Iran is stepping up efforts to encourage its two million-strong community of Afghan refugees to finally return home by 2010, the country's top immigration official has said.
Tehran's aim remains to repatriate all Afghan refugees who fled the wars that devastated their country, currently 950,000 registered refugees along with a similar estimated number of illegals, Ahmad Hosseini told AFP.
"We have not set a target date but we are hoping that by 2010 with the help of the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) the Afghan dossier will be closed," he said.
Hosseini said the only Afghans who would be able to remain in Iran in the long term would be those with Iranian-born mothers who will qualify for Iranian citizenship under a new law passed by parliament earlier this year.
"A percentage of the registered Afghans will fall within this law and a percentage must return," said Hosseini, director general of the bureau of alien and foreign immigrant affairs.
Millions of Afghans, mostly Shia Hazara or Sunni Persian-speaking Tajiks, fled to the relative security of Iran from the wars that devastated their country from the Soviet invasion to the Taliban.
At the peak, Iran was hosting around four million Afghans.
Since the fall of the Taliban, which persecuted Afghanistan's Shia minority, Iran has been working with UNHCR and the new Kabul authorities on a voluntary repatriation programme.
Some 1.4 million have left over the past four years but there is growing impatience in Tehran that now only a relative trickle of Afghan refugees are going home each month.
"Since the beginning of this (Iranian) year around 10,000 people have left. Those remaining in Iran, for different reasons, have not shown enthusiasm for the voluntary repatriation programme."
Hosseini said Iran, along with Afghanistan and UNHCR, would now look at new methods to step up the repatriation of the registered Afghans, although he emphasised that coercion was not among them.
Upping incentives for Afghans to leave could include giving would-be returnees cash allowances, reconstruction ventures in the Afghans' home regions and providing reassurance over the security situation there.
But he said there could also be more restrictive measures -- as a host country Iran has the power to determine a refugee's place of residence, lower subsidies and start taxing them.
"We hope that if the Afghan situation improves and we can enforce restrictions on residence and cut subsidies and within three years we will finish the (repatriation) work," he said.
"But there is no force for the refugees who have been registered and identified," he emphasised.
Hosseini said there was no question of the Afghans remaining in Iran long-term as refugees. They would either qualify for citizenship under the new law or have to leave.
"The Afghans will not merge into society. This is utterly dismissed by the government."
The official complained that Afghans -- who mainly work in the construction and sanitation industries -- took work away from Iranians as they accepted lower wages and did not require insurance from employers.
"There is also a security problem with drug smuggling. The presence of Afghans harbours economic, security and social problems," he said.
Hosseini rejected suggestions the recent spike in violence in Afghanistan could deter refugees from going home, saying most came from relatively stable areas around the cities of Herat and Mazar-e Sharif and not from the insurgency-ridden south.
He called on the international community to help Iran by delivering more reconstruction aid to Afghanistan to attract refugees to return, saying current levels from unsatisfactory.
Hosseini added that Iran also wanted more help and recognition from Europe for its role in preventing Afghan, Bangladeshi and Pakistani would-be migrants crossing the Iranian border with Turkey.
"We are not the border guards for the Europeans ... We expect them to invest in the countries to cut the reasons for migrating and secondly they should help us through bilateral co-operation to improve the security of the borders," he said.