Laws: January, 2003 - Number #16
Afghans Return; Sri Lanka
Afghanistan, a country of 28 million, saw at least six million people leave during 23 years of fighting. A third of those who left--some 1.8 million people--returned in 2002, twice as many as expected, making the Afghani return second only to the nine million people who returned to Bangladesh in the 1970s after that nation achieved independence from Pakistan. Most of the Afghanis returned to their villages of origin, but tens of thousands have switched from refugees to internally displaced people.
The fact that many returning Afghans are staying in cities will undoubtedly increase the urban population- about 80 percent of Afghans lived in rural areas in the 1990s. A third of the returnees are in Kabul, the capital, and many live in tent camps around the city of three million.
Despite the returns, there are about four million Afghanis abroad, mostly in Iran and Pakistan.
Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan government proposed and quickly withdrew a proposal in November 2002 to impose a 15 percent tax on incoming remittances. Sri Lanka receives about $1.2 billion a year in remittances, most from maids in the Middle East; there are about 350,000 Sri Lankans in Saudi Arabia, followed by 80,000 in Lebanon, 40,000 each in Kuwait and Oman, 30,000 each in Qatar and Jordan and about 160,000 in the UAE.
Sunita Menon, "Lanka Plans Money Transfer Strategy," Gulf News, December 22, 2002.
