A shrinking cohort

There was a time when Pakistan was host and home to a diversity of foreign nationals. The streets of Gilgit, Hunza and Skardu were thronged with tourists from around the world. Our universities had visiting faculty from far and wide. Our charitable institutions and NGOs had a rolling population of foreigners all here to serve Pakistan and its people — and all are now mostly gone, a quiet exodus that has left Pakistan poorer at every level. It is rare today to see a foreign national anywhere outside of the major cities, and they are barely visible there either. As the security situation has deteriorated over the years, particularly since 9/11, governments have been issuing increasingly stringent travel advisories which whilst not actually prohibiting their nationals from visiting Pakistan, are advising them only to visit if absolutely necessary.

Many of those who came to serve, rather than as tourists, were in the health and education sectors. They were always low-profile and never sought the limelight, all of them acutely aware of the dangers attached to being something ‘other’ in Pakistan. In recent weeks, there has been an attempt on the life of an academic who was married to a Pakistani. She survived, but only just. Now another academic, Dr Bernadette Dean, is being forced to leave the country as a result of a concerted campaign of death threats issued by a religious political party. Foreign nationals are being forced to flee in the same way that members of minority groups are steadily leaving, all pressured by the advancing narrative of extremism that does not tolerate another voice in the house. Pakistan’s own academics are nowadays targets as well, as evidenced by the murder of Dr Wahidur Rahman recently, but there has been no outcry as these valued assets die or depart these shores. The government does little to protect them, vulnerable as they are, and the shrinking cohort of foreign skills and knowledge is only set to get smaller. Diversity is a concept that is dying by the day in Pakistan, along with the tolerance that should be its bedrock.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 15^th,  2015.

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