Amid suspicions: 11,000 Afghans in AJK face expulsion

64 militant outfits banned; anti-terror force to be created

MUZAFFARABAD:

Azad Jammu and Kashmir is set to expel some 11,000 illegal Afghan refugees under the National Action Plan announced in the wake of the country’s worst ever terrorist attack, police said on Thursday.

There are an estimated three million Afghan refugees living in Pakistan, either officially or unofficially, most of whom left their country to escape conflict in the 1980s and 1990s.

But they are viewed with deep suspicion inside Pakistan and routinely accused by authorities of harbouring militants.

“Under the National Action Plan against terrorism, some 11,000 Afghans would be expelled from Azad Kashmir,” senior police official Faheem Abbasi told a press conference in Muzaffarabad.

The plan, which involved the outlawing of militant groups, registration of seminaries and crackdown on hate speech, was announced in the wake of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) massacre that killed 154 people in Peshawar on December 16 following an All-Parties Conference (APC) chaired by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The APC also decided to lift a six-year moratorium on the death penalty and announced the establishment of military courts in the case of terror offences.

Twelve suspects have so far been arrested over the Peshawar attack, most of them Pakistani nationals, according to the army.

But the killings have hardened prejudices toward Afghan refugees, with more than 30,000 leaving Pakistan between January and the first week of February, according to figures released by the International Organisation for Migration.

Pakistan plans to register the 1.4 million Afghan refugees currently living in the country illegally over the next four months, with a view to eventually repatriating them.

Abbasi said the home department was also set to outlaw 64 militant outfits in Azad Kashmir that are also banned in the rest of Pakistan, and create a new anti-terror force comprising 500 personnel.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 3^rd, 2015.