [To begin with,] the economic situation being what it is, their condition is very, very poor. And one aspect that is often neglected is the issue of what the refugees have become after 30 years: there is not enough recognition that a population that has been in exile for 30 years may not necessarily want to return.

How could they become full citizens in their countriesof refuge?
I think that is the big question, because the government position in both places is a ‘no’ to local integration, and I don’t think that this position is likely to change because of the overall situation in the region – but also, to be fair, it is not easy for any country. In my view, the biggest challenge would be the destiny of the population, knowing that they have changed and knowing that the answer to their problems is not in Afghanistan. There is clearly a humanitarian problem in all of this. No doubt about that.

These will be the enormous challenges in the years ahead. First of all, we need to make sure that the return of those who want to do so continues to be voluntary. A critical factor will be the relationship of Afghanistan with Pakistan and Iran. I think the quality of that relationship will always influence the destiny of the refugee population. If the relationship does not go well, it is obvious that the population hosted there will suffer. But if you look in a global context, over 30 years it is incredible how the Pakistani people and the Iranian people have been so generous to this population. I think this is something that needs to be recognised. Whatever the politics, the human element of this has been quite exemplary.

How do you solve the problem of integration?
In the years to come, the challenge will be to find the right equilibrium, one that reflects what is possible here and excludes what is not possible. What is needed here at this point is an injection of realism and pragmatism. It is wrong to say that nothing can be done, but it is also wrong to say that everything can be done. It is wrong to pretend that a school and a health clinic are going to attract the refugees back to Afghanistan or resolve the problem of the population still in exile. The answer is not in the schools or in the health clinics, and it is not in the land-allocation system. The answer is in the population itself, which has grown, as I have said, become something else. Their wishes and dreams cannot be met by the schools and health system you have here in Afghanistan.

We are planning to have a conference with the government in November on the issues of return and reintegration. There are two basic objectives. One is an injection of reality. How many people can actually come back to Afghanistan? We would like a discussion to clarify this question. I think the reality today tells you that if the conditions are what they are today, that number would be minimal, at least if you want people to come back in a decent situation. The other thing that we would like to see at the conference is a seizing of the opportunities that are available under the Afghan National Development Strategy finalised in April, and to see whether, within that, areas of return can be factored in. If you have a district in which the population has doubled due to returns over the last six years, what does this mean in terms of development, education, health, access to water, community-development activities? Can these be factored in? For me, this is what pragmatism is about. One cannot resolve the situation by simply saying, Give UNHCR 500 million dollars and we will resolve it.

We are very good at intervening and fixing problems at a time when everything is confusing, or where there is a war or a lot of problems. I think humanitarians are brilliant at arriving in a disturbed area and making things happen very, very quickly. But when you enter into the question of how to develop a community, how to sustain it, and how to find an answer for the long-term wishes of the population, we don’t have the answers for that. We are certainly the best advocates, and we will not stop to fight for that or to speak for the good of the refugee population. But if you ask me whether I have an answer for this, well, that belongs to someone else. It belongs to the government, it belongs to the overall development process of a community, and that is what has been very complicated here; it has been very difficult.

What about the matter of land allocation to refugees who have returned?
Unfortunately, that programme is not being managed very well, and until now it has not been successful at all. In choosing the land, you pick up land that nobody wants, because if the land is good it is not going to end up in your hands. In selecting an inappropriate piece of land, you end up with catastrophic problems. First and foremost, there is the livelihood issue: you end up with a piece of property 50 kilometres from the city, where nobody is interested in going because there are no job opportunities, and where the investment that you need in order to make it economically viable is not proportional to the challenges you face.

The government response to that has been extremely weak, and the selection of beneficiaries has not always been fair. This programme lacks credibility, and everyone is very sceptical. The donors are particularly so, for very good reasons. In my view, the answer is in a bit of realism. The dream that you are going to give a piece of land to everyone who comes back was false. It should never have been done and should never have been shared, because that dream does not exist. This illusion of setting up 50 or 100 townships around the country to which everyone would return was also false. The answer to the problem is not in moving the refugees from one displacement to another displacement.

The situation has been exacerbated by internal displacement.
That, I think, is a new element in the equation – the fact that you have a worsened humanitarian situation in Afghanistan, compared to the situation we were in before. With regards to those who flee because they find themselves in a conflict area, we are all confronted with the lack of access, which remains very limited in the south and southeast of the country. This is a new element that we have not seen before. Then you have the drought, and we haven’t even seen the impact of this yet. The displacement we are seeing is not enormous, but it might become so depending on the crop.

Is the political climate likely to make things more difficult?
There is no doubt about that. If the political and economic climate in the region is not at ease, for a number of reasons, then there is no doubt that the search for solutions for the refugee population will be much more complicated, much more difficult. History proves very well what it was, and what it is. It will take some time.