PAKISTAN: Afghan Refugees Torn Between Staying, Returning Home

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Nadeem Iqbal

ISLAMABAD, Dec 17 2002 (IPS) - Five-year-old Ajmal, an Afghan refugee born in Pakistan, disagrees with his 11-year-old sister Tarina that the destruction in Afghanistan is such that they should not go back to their homeland yet.

Ajmal has never seen Afghanistan. But Tarina was there when she was three, and remembers the devastation and deprivation that she saw even at that time, in 1996.

"Our home is divided between whether we should go back or not. It is so good here. Me and my elder sister do not want to go back, but my elder and youngest brothers want to,” she said.

Whether to stay in Pakistan or go back to Afghanistan is a debate raging in Afghan refugee households here, after an agreement last week between the two countries to repatriate the remaining 1.8 million Afghan refugees in the next three years.

The Dec. 13 tripartite agreement was reached with the participation of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and signed by Pakistani minister Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao and visiting Afghan Refugees and Repatriation Minister Enayatullah Nazari. It will be formally signed in January in Geneva.

The voluntary repatriation programme will help all Afghan citizens residing in Pakistan who wish to return to their homes.

At the end of the three-year period, Afghans remaining in Pakistan will be screened to identify those who may still need international refugee protection.

More than 1.5 million Afghans have already left Pakistan since the Afghan authorities and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees began to assist the voluntary repatriation in March this year, months after the fall of the Taliban in November.

Mainly due to drops in temperature in the winter, the rate of return from Pakistan has significantly slowed in recent weeks. Less than 10,000 Afghans are returning now per week across the eastern border, down from the height of nearly 100,000 in May.

UNHCR estimates that another 600,000 may return from Pakistan next year from the remaining 1.8 million who are still in the country at present.

The influx of Afghan asylum seekers into neighbouring Pakistan started in 1979 soon after the invasion of Afghanistan by the former Soviet Union, and within years their number reached 3 million.

Although majority belonging the poor and lower middle class stayed in camps or cities like Peshawar and Quetta bordering Afghanistan, the richer ones landed in the capital Islamabad.

According to estimates today, the Afghan population constitutes at least 10 percent of the 900,000 people in the city. Many were born here. They are fluent in the local Urdu language, in addition to their own Dari language.

Many Afghans have adjusted to life here, despite the difficulties and uncertainty that being a refugee brings.

For instance, given the large number of refugees it hosts, Pakistan never signed Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees because it restricts the forced expulsion of refugees and requires the assimilation and naturalisation of refugees.

Pakistani officials claim that they have been observing the spirit of U.N. convention anyway and have never forced the Afghans to leave, and that the government issues special passes to the legal refugees that are renewed periodically.

Still, this means that even though they have been in Pakistan for nearly 30 years and their children have been born here or have spent a major portion of their lives in Pakistan, they remain refugees and have no legal claim to staying on permanently.

According to a survey conducted by the police among Afghan professionals last year in Islamabad, Afghans are found in different professions – there were 38 doctors, 65 teachers, 62 tailors, 143 taxi drivers and 9,831 labourers included in the poll.

Many Afghans also own public transport vehicles plying the city. Many are salespersons and vendors near markets as well. The city has numerous Afghan boutiques, jewellers, restaurants, bakeries.

The idea of giving up their jobs and livelihoods in a place they have grown used to, and starting from scratch – even if it is their own homeland – is not easy for many Afghan refugees here.

Twenty-three year-old Shafiq Smadi, who came to Pakistan in 1992 along with seven other family members, says they have put struggled too much to create a new life in Pakistan and cannot just give it up.

"I have only got primary education in Kabul and could not continue in Pakistan. Instead, to survive I started selling chips and later pickle in the markets,” he recalled of his family’s early days here. ”Now our family owns a bakery and has a good business.”

”I have never been to Afghanistan but I know that the situation there is not good. We do not want to go back, but could think about if the Afghan government would provide us a business and a house,” Shafiq Smadi added.

Since January, many families have sent one member to Afghanistan on reconnaissance ‘go and see’ visits to check out the situation there. To the returning families, the UNHCR provides travel cost and some sustenance – wheat and oil, for instance – for some months to survive back in Afghanistan.

But many have returned to Pakistan after consuming the U.N. aid and finding out that the situation in Afghanistan is not conducive to their livelihoods.

But some say they are not interested in returning to Afghanistan. Saleh Muhammad, 45, who came here 14 years ago, does not want to go back because his four children do not want to.

"My children are between 18 and 10 years of age. The youngest was born in Islamabad. They love the place they live in and spent their childhood in. About Afghanistan they know only through TV images of war,” he said.

”They do not want to go back," added Saleh, who fears that soon, he and other Afghan refugees will be forced out of Pakistan even if they want to stay.

PAKISTAN: Afghan Refugees Torn Between Staying, Returning Home

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Nadeem Iqbal

ISLAMABAD, Dec 17 2002 (IPS) - Five-year-old Ajmal, an Afghan refugee born in Pakistan, disagrees with his 11-year-old sister Tarina that the destruction in Afghanistan is such that they should not go back to their homeland yet.
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