‘Afghans in Pakistan wanted to escape Taliban rule but we shattered their hopes’

Seeing no end to insurgency in their own country, Afghan immigrants living in Pakistan for the past many years were hoping that they would become Pakistani nationals one day, however their dreams shattered as the current caretaker government suddenly decided to send them back to Afghanistan.

Journalist Zia Ur Rehman made this remark during a talk at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) on Thursday. Rehman along with economist Uzair Younus and lawyer Abira Ashfaq was on a panel for a discussion titled ‘No country to call home: Behind Pakistan’s expulsion of Afghan refugees’ moderated by IBA lecturer Yumna Fatima.

The journalist shared the story of an Afghan immigrant man who went to buy vegetables but was stopped by police in the market for checking his identity document, which he did not carry, and was consequently forced to sit in a bus and sent along with other persons caught in a similar manner to the Chaman border for deportation to Afghanistan.

“The man did not have any money and he contacted his family from Chaman and told them about the incident,” Rehman said, adding that in many Afghan immigrant families living in the country, some members are documented and some are undocumented, and the government’s repatriation drive have been dividing many such families.

Besides immigrants, he added, there was another category of Afghan people, including former law enforcement and security personnel and journalists who arrived in Pakistan a couple of years ago on visas to escape persecution at the hands of Taliban, but now their visas were not being extended.

He said that stereotyping against Afghan immigrants had been taking place for long now and because of this, divisions were formed even in the civil society on the issue.

The journalist said the authorities had warned landlords in many parts of the country not to rent out their places to Afghan immigrants or else they would face legal action.

Abira was of the view that a narrative had been built to scapegoat Afghan immigrants for the failure of the authorities to curb crime and maintain governance. She called the ongoing repatriation drive an imperialist adventure.

She added that many Sindhi and Baloch nationalists were divided on this issue, with some supporting the government’s deportation move while others opposing it.

She said that instead of talking about the mining for petroleum and minerals happening in parts of Sindh and Balochistan causing harm to the environment and indigenous people, people had been indoctrinated through mass media to accept the state’s narrative. She advised the audience to look at things from a decolonisation lens.

She said that Afghan immigrants were not allowed to go to public educational institutions, but they could opt for private ones if they could afford them. She remarked that this reeked of an institutional discrimination and a ‘racial apartheid’ against Afghan immigrants, even though they did contribute to the country’s economy through taxes.

The lawyer said Pakistan’s immigration law had problems that led to structural discrimination. She maintained that there was currently no law that could protect Afghan immigrants from deportation, even those who were born in the country and lived here for generations.

She asked the young audience to resist such moves, or else morality in society may die forever.

Younus said that Afghanistan was being punished because a superpower, from which he apparently meant the US, was a bit salty over what happened to it in the country in the past 20 years. He said that Afghans were out of their country because they did not want to live under the Taliban rule, and now unfortunately were being forced towards it.

He said the Taliban government in Afghanistan was running a budget deficit of USD8 billion annually with no access to international support. He opined that they would rely on drug trade and taxation on trade at border. He feared that they may also react aggressively through the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan against Pakistan to maintain coherence in their society.

The economist said that anecdotal data suggested that Afghan immigrants worked in labour-intensive fields in Pakistan, with investments in local business. He added that when you expropriate business, it affected the economy negatively.

He lamented tjat although Afghan immigrants contributed positively to the economy, a polling data showed deportation drive as a popular policy choice. He said that even in a half-decent democracy, this repatriation policy would have been discussed in Parliament before being implemented.