Iran has expelled about 100,000 Afghans in nearly six weeks in a drive to deport those who are in the country illegally, the UN refugee agency in Afghanistan said Tuesday. About 1,000 were now returning every day through two border points, the UNHCR's representative in Afghanistan, Salvatore Lombardo, told reporters.
"We are talking of approximately 100,000 Afghans being deported since April 21," he said. "The crisis had at the very beginning a very high number of people being deported. It has decreased in the past couple of weeks. What we see now is probably approximately 1,000 deportees per day from the two crossing points."
Tehran has said it wants one million Afghans repatriated by next March. Afghanistan has asked its neighbour to halt the returns, saying it does not have the capacity to accommodate a large number of people at once. The United States has also voiced concern over the flood of returning deportees becoming a burden.
Anger in Afghanistan about the forced returns has cost the refugees minister his job, with parliament voting that Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta should also be sacked - a decision nullified by the Supreme Court.
Lombardo said most of the nearly 100,000 returnees were single men who had been in Iran for short periods of time and returned to their homes in Afghanistan relatively quickly. Returned families faced more difficulties because they had often been outside of the country for longer periods and were not always able to return to their places of origin, he said. The deportations were quick and sometimes not "according to all the standards," he said, without elaborating.