OPF has compensated over 40,000 Gulf war victims

The Overseas Pakistanis Foundation (OPF) has so far compensated around 44,754 Pakistanis who were affected by Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
An OPF official told APP here Sunday that the Foundation had disbursed around $327 million among the Pakistanis who lost their jobs, businesses and properties and had to return home penniless.
He said the amount was provided by the UN Compensation Commission (UNCC) in two phases for the welfare and rehabilitation of the Gulf War-affected Pakistanis.
The UNCC, created in 1991, was mandated to process claims and pay compensation for losses suffered as a direct result of the war, he added.
In this regard, OPF had been given a task by the government to collect compensation claims from the Pakistanis repatriated from Kuwait, he added.
"Under the Government's instructions, OPF established relief camps at Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Quetta and Taftan to help and facilitate the returnees", he added.
Subsequently in 1991, the official said, the government mandated OPF to process compensation claims and arrange disbursement of compensation amount received from the United Nations.
Accordingly, 44,498 applications were received and forwarded to UNCC for settlement. Of these 43,971 claims were approved by the UNCC for payment of compensation involving an amount of US $316 millions in a first phase.
The official said that the "efficient performance" of OPF in this work had been lauded by the UNCC and other international organisations.
However, in 2003, the matter was again taken up by OPF with UNCC after many people who returned from Kuwait and belonged to rural or tribal areas approached the Foundation for payment compensation, he said.
These people pleaded that they had no information about the OPF-run campaign, which was publicised in the media, the official added.
Due to the government efforts, he said, UNCC responded positively and set criteria for entertaining the left-out claims. Later, in a second and last phase, 830 claims applications were received by the Foundation and referred to UNCC for settlement. However the Commission approved 783 and around $11 million were paid to the applicants in 2005.
About the remaining 47 applications, he said they were still under process. "We have informed these applicants to fulfil all formalities for compensation and we have Rs 47 million in reserve for payment," he added. The official said the UNCC had now decided to wind up its world-wide Gulf War compensation operation.