Sent to the land that was never theirs: Afghan refugees in Pakistan

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  Haji Arsala Khan sits with companions at Peshawar market.

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  Many Afghans who sought shelter in Pakistan have been told their residencies will end in December. Some refugees may have never set foot in Afghanistan, while their elders who fled the violence of the Russian invasion of 1979 may have not seen their native land in decades.

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  At the UNHCR offices in Peshawar, an elderly woman is helped aboard a lorry for her family’s journey to Afghanistan.

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  Vendor Muhammad Ahmad marks time with his wares, as does a young refugee at his dress shop in the city.

Forced from their homes by decades of war and tribal conflict, Afghan refugees in Pakistan have been blamed for 152 killings, mostly of children, in Peshawar. Deportations have risen and their lot is desperate.

On the morning of December 16 last year, members of the Pakistani Taliban, the same organisation that tried to kill teenage education activist Malala Yousafzai, attacked the Army Public School and Degree College in Peshawar, Pakistan, murdering 152 people – 133 of them children – and injuring more than 120.

Despite the condemnation of the attack from the Afghan Taliban, provincial officials turned on Afghan refugees when identifying the underlying cause of terrorism, unrest and crimes in Pakistan’s north-western province.

“They are not only used by miscreants as the facilitators for such misdeeds, but they have also increased pressure on the feeble economy and meagre available resources,” Pervez Khattak, chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, said soon after the attack.

It is estimated that there are more than three million Afghans living in Pakistan, at least 1.5 million of whom form the world’s largest protracted refugee population.

Since 2002, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has assisted in the return of 3.8 million registered Afghans from Pakistan, but in recent months the number leaving appears to have increased.

Reuters reports that the International Organisation for Migration registered more than 22,000 undocumented Afghan refugees crossing the Afghan-Pakistan border at the town of Torkham in January, more than twice the figure for the whole of last year.

As many as 1,500 others were deported in the same month, double the number of deportees in December.

Responding to these events in January, the UNHCR’s country representative, Maya Ameratunga, called on the Pakistani government not to use force in the repatriation of Afghan refugees.

“Afghan refugees are also victims,” Ms Ameratunga said in Quetta. “They fled their country because of war and terrorism, and we should not forget this fact that they are innocent victims and we should not victimise them again by abusing their human rights and making them forcibly return.”

All photos courtesy Fayaz Aziz / Reuters.