PAKISTAN: Poor facilities at Afghan registration centres
affect turnout
Source: IRIN
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ISLAMABAD, 5 December (IRIN) - Heavy rains over the past three
days have caused difficulties for Afghan refugees coming for registration, with no proper shelter or heating arrangements at the centres in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar in North West
Frontier Province (NWFP) hitting turnout. "It's all muddy inside and outside the centre as you can see. There is no arrangement to keep women and children in a dry, warm place while they are
waiting to go through the process, which takes about four hours usually," Habib-ur-Rehman, a middle-aged Afghan who came for registration at the Katcha Garhi centre in Peshawar, said on Tuesday. The situation at the other five registration centres in the provincial capital of NWFP was more or less same, the Afghan refugees told IRIN. More than 600,000 Afghans have been registered so far in
a nationwide drive to provide them with official identification for a three-year period, according to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Islamabad. The US $6
million registration exercise, which started on 15 October, will continue until the end of the year. It is a follow-up to a comprehensive Afghan census conducted in Pakistan in February and March
2005, which found more than 3 million Afghan refugees were still living in the country. The rainy and cold weather this week has affected the pace of registration, with less people turning up at
the registration centres. "While improvements in technical searches of census database, crowd control and the flow management continue to speed up the process, the rains have had some effect on the
turnout," Vivian Tan, a UNHCR spokeswoman, explained in Islamabad. The UN refugee agency has started distributing plastic sheets to provide some shelters for the queuing Afghans in centres without
any sheltered waiting areas, Tan added."We have done the same in the southern province of Balochistan, where temperatures are freezing after heavy rain over last week. There, we have also arranged
for gas heaters and wood-burning stoves to keep the centres warm," the UNHCR spokeswoman said. The ongoing registration campaign aims to provide Afghan refugees with temporary legal status through
a Proof of Registration (PoR) card, which recognises the bearer as an Afghan citizen living temporarily in Pakistan.Pakistan's National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) is conducting the
exercise, using fingerprint biometrics and photos to record information through stationary and mobile registration centres across the country with the support of the government's Commissionerate for
Afghan Refugees (CAR) and the UN refugee agency.ts/at/jl
