Construction work on the first refugee camp being set up for the newly-displaced Afghans has started along the porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border in a bid to provide much-needed shelter to hundreds of thousands of families fleeing their homeland due to fears of possible U.S. attacks.
"The construction of the first camp for new Afghan refugees at Malakano Kalay in the Shinwari belt of Khyber Agency has begun, with the capacity to accommodate around 10,000 people. We are moving big machinery to the site from Thursday," the UNHCR official, Yousuf Hassan, told Gulf News.
Hassan said UNHCR teams have been dispatched to Kurram and other areas to look for more such sites, which is in addition to the 23 sites already selected for setting up refugee camps in the tribal agencies bordering Afghanistan.
This will be also for the first time that refugee camps will be set up on the so-called 'zero line' in the border areas, as tribals had opposed establishing camps for Afghans in the tribal belt.
Foreign aid for the new as well as old Afghan refugees is being airlifted to Peshawar and Quetta, the Pushtoon dominated parts of Pakistan. Denmark is the first European country to send relief goods, that arrived in a special chartered plane in the NWFP on Tuesday.
"We have received 45,000 tonnes of goods, which include 21,000 blankets and 2500 plastic sheets. UNHCR expects bigger airlifting of relief goods from Japan next week," said Hassan.
Aid agencies have been appealing to Pakistan's military government to open its borders to enable thousands of refugee families stranded on the Afghan side of the border.
However, Pakistani officials denied permission, saying that it cannot afford the economic burden of more refugees. They said Pakistan was already host to more than two million Afghan refugees for the last two decades.
UNHCR officials put the number of stranded Afghans at between 20,000 to 30,000 people and expect the number of refugees to go up in the coming days. More than 25,000 Afghans have already crossed into Pakistan, while walking through mountainous terrain, using unfrequented routes to avoid arrest at the border.
New refugee camp to be set up in NWFP along border
Construction work on the first refugee camp being set up for the newly-displaced Afghans has started along the porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border in a bid to provide much-needed shelter to hundreds of thousands of families fleeing their homeland due to fears of possible U.S. attacks.
