Islamabad has set November 1 as the deadline for all undocumented migrants, mainly Afghans, to voluntarily leave the country, warning of arrests and deportations after that date.
“Even those of us who have legal refugee status/cards are not being spared by the police who are viciously targeting our people all over Karachi,” Haji Abdullah, the head of the community in Afghan Basti told PTI.
Karachi is estimated to be home to some 300,000 Afghans, many of them coming over from Afghanistan during the Taliban takeover and residing here illegally.
Latest UN figures show some 1.3 million Afghans are registered refugees in Pakistan, while another 880,000 have legal status to stay in the country.
Pakistan’s caretaker interior minister Sarfaraz Bugti, however, claimed there were over 1.7 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan who were not registered with the government and they were the ones who were going to be sent back home. The majority of the Afghan refugees live in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and southwestern Balochistan provinces bordering Afghanistan but the southern Sindh province also hosts some 500,000 refugees with most of them in Karachi which provides them a chance to earn their livelihood easily. Many of the young and middle-aged Afghans in the two populous neighbourhoods have harrowing tales to narrate about run-ins and arrests with the police.
“The police are having a field day extorting money from our people even when our people who have the refugee cards show them their cards. They are torn and our people are taken to police stations and only released when bribes are paid to the police,” Abdullah said.
Haji Rahim, who is a respected businessman in the community, said that most of the youth were staying at home and not venturing out for work because of the fear of getting arrested by police.
“We don’t know what to do because even the legal status refugees are being harassed and forced to pay money. A man who has a cart and sells chips in Saddar was picked up by the police and is still languishing in jail because his family can’t arrange for the money asked for by the police,” Rahim said.
Sania Naz, wife of the man, said it was difficult to feed five children as both her husband and brother were in jail.
Senior Superintendent Police Illyas Kashmiri, however, said many of the Afghan refugees living in these two neighbourhoods have been found involved in drug peddling, street crimes, and dacoities.
“The crime has increased in Karachi in the last two years because many of them after committing different crimes slip back into their neighbourhoods which are not easy to access even by police,” he said.
He said even Afghan children who go around the city collecting garbage work as informers for the bigger criminals.
Because of the prevailing situation, many families have already decided to return home and some have already left by road via the Chaman border in Balochistan.
“I think around 500 refugees have left for Chaman in the last week from these two colonies,” Rahim said.
Ahmed (one name) who runs a restaurant at Sohrab Goth and acts as a fixer between his people and the police said that in the last month, some 1,500 Afghans had been arrested in different cases. “Many were released after paying bribes.”
Pakistan’s decision to ask illegal immigrants to leave by October 31 or face forcible expulsion from November 1 has drawn criticism, with organisations such as UNHCR and Amnesty International calling on the government to rethink its plans. The Taliban government in Kabul has also expressed its reservations over the move.
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