Coming home to war: Afghan refugees return reluctantly from Pakistan

Returning families say Afghanistan is no safer than when they fled


Reuters September 05, 2015
PHOTO: REUTERS

KABUL: Rahim Khan’s return to Afghanistan 28 years after fleeing to Pakistan was not the homecoming he had dreamed of. The 60-year-old is one of a growing number of Afghan refugees making the journey back with trepidation, as militant violence intensifies, yet feeling shunned by their adopted country as relations between the neighbours sour.

The rate of returnees has more than quadrupled this year, with 137,000 refugees going back to Afghanistan since January. The number could spike further if the countries fail to agree by December 31 to extend identity cards for two years and allow some 1.5 million registered refugees to stay in Pakistan.  The chill in relations has put the extension in doubt, along with the future of another million unregistered Afghans.

“First we had to leave here because of war. Now we are coming back to war and bombs,” said Rahim, speaking at a refugee centre near Kabul where his Pakistan-born grandchildren were being taught the dangers of mines and roadside bombs.

Outside, the thump of exploding ordnance from a nearby army range echoed off arid hills, another reminder that Afghanistan appears no closer to peace than when Khan left during the Soviet occupation. Yet Rahim and others like him say they had little choice but to leave Pakistan.

His son Abdul Manan said their life as labourers and fruit vendors in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) took a turn for the worse after Taliban gunmen massacred at least 141 students at the Army Public School in Peshawar. He said police started showing up at their home, asking to see their papers and threatening them with jail if they failed to pay Rs1,000-1,500 every few days.

“We decided to leave, there was no other option. We couldn’t keep paying Rs1,500,” said Manan. “This is our home and we have no other place to go.”

Raja Shafqat Khan, senior official at the police headquarters in Muzaffarabad, said he was not aware of the family’s complaints. “As a policy, we do not harass Afghan refugees,” he said.

Rahim is moving in with his daughter-in-law’s family in Afghanistan’s northeastern province of Kunduz, because fighting is too fierce around his farmland in neighbouring Baghlan.

But as thousands arrive from Pakistan, others are seeking ways to leave. After Syrians and Eritreans, Afghans are the third biggest group of asylum seekers in Europe, making up about 11 per cent of the 300,000 refugees and migrants who have made it across the Mediterranean this year, according to data from the UN refugee agency.

Ahmad Faheem, who runs the agency’s Kabul reception centre, said some of those leaving were among 3.5 million former refugees who returned from Pakistan soon after the US toppled the Taliban in 2001, amid brief hope of a better future.

“Day by day the security situation is getting worse,” said Faheem, who himself returned from Pakistan in 2002. “They have come here to try to settle, but if there is no security and no work, they leave again.”

Published in The Express Tribune, September 5th, 2015.

COMMENTS (9)

Sarwar | 8 years ago | Reply @Truth Pakistanis seeking "dual nationalities" is not the same as Afghans taking shelter in Pakistan. Therefore there's no truth in your allegation.
Faraz | 8 years ago | Reply @Truth: No one said Pakistan is a country where everything is all right. We have serious issues that we need to resolve. But the Afghans need to find a solution to their problems. We are not a rich country which can offer jobs to millions of Afghans - we can barely offer jobs to our own citizens. If Pakistani's apply for dual nationalities it because we are a country that has not solved its own problems. We cannot take on the entire Afghan nation at our citizens expense. Certainly we should help but we have been doing that for too many years. Afghanistan needs to understand that if it keeps on the civil war then they are the ones who lose.
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