Census counts almost 3 million Afghans in Pakistan
By Azka Jameel - Pakistan Times Staff Correspondent

ISLAMABAD: A census carried out across the country this year determined that just over three million Afghans who had arrived since 1979 are now living in Pakistan.

Sajid Hussain Chattha, Secretary of the Ministry for States and Frontier Regions (SAFRON); Najam Hasan, Chief Census Commissioner; and Guenet Guebre-Christos, representative of UNHCR in Pakistan, told a news conference here on Monday.

The census carried out between late February and early March counted a total of 3,047,225 Afghans who had arrived after December-1 in 1979. SAFRON deals with Afghan refugees.

The census, carried out by the government with technical and financial assistance from the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), was the first exercise ever conducted to count the number of Afghans in Pakistan.

Previous Figures

Previous figures of those who had arrived since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had always been estimates, they said.

Under the agreement setting the terms of the census, UNHCR said it would accept the figures determined in the government exercise while the Government of Pakistan said it agreed that not all Afghans in the country would be of concern to the UN Refugee Agency.

The census, in all areas of Pakistan, found 1,861,412 Afghans were in North West Frontier Province, 783,545 were in Balochistan, 136,780 were in Sindh, 207,754 were in Punjab, 44,637 were in Islamabad and 13,097 were in Azad Kashmir or the Northern Areas.

A more detailed report on the data gathered by the 3,000 census workers is being processed and will be available by the end of May.●