Joyful Afghan refugees fly home

Joyful Afghan refugees fly home

Agencies, Jakarta

Janna (above) plays with her toy guns as her family and other Afghan refugees wait to board a charter flight taking them home to Afghanistan.

Under a voluntary repatriation program organized by the International Organization of Migration (IOM), 36 Afghans stranded in Indonesia for a number of years after fleeing the Taliban, hugged and kissed as they boarded the Gulf Air aircraft to Dubai en route to Kabul.

"We are very excited to go back to our country, our now peaceful country," Doctor Abdul Rasyid told Reuters, as he waited in the rain with his wife and four children.

Rasyid, 37, plans to return to his old job working for a UN medical program in Kabul.

Rasyid, who survived when a wooden boat attempting to smuggle him into Australia capsized, said he'd left Afghanistan because the Taliban government had threatened to kidnap and kill his family.

Thousands of illegal migrants, mostly from Afghanistan and the Middle East, have arrived in Indonesia in recent years before embarking on perilous sea voyages in attempts to slip into Australia. Most that made it have ended up in desert detention camps in Australia. Hundreds of others have drowned when their rickety boats sunk.

Repatriation from Indonesia is part of a worldwide attempt to return millions of Afghan refugees back to their devastated country after the fall of the hard-line Taliban.

The IOM will pay the travel costs for the returnees as well as assisting them once they arrive home.

"Everybody will get a one-time repatriation package to help them to start their life again," said Richard Danziger, head of the IOM office in Indonesia, adding the organization had also found jobs for some of the returnees.

Danziger said the IOM was confident more migrants would sign up for repatriation once the first batch had returned home.

"Next week we have about 70 more," he said.