Pakistan: Schooling, food security worry returnees

While displaced people continue to return from camps to their homes in Swat, Buner and other northwest areas of Pakistan affected by conflict, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) warns that about a million internally displaced persons (IDPs) could remain displaced until December. "Everybody is hoping people come back to their villages ASAP. But at the same time we also believe it would be prudent to assume that by September one million could have gone back and that we would still have one million displaced through the year," UNICEF emergency office director Louis-Georges Arsenault, who recently visited Pakistan, told the media in Geneva. Arsenault said about a million children were at risk of not starting school in September, mainly due to the widespread destruction of school buildings by the Taliban in Swat and the fact that 4,000 schools continue to shelter IDPs. The emergency response unit of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) government has said 907 families had returned as of 15 July. Colonel Wasim Shahid of the army's special support group for IDPs said 285,187 people had returned to Swat and 36,792 to Buner district.