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Afghan refugees have settled in Pakistan for decades. Now they’re being ordered to leave.

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Afghan refugees have settled in Pakistan for decades. Now they’re being ordered to leave.



Pamela Constable
Asia & Pacific
September 25 at 4:00 AM
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Saeed Hamid’s restaurant is covered with touristic murals from Afghanistan – blue-tiled shrines and aqua lakes, ancient Buddhas carved into cliffs, and an enormous scene of horses and riders scrimmaging on a muddy field, trying to capture the carcass of a goat.

But Hamid’s nostalgia stops right there. His parents fled their conflicted homeland before he was born, and he grew up in Pakistan’s capital. He learned English, married and raised his own children here, and built a flourishing bakery and kebab house that employs 20 people and is packed every evening.

So it is easy to understand his anxiety about the future. In the past year, more than 250,000 undocumented Afghan refugees have returned to their impoverished, insurgent-plagued country under pressure from Pakistani authorities. Now, the population of 1.5 million long-settled, registered refugees has been given six months to leave as well.


“No one has bothered us yet, but everyone is worried,” Hamid said one recent afternoon, as the smell of newly baked bread filled his eatery. “We are happy and busy here. If we had to go back, there would be nothing to do and no one to welcome us, only the Taliban and Daesh,” he said, using the Afghan term for the Islamic State militants.

For decades, next-door Pakistan has provided a safety valve for Afghans who fled successive periods of conflict and repression, hosting up to 5 million at a time. The reception has not always been enthusiastic, but it has been heavily subsidized by the United Nations, and most refugees have easily blended into the large population of ethnic Pashtuns that historically straddled the border.








Afghan refugees have settled in Pakistan for decades. Now they’re being ordered to leave.



Pamela Constable
Asia & Pacific
September 25 at 4:00 AM
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Saeed Hamid’s restaurant is covered with touristic murals from Afghanistan – blue-tiled shrines and aqua lakes, ancient Buddhas carved into cliffs, and an enormous scene of horses and riders scrimmaging on a muddy field, trying to capture the carcass of a goat.

But Hamid’s nostalgia stops right there. His parents fled their conflicted homeland before he was born, and he grew up in Pakistan’s capital. He learned English, married and raised his own children here, and built a flourishing bakery and kebab house that employs 20 people and is packed every evening.

So it is easy to understand his anxiety about the future. In the past year, more than 250,000 undocumented Afghan refugees have returned to their impoverished, insurgent-plagued country under pressure from Pakistani authorities. Now, the population of 1.5 million long-settled, registered refugees has been given six months to leave as well.

“No one has bothered us yet, but everyone is worried,” Hamid said one recent afternoon, as the smell of newly baked bread filled his eatery. “We are happy and busy here. If we had to go back, there would be nothing to do and no one to welcome us, only the Taliban and Daesh,” he said, using the Afghan term for the Islamic State militants.

For decades, next-door Pakistan has provided a safety valve for Afghans who fled successive periods of conflict and repression, hosting up to 5 million at a time. The reception has not always been enthusiastic, but it has been heavily subsidized by the United Nations, and most refugees have easily blended into the large population of ethnic Pashtuns that historically straddled the border.

hostage to tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan, with both countries accusing each other of harboring militants in the porous border regions. In late 2014, when terrorists invaded a Pakistani military school, killing 141 students and teachers and enraging public opinion, authorities vowed to start sending the refugees back.









Afghan refugees have settled in Pakistan for decades. Now they’re being ordered to leave.



Pamela Constable
Asia & Pacific
September 25 at 4:00 AM
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Saeed Hamid’s restaurant is covered with touristic murals from Afghanistan – blue-tiled shrines and aqua lakes, ancient Buddhas carved into cliffs, and an enormous scene of horses and riders scrimmaging on a muddy field, trying to capture the carcass of a goat.

But Hamid’s nostalgia stops right there. His parents fled their conflicted homeland before he was born, and he grew up in Pakistan’s capital. He learned English, married and raised his own children here, and built a flourishing bakery and kebab house that employs 20 people and is packed every evening.

So it is easy to understand his anxiety about the future. In the past year, more than 250,000 undocumented Afghan refugees have returned to their impoverished, insurgent-plagued country under pressure from Pakistani authorities. Now, the population of 1.5 million long-settled, registered refugees has been given six months to leave as well.

“No one has bothered us yet, but everyone is worried,” Hamid said one recent afternoon, as the smell of newly baked bread filled his eatery. “We are happy and busy here. If we had to go back, there would be nothing to do and no one to welcome us, only the Taliban and Daesh,” he said, using the Afghan term for the Islamic State militants.

For decades, next-door Pakistan has provided a safety valve for Afghans who fled successive periods of conflict and repression, hosting up to 5 million at a time. The reception has not always been enthusiastic, but it has been heavily subsidized by the United Nations, and most refugees have easily blended into the large population of ethnic Pashtuns that historically straddled the border.

hostage to tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan, with both countries accusing each other of harboring militants in the porous border regions. In late 2014, when terrorists invaded a Pakistani military school, killing 141 students and teachers and enraging public opinion, authorities vowed to start sending the refugees back.

The push took many forms, from police harassment to a government publicity campaign, endorsed by officials in Kabul, which urged Afghans to return with the slogan, “My home is my flower.” After refugee leaders protested, departure deadlines were postponed several times, but the trickle of returnees swelled to tens of thousands early this year, especially after the U.N. added an extra cash bonus for each family once they resettled in Afghanistan.

The surge intensified in June, when Pakistan erected a large gate at Torkham, the major border crossing near Peshawar, and announced that no Afghans could re-enter without a passport and visa. This was tantamount to social death for refugees used to visiting relatives back home, then returning to the safety and prosperity of Pakistan. Riots and shootings broke out at the border gate, but the passport policy stood.

“Torkham gate was the biggest factor. It sent out a very clear message that this was not going to be business as usual,” said Imran Zeb Khan, Pakistan’s chief commissioner for Afghan refugees. He said the cash incentives, as well as public encouragement from Afghan diplomats here, added to the push. By early September, more than 260,000 Afghans had been formally repatriated.

So far, most of the returnees have been undocumented refugees, those who had never registered with U.N. officials and lived in Pakistan illegally for years. Many were poor families without job skills and little to show for their years abroad; 70 percent were under age 24, and 75 percent had been born in Pakistan. Of an estimated 1 million unregistered refugees, officials said 700,000 still remain here.


One day this week, hundreds of Afghan men, women and children waited outside a government center near Peshawar, where officials registered them as refugees for the first time and approved them for repatriation subsidies. Some said they were reluctant to leave and fearful of what awaited them. Others said they had been harassed by police and pressured for bribes to cut their waiting time.


“Last month some of my relatives went back, and the Afghan government claimed it would provide them with rations and housing, but they are living in a tent,” said Meera Jan, 89, who had waited in line for hours. “They have urged me not to leave, but the police and other officials won’t let us live here anymore. I am an old man and I can die in either country. What can I do?”

Officials at the center seemed overwhelmed, saying the number of applicants was far higher than expected and that many were confused or had problems proving their identity. Even so, Shabbir Nawaz, a supervisor, said the center is handling about 700 people per day. “We are trying our best, but most of them are uneducated and have no understanding of the process,” he said.

Faced with a raft of complaints and a crush of applicants, the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has already repeatedly extended the deadline for “voluntary repatriation.” Earlier this month, he ordered the latest departure date postponed from the end of November to next March.

“Afghans are our brothers and very dear to us,” Sharif said in a statement announcing the reprieve. “We will not allow Afghan refugees living in Pakistan to be terrified in any way. They are our guests.”

Sharif’s gesture was small consolation, however, for hundreds of thousands of registered refugees, especially those who own property or businesses and believed their official status was a guarantee of permanence. Instead, they are suddenly vulnerable to financial cheating and pressure — unable to get a fair price for a car, legally barred from selling a house and worried that they will be unable to collect on debts or investments.

Khan, the commissioner for refugees, said the government is aware of such problems, as well as other family issues such as unfinished school semesters and college degrees. He said a meeting has been called with leaders of all Pakistani political parties to work out practical solutions. Individuals with special hardships, he said, are being allowed to apply for Pakistani identity documents.

Meanwhile, though, longtime refugees such as Mohammed Rauf Derrighel, 63, are fuming. “I was a child when I came here. Now I am an old man, and suddenly I am being told to go. I feel helpless,” complained the burly, gray-bearded businessman, who was commiserating with a friend at his tailor shop in Islamabad.

On the outskirts of the capital, hundreds of Afghans live in clusters of flimsy mud and straw-roofed huts, using car batteries to turn on light bulbs and tending goats among campfires. But despite such precarious circumstances, some are registered refugees with long-standing jobs or investments in industries such as scrap metal that they now fear could be lost.

Babur Khan, who has lived in Pakistan since he was 2, squatted outside a hut one recent afternoon, listening as his brothers and cousins talked about their concerns. Suddenly he went inside and came back out with a folder of legal documents, signed and notarized several months before. They certified that he had invested $2,000 in a scrap-metal business and that the Pakistani owner would pay him a few pennies’ profit for each kilo. It was his entire savings, and he now wondered if he had made a mistake.

“Our dealings have always been smooth, but since the Torkham gate fight, everything has been disturbed,” said Khan’s older brother Hassan. “People were fair with us in the past, but now they know we have to leave, and they want to cheat us. We are like a flock of sheep. The owner kept us for 35 years, and then suddenly he went mad and threw all the sheep in a river.”



Aamir Iqbal contributed to this report from Peshawar, Pakistan.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...53b532-7f3c-11e6-ad0e-ab0d12c779b1_story.html


When wars last a long time, the return of the refugees becomes an issue. Many of these refugees have not seen their homeland Afghanistan. First the 9 years of Russian war which was devastating beyond belief, then the civil war under which an ethnic war was fought as well. Finally some semblance of peace for 6 years under the Taliban but then the US war and Afghan civil war which is now 15!! Years old. The constant cycle of war that has plagued Afghanistan have allowed new generations of afghans to take birth. Nevertheless it was always going to happen.

Recently I have seen an upsurge of such articles where Afghan stories are published.

Another thing. In all these articles I have seen that many afghans have good businesses being run in pakistan as well as have private properties as well.

I think this highlights our generosity that we placed no restriction on afghans and allowed them to not only move freely but open businesses anywhere they wished too, which is something no nations allows of refugees. Such absorption. Yet we are hated and criticized by their homeland.

A day will come when the afghan govt will flat out reject that pakistan did any generosity by hosting afghan refugees and kept them like slaves for political push. They rejected everything else we have done for them so why not this as well.
 
.
Time has come for the US to step up to the plate and start doing more by taking in more Afghan refugees. Pakistan will expell Afghans from its land and this process cannot be reserved.
 
.
They are always welcome in India along with the Balochis. Cheers to Indo-Afghan brotherhood :cheers:
 
.
The biggest point that these "stories" seem to miss so easily is that if Afghans were holding any businesses in Pakistan or doing any jobs, it was most probably illegal.

I know that in European and Western countries as refugees people are not allowed to work or even study. They are given allowances but must remain in thei camps or hostels.

I think Pakistan pampered these people so much so, that they don't understand that all privileges they were enjoying were generosity of Pakistani people and not something they were entitled to.

I say, enough. All this unchecked movement between Afghanistan and Pakistan to meet "family" also brings the dangers of weapons and drungs smuggling.

Finally Pakistan is taking right steps. India should share some burden and take half of these good people.
 
.
Yes! we let them live here out of our generosity, and that does not make them Pakistani citizens or gives them the right to live here forever.



saiyan0321 said:




Afghan refugees have settled in Pakistan for decades. Now they’re being ordered to leave.



Pamela Constable
Asia & Pacific
September 25 at 4:00 AM
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Saeed Hamid’s restaurant is covered with touristic murals from Afghanistan – blue-tiled shrines and aqua lakes, ancient Buddhas carved into cliffs, and an enormous scene of horses and riders scrimmaging on a muddy field, trying to capture the carcass of a goat.

But Hamid’s nostalgia stops right there. His parents fled their conflicted homeland before he was born, and he grew up in Pakistan’s capital. He learned English, married and raised his own children here, and built a flourishing bakery and kebab house that employs 20 people and is packed every evening.

So it is easy to understand his anxiety about the future. In the past year, more than 250,000 undocumented Afghan refugees have returned to their impoverished, insurgent-plagued country under pressure from Pakistani authorities. Now, the population of 1.5 million long-settled, registered refugees has been given six months to leave as well.


“No one has bothered us yet, but everyone is worried,” Hamid said one recent afternoon, as the smell of newly baked bread filled his eatery. “We are happy and busy here. If we had to go back, there would be nothing to do and no one to welcome us, only the Taliban and Daesh,” he said, using the Afghan term for the Islamic State militants.

For decades, next-door Pakistan has provided a safety valve for Afghans who fled successive periods of conflict and repression, hosting up to 5 million at a time. The reception has not always been enthusiastic, but it has been heavily subsidized by the United Nations, and most refugees have easily blended into the large population of ethnic Pashtuns that historically straddled the border.







Afghan refugees have settled in Pakistan for decades. Now they’re being ordered to leave.



Pamela Constable
Asia & Pacific
September 25 at 4:00 AM
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Saeed Hamid’s restaurant is covered with touristic murals from Afghanistan – blue-tiled shrines and aqua lakes, ancient Buddhas carved into cliffs, and an enormous scene of horses and riders scrimmaging on a muddy field, trying to capture the carcass of a goat.

But Hamid’s nostalgia stops right there. His parents fled their conflicted homeland before he was born, and he grew up in Pakistan’s capital. He learned English, married and raised his own children here, and built a flourishing bakery and kebab house that employs 20 people and is packed every evening.

So it is easy to understand his anxiety about the future. In the past year, more than 250,000 undocumented Afghan refugees have returned to their impoverished, insurgent-plagued country under pressure from Pakistani authorities. Now, the population of 1.5 million long-settled, registered refugees has been given six months to leave as well.

“No one has bothered us yet, but everyone is worried,” Hamid said one recent afternoon, as the smell of newly baked bread filled his eatery. “We are happy and busy here. If we had to go back, there would be nothing to do and no one to welcome us, only the Taliban and Daesh,” he said, using the Afghan term for the Islamic State militants.

For decades, next-door Pakistan has provided a safety valve for Afghans who fled successive periods of conflict and repression, hosting up to 5 million at a time. The reception has not always been enthusiastic, but it has been heavily subsidized by the United Nations, and most refugees have easily blended into the large population of ethnic Pashtuns that historically straddled the border.

hostage to tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan, with both countries accusing each other of harboring militants in the porous border regions. In late 2014, when terrorists invaded a Pakistani military school, killing 141 students and teachers and enraging public opinion, authorities vowed to start sending the refugees back.








Afghan refugees have settled in Pakistan for decades. Now they’re being ordered to leave.



Pamela Constable
Asia & Pacific
September 25 at 4:00 AM
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Saeed Hamid’s restaurant is covered with touristic murals from Afghanistan – blue-tiled shrines and aqua lakes, ancient Buddhas carved into cliffs, and an enormous scene of horses and riders scrimmaging on a muddy field, trying to capture the carcass of a goat.

But Hamid’s nostalgia stops right there. His parents fled their conflicted homeland before he was born, and he grew up in Pakistan’s capital. He learned English, married and raised his own children here, and built a flourishing bakery and kebab house that employs 20 people and is packed every evening.

So it is easy to understand his anxiety about the future. In the past year, more than 250,000 undocumented Afghan refugees have returned to their impoverished, insurgent-plagued country under pressure from Pakistani authorities. Now, the population of 1.5 million long-settled, registered refugees has been given six months to leave as well.

“No one has bothered us yet, but everyone is worried,” Hamid said one recent afternoon, as the smell of newly baked bread filled his eatery. “We are happy and busy here. If we had to go back, there would be nothing to do and no one to welcome us, only the Taliban and Daesh,” he said, using the Afghan term for the Islamic State militants.

For decades, next-door Pakistan has provided a safety valve for Afghans who fled successive periods of conflict and repression, hosting up to 5 million at a time. The reception has not always been enthusiastic, but it has been heavily subsidized by the United Nations, and most refugees have easily blended into the large population of ethnic Pashtuns that historically straddled the border.

hostage to tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan, with both countries accusing each other of harboring militants in the porous border regions. In late 2014, when terrorists invaded a Pakistani military school, killing 141 students and teachers and enraging public opinion, authorities vowed to start sending the refugees back.

The push took many forms, from police harassment to a government publicity campaign, endorsed by officials in Kabul, which urged Afghans to return with the slogan, “My home is my flower.” After refugee leaders protested, departure deadlines were postponed several times, but the trickle of returnees swelled to tens of thousands early this year, especially after the U.N. added an extra cash bonus for each family once they resettled in Afghanistan.

The surge intensified in June, when Pakistan erected a large gate at Torkham, the major border crossing near Peshawar, and announced that no Afghans could re-enter without a passport and visa. This was tantamount to social death for refugees used to visiting relatives back home, then returning to the safety and prosperity of Pakistan. Riots and shootings broke out at the border gate, but the passport policy stood.

“Torkham gate was the biggest factor. It sent out a very clear message that this was not going to be business as usual,” said Imran Zeb Khan, Pakistan’s chief commissioner for Afghan refugees. He said the cash incentives, as well as public encouragement from Afghan diplomats here, added to the push. By early September, more than 260,000 Afghans had been formally repatriated.

So far, most of the returnees have been undocumented refugees, those who had never registered with U.N. officials and lived in Pakistan illegally for years. Many were poor families without job skills and little to show for their years abroad; 70 percent were under age 24, and 75 percent had been born in Pakistan. Of an estimated 1 million unregistered refugees, officials said 700,000 still remain here.


One day this week, hundreds of Afghan men, women and children waited outside a government center near Peshawar, where officials registered them as refugees for the first time and approved them for repatriation subsidies. Some said they were reluctant to leave and fearful of what awaited them. Others said they had been harassed by police and pressured for bribes to cut their waiting time.


“Last month some of my relatives went back, and the Afghan government claimed it would provide them with rations and housing, but they are living in a tent,” said Meera Jan, 89, who had waited in line for hours. “They have urged me not to leave, but the police and other officials won’t let us live here anymore. I am an old man and I can die in either country. What can I do?”

Officials at the center seemed overwhelmed, saying the number of applicants was far higher than expected and that many were confused or had problems proving their identity. Even so, Shabbir Nawaz, a supervisor, said the center is handling about 700 people per day. “We are trying our best, but most of them are uneducated and have no understanding of the process,” he said.

Faced with a raft of complaints and a crush of applicants, the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has already repeatedly extended the deadline for “voluntary repatriation.” Earlier this month, he ordered the latest departure date postponed from the end of November to next March.

“Afghans are our brothers and very dear to us,” Sharif said in a statement announcing the reprieve. “We will not allow Afghan refugees living in Pakistan to be terrified in any way. They are our guests.”

Sharif’s gesture was small consolation, however, for hundreds of thousands of registered refugees, especially those who own property or businesses and believed their official status was a guarantee of permanence. Instead, they are suddenly vulnerable to financial cheating and pressure — unable to get a fair price for a car, legally barred from selling a house and worried that they will be unable to collect on debts or investments.

Khan, the commissioner for refugees, said the government is aware of such problems, as well as other family issues such as unfinished school semesters and college degrees. He said a meeting has been called with leaders of all Pakistani political parties to work out practical solutions. Individuals with special hardships, he said, are being allowed to apply for Pakistani identity documents.

Meanwhile, though, longtime refugees such as Mohammed Rauf Derrighel, 63, are fuming. “I was a child when I came here. Now I am an old man, and suddenly I am being told to go. I feel helpless,” complained the burly, gray-bearded businessman, who was commiserating with a friend at his tailor shop in Islamabad.

On the outskirts of the capital, hundreds of Afghans live in clusters of flimsy mud and straw-roofed huts, using car batteries to turn on light bulbs and tending goats among campfires. But despite such precarious circumstances, some are registered refugees with long-standing jobs or investments in industries such as scrap metal that they now fear could be lost.

Babur Khan, who has lived in Pakistan since he was 2, squatted outside a hut one recent afternoon, listening as his brothers and cousins talked about their concerns. Suddenly he went inside and came back out with a folder of legal documents, signed and notarized several months before. They certified that he had invested $2,000 in a scrap-metal business and that the Pakistani owner would pay him a few pennies’ profit for each kilo. It was his entire savings, and he now wondered if he had made a mistake.

“Our dealings have always been smooth, but since the Torkham gate fight, everything has been disturbed,” said Khan’s older brother Hassan. “People were fair with us in the past, but now they know we have to leave, and they want to cheat us. We are like a flock of sheep. The owner kept us for 35 years, and then suddenly he went mad and threw all the sheep in a river.”



Aamir Iqbal contributed to this report from Peshawar, Pakistan.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...53b532-7f3c-11e6-ad0e-ab0d12c779b1_story.html


When wars last a long time, the return of the refugees becomes an issue. Many of these refugees have not seen their homeland Afghanistan. First the 9 years of Russian war which was devastating beyond belief, then the civil war under which an ethnic war was fought as well. Finally some semblance of peace for 6 years under the Taliban but then the US war and Afghan civil war which is now 15!! Years old. The constant cycle of war that has plagued Afghanistan have allowed new generations of afghans to take birth. Nevertheless it was always going to happen.

Recently I have seen an upsurge of such articles where Afghan stories are published.

Another thing. In all these articles I have seen that many afghans have good businesses being run in pakistan as well as have private properties as well.

I think this highlights our generosity that we placed no restriction on afghans and allowed them to not only move freely but open businesses anywhere they wished too, which is something no nations allows of refugees. Such absorption. Yet we are hated and criticized by their homeland.

A day will come when the afghan govt will flat out reject that pakistan did any generosity by hosting afghan refugees and kept them like slaves for political push. They rejected everything else we have done for them so why not this as well.
Click to expand...
 
.
They offer no value and are a security risk.

How many times must I watch the news only for an Afghan to be done for terrorism and he has visited Pakistan. Break this link and disassociate.
 
.

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