It is a gigantic responsibility and task for us, and for the humanitarian organizations involved, including the UN organizations, UNHCR, and so on. For the past 30 years, Afghanistan has produced the largest refugee population in the world, and today, even though five million Afghans have come back home, we still have the largest refugee population in the world.
We are now faced with another dilemma, which is the forced closure of refugee camps in two of our neighbouring countries. We have agreements with the UNHCR and the governments of Pakistan and Iran, where most of our refugees are living, to facilitate the voluntary and honourable return of Afghans back to their homes--voluntary and honourable. We are seeing signs of involuntary and not so honourable forcing of Afghans to come back to their homes under the worst of conditions, including this past winter, when many of them died just because they were pushed out of their homes, and their families didn't know what had happened to their loved ones. This is a major problem for the Afghan government. There are a lot of sensitivities attached to this, because relations with these two neighbours are a very critical issue, and the Afghan refugees are suffering as a result.
We are trying our best to give those who have come back the minimum we can to start a new life in Afghanistan. They face the prospects of unemployment, land mines that are still buried, villages that have been razed during the Soviet occupation, families whose members cannot find each other, and so on and so forth. If you travel to parts of Kabul, you will see refugee tent cities emerging because they have no housing; they have nowhere to go. I have to say they're frustrated, they're going through very difficult times, but they're also somewhat relieved that they're back home, and the one thing they are all concerned about is how safe they are going to be and what security is going to be like for their children. Are they going to be able to send them to school or are they going to be attacked on the way to school?