This report is supported by the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives
December 24, 2023
By Xari Jalil
ISLAMABAD
In the heart of South Asia, a silent crisis unfolds as refugees from Afghanistan, particularly the Shia-Hazara community, face overwhelming challenges while being pushed out by Pakistan.
Under the circumstances, some have had to return to their homeland reluctantly to live – or rather to die – under the brutal and merciless Taliban regime. But many others have stayed back, trying to be as invisible as they can while waiting endlessly for visa approval from other countries such as from the US and European countries.
For Dr Ayesha Hussain*, who came to Pakistan two years ago after the Taliban took over, life made a sharp turn and seems to be going downhill ever since.
Hussain is unemployed, confined indoors, and suffering from depression. When she wants to feel happy she tries to remember that time when things were looking up for her career-wise, and she was a working dentist.
“I graduated in 2020, and I was working in a private clinic,” she says. “My husband had a barber shop, and we were working together side by side to make a good life for us and our kids. But I just worked there for three months, before the Taliban took over and everything became hopeless.”
Hussain’s parents had already told her the stories of how the last Taliban government was like. That was decades ago. But she knew what they would do with women and the Hazara people.
“The Taliban have a problem with the Shia-Hazaras, with educated women, and human rights defenders and also those who were with the former government,” she says. “Being a dentist if I go back there, there would be a lot of problem. When I lived there I was working with civil society, raising awareness and literacy among women. I had to escape and flee the country to save my life.”
Hussain says that civil activists had been disappearing mysteriously everyday, which they soon discovered were being abducted by the Taliban and were being murdered. But being in Pakistan also has ended up in dashing her hopes for a better and more secure future.
“Hazaras are also here like other refugees – we have no documents for living here, we have no right to register our children in schools. We can’t enroll them in schools, we have no cards that UNHCR gave us as refugees. Because of that, we cannot live normally here,” she says. “I used to dream of opening up my own clinic, enrolling my kids in better schools. Now my son is nine and he hasn’t been to school in two years.”
Even when they go to the hospital, they are asked to present an id card which they don’t have. “For two years I am mostly living in a depressed state because I am stuck at home.”
For Zahra Mowsavi*, she is living what she calls a ‘loop of displacement’.
“I don’t know when this loop of displacement will end,” she says. “I was born in Iran during the Soviet Invasion. Today again I am a refugee. Being a refugee has scarred us so much that even in the middle when we were living in our own land in Afghanistan, my parents used to be extra careful not to collect too many things. They used to say, who knows when we have flee again?” she says.
It is not easy to stay invisible while living in Pakistan.
“As you can tell our faces are very different than others from our country,” she says. “We are very easily recognizable making us easy targets of discrimination and harassment, especially by the police. This is very sad, because when we came here the behavior of the Pakistani people was different, but ever since the government announced deportation, we have seen their attitudes change, for example, house owners ask for extra money.”
At present Zahra and the others have applied to the US visa but there is little hope.
“We have applied for US visa through some charity organizations inside USA but that was two years ago,” says Zahra. “Recently we received a letter from them asking us to provide evidence that our life is in danger. Everyone knows how difficult the situation is for the Hazara people inside Afghanistan, and we have gone through massacres, and discrimination in Afghanistan. They can also see how miserable our life is here. The government doesn’t recognize us as legitimate persons in Pakistan; we cannot access health or education facilities or seek employment. Don’t they see these problems? And yet they still ask us to provide third-party evidence of being vulnerable to danger inside Pakistan.”
Women in Conflict
“Women in Afghanistan have been terribly affected by the war,” says Zahra. “Like any other women, they too have lost their husbands, their children. A woman was telling me how she had raised her son to the age of 25 only to see him being killed in a bomb blast.”
Zahra says it is not difficult to imagine a family that doesn’t have any male members because of them being killed in bomb explosions leaving a woman to head the family. “But unfortunately the (Taliban) government doesn’t allow women to go outside and work, so what will she do then?”