The commemoration of World Refugee Day, on 20 June, was marked in Afghanistan by an announcement by the UN's refugee agency, UNHCR, that the movement of people across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border had changed in character for the first time since the beginning of the conflict, when Russia imposed a government in 1978. Instead of the 'classical' movement of Afghan refugees crossing into Pakistan, a recent study by the agency suggested, this movement was now becoming increasingly 'normalised', with most of the crossborder movement that of economic migrants rather than those fleeing war. Yet while the agency's country office touted this as a positive trend, behind the numbers is another story.
An understanding of the complexity of the situation seems to be tacit within UNHCR, as well. As the agency's Afghanistan director, Ewen Macleod, pointed out, "People are moving increasingly for social and economic purposes to and from Afghanistan. But this does not mean that the factors that can give rise to refugee flight or internal displacement have been fully overcome." The findings of the study, which mapped the border crossings at Torkham and Spin Boldak, could largely be a result of the fact that Pakistan is not only unwilling to continue to host Afghan refugees, but is also pressuring the remaining refugees to leave the country. With camps forcibly shut down, harassment from the authorities and the deteriorating economic and security situation within Pakistan, Afghans have little option but to head back to their own country.
Those who were forced to flee within Afghanistan are now forced to take shelter in another part of the country, thus becoming what the jargon would describe as 'internally displaced persons'. According to UNHCR, precise figures about the number of such IDPs within Afghanistan are hard to come by, as access to insecure areas is limited and many 'displacements' last for only a short period. However, the estimates of those displaced internally during the last three decades of conflict by violence, drought and poverty, and those recently displaced by fighting in the southern provinces, is conservatively estimated to be 235,000.
Such numbers have, unsurprisingly, caught the attention of the very top levels of the international community. The situation has been so acute that it prompted the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, to warn in mid-June that the refugee situations around the world "do not include the millions more uprooted people who are displaced within their own countries and who far outnumber the world's refugees. Many of them have also been unable to return home, sometimes for decades." Guterres continued: "Although international law distinguishes between refugees and the internally displaced, such distinctions are absurd to those who have been forced from their homes and who have lost everything. Uprooted people are equally deserving of help whether they have crossed an international border or not."