Notes on Afghan Refugees in Pakistan

[rfmcdonald]

Quotes taken from Richard Reeves' Passage to Peshawar (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984).

"What would have happened if more than eight million Mexicans came into the United States between Texas and California during the invasion of their country--that would be the proportional equivalent to the Afghan migration--would we, Christians on both sides of the Rio Grande, be so generous? The situation would not have been so different, including the fact that many Afghans were unofficially (illegally) in Pakistan's Northwest before the Soviets came, as many Mexicans are illegally among the Mexican-Americans of the American Southwest. But the reaction might be different. One result could be a barbed-wire shortage." (72)

"For Pakistan, the influence of refugees meant an influx of both foreign aid and foreign sympathy. The aid included millions of dollars a year in hard Western currencies--the coin that the world demands for everything from gasoline to make trucks go to tear gas to make mobs go--cash that was critical to a country that spoke, quite accurately, of meager resources. But the sympathy was probably more critical to the people currently running the country, the military. General Zia was certainly one of the few military dictators around the world regularly quoted as a humanitarian." (79)

"The refugee problem not only gave the respect and legitimacy abroad, but the burden of the Afghans and the threat of the Soviets probably kept Zia in power. Even his worst domestic enemies, lawyers and other Western-educated political activists, sometimes defined the situation on the frontier as a national 'emergency'--and emergency has always been the favorite word of military rulers everywhere.
There was one other thing about the Refugees in the North-West Frontier Province. Their labour was needed in Pakistan. As poor as the country was and as low as the cost of a man's day, there was a labor shortage around Peshawar because so many of the local men were working in the Gulf states as laborers in and around the oil fields. The money was much better in Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, and for the past several years Pakistanis in general--two million at any time--and Pathans in particular had been going o the oil countries to fill three-year and five-year labor contracts at wage levels many times what they would earn at home. Under any circumstances, someone would have been needed to repair the roads and carry the loads of Pakistan--and it turned out to be the hundreds of thousands of Afghan someones coming over the mountains." (79-80)

"[N]ine hundred physicians, three-quarters of [Afghanistan]'s doctors, were gone. They were in Europe or the United States, aching perhaps for their land and people but making new lives for themselves in places where their skills made them welcome. The same was true in other professions and among merchants. The upper classes and the upper middle classes had been driven out or fled." (81)

"The Afghans did not seem to have thought of their migration in terms of whether they were 'welcome' or not. They had always considered the Northwest of Pakistan, the home of their ethnic cousins and Muslim brothers, an extension of their own lands, separated only by the mountains and a line an Englishman named Durand drew on a map 150 years or so ago and called a boundary. They were living as they had for centuries before this Durand ever heard their language. They did not accept Moghul law, British law, Afghan law or Pakistani law. Much of the frontier province, a band 200 miles long and 30 to 60 miles wide, was not under Pakistani or any national law; it was governed, officially, by tribal law. In the Khyber agency, the land between Peshawar and Khyber Pass, the border, only the main road was under the legal control of the central government. If someone shot you off the road--and it happened--that was not a matter for the government, any government. The case would be handled by a jirga, a tribal council." (86-87)

"'[The Afghan refugees] are wild men who will end up destroying our country,' said a Pakistani sociologist, a woman, with a passionate hatred of the refugees which I heard many times from educated men and women. 'The government wants these people as an excuse to maintain the state of emergency and to get the money and sympathy from the international community. But they are terrorizing our own people. After all the years it took us to persuade the Pathans in the Northwest to give up their guns--in exchange for roads and the things a modern government could provide--and now they are invaded by these barbarians.'" (87-88)

It's always a very, very good idea to know what you're doing on the subject of migration issues.