Government denies harassment of Afghans

Pakistani authorities on Monday denied charges by Afghan Taliban officials that police were actively harassing Afghan nationals living in the country. “Those allegations are completely untrue,” Aziz Khan, foreign ministry head of Afghanistan affairs, told IRIN. “There is no harassment of Afghans who have proper travel documents or have been properly registered.” Asked whether he had heard of cases of police extortion, Khan said: “I don’t want to get into the game of action and reaction. I would prefer not to comment.” The comments follow a complaint by Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Mutawakkil to his Pakistani counterpart, Abdus Sattar, on 26 April. According to a Reuters report, Mutawakkil’s letter said authorities in the Pakistani cities of Karachi, Peshawar and Quetta were harassing Afghan refugees and extorting bribes. The letter asked authorities in Islamabad to take the necessary steps to end the police harassment, the report said. Mutawakkil added that Pakistani officials at the Torkhan and Chaman border points were discriminating between Pashto- and Dari-speaking Afghan nationals, saying such a practice harmed the national unity of Afghanistan, the report said. Afrasiyab Khattak, chairman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) in the northwestern city of Peshawar, however, disagrees. “The harassment is definitely there and Pakistani authorities are wrong in denying this,” Khattak told IRIN. He said that Mazhar Ali Shah, secretary for the interior in the government of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), had publicly announced that some 4,000 Afghans had been deported recently. “This [was] without any court appearance whatsoever,” Khattak added. According to Khattak, when Afghans came here in the 1980s, they were not registered individually. Instead, the head of a family would register himself, listing his dependents, who, in fact, were never issued any type of identification. “This arrangement has been in action for 15 years. Now, suddenly, they say every individual should have documents,” Khattak said. With people disappearing, and government authorities more determined to stem the tide of Afghans into the country, Afghans living in Pakistan are scared. While the rounding-up policy had to a certain extent eased recently, Khattak said there had been no public statement of policy, leaving many Afghans in Pakistan anxious about their future. Having lived and worked in the country for years without any identification papers, many are now feeling the heat from what some view as one of the strongest crackdowns by the authorities in years. One Afghan living in the capital, Islamabad, who wished to remain anonymous, said he spent four days in a local jail until a US $50 bribe was paid for his release. “None of us have Afghan passports, because we can’t afford them,” the 23 year-old street vendor told IRIN. “Most of my friends are the same as me, too afraid to walk around late at night in case we meet up with the police again.” He added: “The Pakistani police are fully aware of our situation, and take full advantage of it.” Meanwhile, the government in Pakistan’s NWFP on 26 April vowed that its campaign to deport illegal Afghan immigrants would continue. “The provincial government’s stand about Afghan refugees is very much clear, i.e. no new Afghan illegal immigrant would be allowed to enter NWFP,” a press statement by the provincial information department said. It added that the campaign to deport all those Afghans who had entered the province illegally would “continue unabated”. The statement added that the NWFP government took strong exception to a report in the Pakistani daily, ‘The News’, alleging that relief goods meant for Afghan refugees were being confiscated by NWFP authorities, an allegation the authorities vehemently deny. No longer able to shoulder the burden alone, Pakistan says it hosts some two million Afghan refugees. In a recent interview with IRIN, Pakistani Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider called on the United Nations to take a more active role in stemming this tide. Since September, over 170,000 newly arrived Afghans have come to Pakistan seeking refuge from drought, conflict, or a combination of both, the largest influx since the fall of the Afghan capital, Kabul, to the Taliban Islamic movement in 1996.