Call for justice: Pakistani women married to Afghan men protest

[asif86]

http://tribune.com.pk/story/1176645/...n-men-protest/

By Our Correspondent

Published: September 6, 2016

PESHAWAR:
The Pakistani women, married to Afghan men, protested outside Peshawar Press Club on Monday, asking the government to stop forcefully repatriating the Afghan refugees.

“Our families have divided now,” cried Shamim Bibi, who was married to an Afghan refugee. “They have sent my husband to Afghanistan, who has also taken my sons along with him.”

She added her husband’s family had been living in Peshawar for the last several decades. Their families were related to each other, she said, so they got married.

During the protest, dozens of women along with their children were holding placards inscribed with slogans demanding justice and requesting the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan to find a solution to their issues and stop destroying their homes and future of their children.

Similar was the case with Afghan women. The future of those of them who have married Pakistani men was also at stake as the government is forcing all the Afghans out of the country.

“They [Afghan men] have taken our children with them,” Shamim Bibi said. “Afghan husbands of some of the women are behind bars and so far no one has come for their defence, even the Afghanistan government is not listening to their problem.”

Currently, she said, they have no sources of income. Some of their sons were kept in prison for some time, then forced to leave.

“There is nothing left in Afghanistan as it has been completely destroyed due to years of wars,” said Shazia, another protester. She added their children were born in Peshawar and have not even seen their country.

Her children were studying in schools, she said. “Their education will be left incomplete, because in Afghanistan there is neither a school nor do they have resources to study,” Shazia added. “Afghanistan is an unfamiliar land for our children, they were born and bred here, and even have homes and businesses.”

Published in The Express Tribune, September 6th, 2016.

[asif86]

http://dailytimes.com.pk/khyber-pakh...fghan-husbands

Women demand identity for Afghan husbands

* 'We are reluctant to go to Afghanistan where our lives are in danger'


By Sajid Khan


06-Sep-16


PESHAWAR: Dozens of married Pakistani women to Afghans refugees belonging to different localities of Peshawar on Monday appealed to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Raheel Sharif and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan to bestow Pakistani nationality to their Afghan husbands.

"We are reluctant to go to Afghanistan as we have received threats from Afghans living in Afghanistan that if we go there. Our husbands have been deported on Torkham border to their ancestral homeland Afghanistan", said one of the women while talking to reporters.

More than 35 women of various localities of provincial capital including Corporation Colony, Madina Colony, Dalazaq Road, Charsadda Road, Patang Chowk, Ghareeb Abad and other places gathered in their shuttlecock veils and covered faces at Sher Shah Suri Road and hold a protest demonstration against the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Government.
Carrying placards inscribed with different appeals regarding a process to provide nationality to their husband and come back to Pakistan.

"We did not see and even made a visit to Kabul how can we live there and adjust ourselves with those people", asked a woman having a child in her arms. "My husband was a driver and earning livelihood for my seven kids now my husband has been departed to Afghanistan wherein he is jobless", she lamented.

She claimed that her husband was born in Pakistan 40 years ago and settled here but due to current Afghan refugees' crisis her husband also prey victim of expulsion. "I am a Pakistani by nationality and have my Computerized National Identity Card (CNIC), Pakistan is our country. Why Government of Pakistan does not introduces a process to give nationalities to those Afghans who married to Pakistani women", she suggested. "Every country in the world bestows on nationality to immigrants but Pakistan does not provide this facility to our Afghan husbands", she asked.

Interestingly, another woman on the condition of anonymity said that some 3 or 4 children had been carried by their Afghans fathers with them to Afghanistan forcefully. She said that one of the children had returned to Pakistan after a long process and spending more than Rs 60,000.

[Samandri]

I doubt that Afghan men have forcibly taken their sons from their Pakistani wives to Afghanistan......the couples must have mutually agreed , that wife will say this and that in the protest so that may be the husbands are given Pakistani citizenship when the issue is highlighted....


I wonder from which tribes and regions are these "Pakistani" wives?, ...From what i have observed, Afghan refugees did not mingle much with locals (Pakistani Pashtuns) . They always kept a distance from locals.......Marriages between locals and refugees were very very rare, personally never heard about such a case.

[Kabulistan]

Sorry I am not fully aware of things going on in Pakistan, but why is Pakistan deporting Afghan refugees?

[Kabulistan]

I doubt that Afghan men have forcibly taken their sons from their Pakistani wives to Afghanistan......the couples must have mutually agreed , that wife will say this and that in the protest so that may be the husbands are given Pakistani citizenship when the issue is highlighted....


I wonder from which tribes and regions are these "Pakistani" wives?, ...From what i have observed, Afghan refugees did not mingle much with locals (Pakistani Pashtuns) . They always kept a distance from locals.......Marriages between locals and refugees were very very rare, personally never heard about such a case.

There are lots of Afghans in western Pakistan (I have lived in Peshawar a few years), and I am not talking about native Pashtuns of Pakistan...Marriages happen between Afghan refugees and these ''Pakistanis'' /Afghans with Pakistani nationality

[Silver]

Sorry I am not fully aware of things going on in Pakistan, but why is Pakistan deporting Afghan refugees?

No one is bombing Afghanistan now. They can go back and UN/Afghan government can setup camps in Kabul. UN is paying $400 per head or family to anyone going back. Unless policy changes which doesn't look like the case, Afghans refugees will never be nationalised. In that case they are better of in their own country so thats why huge numbers of them are going back.

Minority of them who have established themselves in Pakistan doing legitimate business or properties may get extended visas.

[Elite Pakhtun]

Refugees’ return

Omar Waraich — Published Aug 21, 2016 01:00am

The writer is a journalist

UNTIL recently, Pakistan was home to the largest refugee population. For decades, the country won much praise for giving sanctuary to vulnerable people who had to flee their homes. When far wealthier countries showed a callous indifference towards those people seeking safety — tightening border controls while pleading lack of capacity — the example of Pakistan shamed them.





Now, however, the Pakistani government risks squandering that moral standing and courting notoriety, for planning what might be one of the largest forcible returns of refugees in modern history. Several times, it has imposed unfeasible deadlines for the Afghan refugees’ return, triggering fresh waves of harassment from the police and other officials. Each time, an extension has been reluctantly granted.


For Afghan refugees, these reprieves do not provide any relief. They merely serve to prolong their anxiety. Ever since the Soviet invasion of their homeland, their lives have hinged precariously on geopolitics in the region. An elusive peace in Afghanistan in the midst of an escalating conflict has stopped them returning voluntarily. In Pakistan, they still languish in the limbo of their camps, denied their rights in a country they know better than their own.


The latest attempts to send Afghan refugees back across the border speak to transparently political motives. As retired Gen Abdul Qadir Baloch, the Minister for States and the Frontier Regions, admitted, clashes along the border and the killing of Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour further soured relations with Kabul and led to the latest push against Afghan refugees.
Afghan refugees in Pakistan continue to languish in limbo.

This is scarcely the first time that Afghan refugees are being punished for Islamabad’s anger at Kabul. As a Human Rights Watch report documented, after the massacre of more than 100 children at the Army Public School in Peshawar in December 2014, the police descended on Afghan refugee camps, harassing their occupants, even beating them and subjecting them to other ill treatment.


Long subject to routine harassment, including the solicitation of bribes, the refugees were made a focus for reprisals after the armed group that attacked the school was traced to Afghanistan.



In its haste to settle scores, the government appears to be forgetting is that it has a responsibility to protect and ensure the rights of all people living within its territory. Although it has agreed with its Afghan counterparts that voluntary repatriation — which has already seen nearly four million Afghans return since 2002 — should continue, refugees in Pakistan must have their human rights fully respected.


Attacking a group of refugees because they happen to be from the same country where armed groups that carry out vile atrocities are based is a cruel and discriminatory practice unworthy of any state.



Many refugees across the world say that they would choose repatriation — if it was safe. In the case of Pakistan’s 1.5 million registered Afghan refugees, the situation is complicated by the fact that many of them have spent the majority of their lives in Pakistan. Many have married in Pakistan, and have children who know no other country.


For repatriation to be lawful, it must be truly voluntary — that is, people must have made a free and informed decision to return.


At the moment, the conflict in Afghanistan is widening, not winding down. Regular bomb attacks are punctuating the Afghan Taliban’s advances, even as more territory in both the north and the south of the country continues to slip out of the government’s control. Following the loss of a district in the north to the Taliban, Helmand province is now besieged.


As per an Amnesty Int*ernational report this year, the number of internally displaced people in Afg*hanis*tan has doubled over the past three years to more than a million. During the same period, international aid to the country has halved as donors have shifted their attentions elsewhere following the withdrawal of their troops.


In overcrowded and unsanitary camps, Afghanistan’s internally displaced fight for their survival. They are denied adequate supplies of food, medical aid, and opportunities to pursue education and employment. Some of them are returnees from Pakistan, seemingly condemned to spend their lives shuffling across borders, from camp to camp.


Forcibly expelling refugees from Pakistan would be a clear breach of the principle of non-refoulement: the right not to be sent back to a country where one might be at real risk of serious human rights violations.
For years, successive Pakistani leaders have rightly affirmed that their country’s security is contingent on the security of Afghanistan. But the current refugee policy could undermine not just Afghanistan’s security, but Pakistan’s as well.


Putting so many people in harm’s way, either at home or across the border, doesn’t make states safer. Indeed, it invites ruinous consequences that could be difficult to roll back, and damage to the country’s image that will be difficult to efface.



The writer is a journalist.
Published in Dawn, August 21st, 2016

[Silver]

^^
We should send that journalist to Afghanistan along with refugees.

[Elite Pakhtun]

Absolutely not. He's right. We should treat those of our race as brothers. The line exists unfortunately, but the effects were mitigated/non-existent once upon a time when everyone ignored it.

I remember in the mid-late 90s I was at the Khyber pass and all I saw was non-stop traffic of people going back and forth. Nothing resembling border police or anything was there.

There were also people selling hash out in the open, but that's a story for another day.

[Shapur]

I doubt that Afghan men have forcibly taken their sons from their Pakistani wives to Afghanistan......the couples must have mutually agreed , that wife will say this and that in the protest so that may be the husbands are given Pakistani citizenship when the issue is highlighted....


I wonder from which tribes and regions are these "Pakistani" wives?, ...From what i have observed, Afghan refugees did not mingle much with locals (Pakistani Pashtuns) . They always kept a distance from locals.......Marriages between locals and refugees were very very rare, personally never heard about such a case.

welcome back

Maybe things have changed but in the 90s I saw pashtuns from Afghanistan and Pakistan playing cricket in the streets of peshawar in Ramadhan and Afghan pashtuns freely intermingling with locals etc. There were the odd people joking about being majar etc but nothing serious and it was all in good spirits. There was one Pashtun poet from Afghanistan who attracted a local following. When he died, his pashtun Pakistani neighbours went to Kabul with his janaza. The area I am talking about is Qaid Abad near Ramdas which is close to the old city of peshawar.


About the marriage thing, Pashtuns rarely marry outside their immediate family let alone to pashtuns of another country and its true I never saw any inter marriages except one.