This documentary is supported by the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives
December 31, 2023
Rahimullah Afghan was born in Loralai. Since his childhood, all that he has known has been Pakistan, yet he is still only recognized as an Afghan refugee student. Having been born and raised in Pakistan since the beginning, he is now being told that there is no place for him and his family in a country they thought they could call their own.
“It’s the Pakistan government policy – but we don’t know much about it. What do they want from us, from Afghan refugees and students?” asks Rahimullah. “I don’t know. But he feels that it is his right that he is given a CNIC by the government.
“When the Pakistani Government gave this statement, I developed an inferiority complex. I had to come to Lahore, so I’ve started my clearance [process] from here. I do not know what calamity had befallen them that they had to push the Afghan refugees out of the country so suddenly. Everything I ever did, I did it in Pakistan,” he says.
On October 3, the caretaker Government of Pakistan decreed that all Afghan refugees must leave in a month’s time. Just like that, there was no longer any space for thousands of Afghan students in Pakistan – their dreams of a future shattered.
Like Rahimullah, Sohaila too has been living in Pakistan since the Soviet war. “We have spent 16 long years here, so I don’t believe that it is right that we are made to leave,” she says. “In Afghanistan there are even more problems waiting for us especially when it comes to education – there no education for women. And since we are settled here, it is very difficult for us to go there.”
“My family came to Pakistan when the Soviet Union attacked Afghanistan in 1979,” says Saadullah.
Saadullah’s family had also been residing in Balochistan since the late 70s during the Soviet war. He feels that the decision of the Government of Pakistan was extremely cruel.
“The entire deportation process, including the decision, is unfair and biased, the effects of which are not only felt by the migrants, but by the settled people as well,” he says. “Most of the migrants were engaged in agriculture especially if you look at Balochistan. In fact almost all the people in Balochistan’s agricultural sector are migrants. Kicking them out also affected agriculture.”
The people who left, left their businesses and their money behind too.
“The mental pressure and psychological trauma of the refugee community cannot be described,” says Ehsanullah. “This is a very cruel decision. Whenever bad times befell Afghanistan, its people turned to Pakistan. This has happened four times in the past, be it the Soviet War in 1979 or the first rule of the Taliban in 1996, the start of the US ‘War on Terror’ in 2001, or the Fall of Kabul in 2021 when the Taliban took over again.”
According to official data, more than four million migrants have sought refuge in Pakistan during this 44-year period including 1.7 million illegal refugees. But the Government of Pakistan has stated that after the end of the war in Afghanistan, there is no reason why refugees should remain here, and therefore they should return to their homeland. Following the Government of Pakistan’s announcement, legally residing Afghan citizens were also subjected to discrimination by the administration
Experts however say that the real reason for this move is to put pressure on the Afghan Taliban as Pakistan believes that the TTP, which is apparently being facilitated by the Afghan Taliban, is responsible for the uptick in terrorism. The victims of this policy, however, do not agree with the Government of Pakistan’s stance.
“Did these undocumented people living in Pakistan fall from the sky?” questions Rahimullah. “They came in through the border – so where was the border security then? Where did they come from? Who are they?”
He says that barely two to three percent of the Afghan refugees in Pakistan have actually been involved in exploitation or criminal activities. This doesn’t mean that all Afghans living in Pakistan are terrorists.
Meanwhile Ehsaanullah is in the third semester of his course in International Relations at the Abbasi University lives in Peshawar.
Caught in the cold war between Pakistan and Afghanistan, these people have lost their homes, businesses, finances, education, friends, their entire lives overnight. And they do not even know what their fault is.
Ehsaanullah has been arrested twice by the police despite being in possession of a PoR (refugee) card.
“I was on my way to my university when the police grabbed me,” he said. “I did not have my PoR on me at that time so I told them that I have a card at home and if they would permit I could call someone to get it. But they said I had to go with them. I went to the police station with them, called my father and he brought my card, yet even then the police demanded money. We had to pay them Rs1000 for my release.”
Ehsanullah says that even students that have come to Pakistan on scholarships are being racially profiled and discriminated against by the police.
Rahiimullah says, the fact that he cannot travel is in itself a form of harassment.
“I have to travel on someone else’s CNIC or recommendation,” he says. “I cannot show my PoR card at checkposts. It’s a kind of harassment.”
Saadullah adds, “Stepping out of my home, even if it’s for university, is difficult, as I am a registered Afghan refugee, with a PoR card, yet I am still scared that we will be rounded up. Even today we live with trauma whenever we leave our homes, we are stricken by fear and panic that we will be picked up and deported.”
When Pakistan declared that Afghan refugees could not remain, state oppression became manifest when the police raided their homes in the dead of the night, and bulldozers tore down the houses of poor Afghans in various areas, the troubles of students also multiplied: some faced racism at their universities, some were unable to find a place to stay on rent.
Rahimullah says even with a valid card he will not be given a room in any hostel nor a flat on rent in Lahore.
A student tells Voicepk, others tell them, ‘Bloody Afghan, why have you come to Pakistan? Why don’t you study in your own country?’
“I feel like dropping out. Why just us? There are many other students in Pakistan from Somalia, Nepal, China, Kashmir, Tajikistan and Dubai. Where is this behaviour when it comes to them? Are the people of Afghanistan so bad that everybody wants to beat them up?”
Despite the difficult situation, a large number of Afghan students do not want to return to Afghanistan. Because, on one hand, women’s education is banned and on the other the lack of employment spells doom for the youth.
Sohaila, another student, says that there is little convenience, and little freedom for women in Afghanistan.
“Over there, the women are kept in their homes – many in our families who do not permit [their girls] go to school,” she says. “Women’s education has been severely affected there [The Taliban] want the women to remain inside. They do not allow them to go outside to study or to do anything for the sake of their families. They say that women should stay indoors and raise their children.”
Hasina Hamti wants to be a journalist for which she needs a degree.
For now, she is pursuing her passion through a vlog which she posts on her official Facebook page. Hasina is one among the many students who do not want to go back to Afghanistan, and is very disappointed by the government’s announcement.
“I am thankful to Pakistan that I was able to get a 12th grade education,” she says. “But in Afghanistan [after the Taliban came], my cousins were stopped from studying any further. It was their final year for their degree, too, so they were really heartbroken. The calls for the expelling migrants are really disappointing. What will the women who completed their education here even do in Afghanistan? Our 14 years of study will go to waste.”
These students have same dreams and aspirations for a better future, just as any other student from any other society. But it seems these dreams cannot come true in Afghanistan. The only difference between people like Rahimullah and Saadullah, and anyone else born and brought up in Pakistan is the ID card.
The futures of those who are in possession of this singular piece of plastic are secure and those without, their futures are marked by uncertainty.
It is an injustice that a country that stands opposed to the Taliban’s ideology should sacrifice girls like Sohaila and Haseena to this very ideology. There was a time when Pakistan vowed to educate the enemy’s child.
Then why is this right being snatched away from refugees and their children?