South Africa now harbors about 152,000 refugees and asylum seekers mostly from other strife-torn African countries, South Africa's National Consortium for Refugee Affairs (NCRA) said on Thursday in Johannesburg.

The NCRA, a network of organizations dealing with the promotion and protection of refugee rights in South Africa, planned to stage programs Saturday in Cape Town to commemorate the World Refugee Day, which falls on June 20.

The events will showcase, highlight and reflect on the refugee situation both in South Africa and the rest part of the world, said NCRA's national coordinator Joyce Ntlou.

The majority of refugees and asylum seekers in the post-1994 South Africa came from strife-torn countries, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Burundi, Rwanda, Somalia, Ethiopia, the Sudan and until recently Angola, Ntlou said.

Ongoing tensions within the DRC have caused an influx of Congolese refugees into neighboring countries such as Rwanda and Burundi.

The events in Cape Town will be held in conjunction with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

UNHCR chief Ruud Lubbers said in a statement Thursday in Geneva that the statistics shows the number of refugees declined drastically in the past year.

"We have seen the global number of people of concern to UNHCR drop from 21.8 million when I first took office at the start of 2001 to 17.1 million at the beginning of this year, an overall decline of nearly 22 percent," said Lubbers.

The top five asylum countries in 2003 were Pakistan (1.1 million), Iran (985,000), Germany (960,000), Tanzania (650,000) and the United States (452,500), according to the UN agency.

Afghans remained the largest single refugee nationality with at least 2.1 million in 74 asylum countries, followed by Sudanese (606,000) and Burundians (531,600).