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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Journeys |
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Journeys |
Off the Grid
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| A journey into the world of Karachi’s
population of Afghan refugees |
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Published : 1 February 2011 |
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BULLIT MARQUEZ / AP PHOTO |
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| Afghan refugees, who crossed the Pakistani border,
arrive in Shakirpur, Pakistan, on 13 October 2001.
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| A |
S I DRIVE PAST the Pakistan Air
Force dormitories, whizzing
past the busy roads leading to
Karachi’s Jinnah International
Airport, airplanes hover above
like bloated mosquitoes in the
clear February morning; below
them, crows and mynah birds
also seem to float calmly in the
colourless sky. The first sign
that one has landed in Karachi is a giant
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fluorescent-yellow McDonald’s sign just outside the airport; here, it is the golden arches that greet newly arrived travellers—rather than a flag, a welcome sign or the gleaming visage of some ghastly local politician.
After passing the airport, leaving behind its security officers wearing bullet-proof vests and helmets, things begin
to look desolate. Driving away from the hustle and bustle of
Karachi proper, the roads begin to seem wider even though
they’re not; there are just fewer cars on them. I pass a spate
of schools, all in gaudy residential bungalows, their names
painted across their gates and balconies: My Little World
School, White House Grammar School, Middle East Middle
School. On the left-hand side of the road, there is a wasteland;
on the right, more learning centres, with names like
‘Little Hearts Grammar School (Parsi Administration).’
But the wasteland will not remain barren for long: a massive
golf club, resort and spectacular getaway for the rich
is being built on the recently levelled land. Billboards mark
the boundaries of the luxury retreat, depicting Arab-looking
businessmen grinning at Western-style houses, confident golfers resembling a pre-scandal Tiger Woods, and
glittering glass lobbies staffed by legions of secretaries, all
of whom will be stomping through this dry land, with its
wild shrubs and rocky soil, soon enough.
| AMEAN J/18% GREY |
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A blackboard at the Hasan Islamia Public School, which
teaches Afghan refugees in English and Urdu mediums. |
I pass by Gulistan-e-Jauhar, by more army bases, by land
that has reportedly been bought by the Aga Khan Foundation,
and by even more army-owned land, which the businessmen-in-uniform plan to transform into extensions of
the existing Defence Housing Authority schemes that have
already expanded throughout the city.
At a toll plaza, I pay a small note to the man sitting in the
window. Another man, in a gray shalwar kameez, strolls
between the stalled cars selling oranges and small apples in
plastic shopping bags, shouting out prices to the truck drivers.
There are a lot of trucks now: this is Karachi’s transport
hub, where violence had recently erupted between the Pathans who control the transport in the Sohrab Goth suburb
that links Karachi to the rest of the country and the
Urdu-speaking Muhajirs who seek to relieve them of their
power—shootings and riots and killings. Today, it’s quiet.
I see a large truck, filled with timber and painted in the
vibrant Pakistani style, with splashes of bright colour everywhere;
bright green decals plastered across the mud
flaps say “dekh magar payar se”—“look, but with love”—a
popular transport vehicle flirt. This bus has unicorns dancing
in a Kashimiri landscape, icy mountains and flowing
rivers, with a portrait of General Musharraf posed in the
middle. It takes me a minute to make out the general; he’s painted with such soft-focus adoration that he looks more
like an aged Korean granny—smooth skin and bouffant
hair, even with the epaulettes.
After a series of forks in the road—heading to Hyderabad,
Lasbela and Hub in Balochistan—I continue on toward
Sohrab Goth. But there is no way to know where I am really
going. A map of Karachi, produced by Haqqi Brothers and
bought at the city’s teeming Urdu Bazaar, is laid out on my
desk at home. The map is a big mess of blue, pink, purple
and orange districts and dots. It tells me that my destination,
the Afghan Muhajir Refugee Camp, is not in Sohrab
Goth—which is not even on the map—but in Gadap Town,
somewhere near the Dreamworld Resort Hotel & Golf Club
and the Cosy Water Park. (The map, however, also says, in
small print at the bottom of the Arabian Sea, “Information
at the map are [sic] not authentic.”) According to another
map I’ve bought, which only confuses me further, the refugee
camp appears to be either in Gulshan-e-Maymar or
Gulshan-e-Mehran. It’s huddled between the crossfires of
what the map identifies as a ‘principal road’ and a ‘main
road.’ I’m not sure what the difference is, or if, in fact, there
is any difference. It’s in North Karachi, no one disagrees
there. But its actual location is unimportant: there are no
buses that travel to the Afghan Muhajir Refugee Camp; for
all intents and purposes, it is entirely off the grid. These are
the sticks. This is not a town.
Upon entering the camp, you are met by one-room mud
stores, stacked high with empty glass bottles of Mirinda
and 7-Up warming under the midday sun. They will be
recycled for a pittance and then used again without being
washed. The bottles are dirty as only glass can be, scratched
and cloudy where repeated use has marked them. There are
posters of Indian film actresses and health pamphlets from
the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on tuberculosis
and polio taped to the walls, but again, there is
something old and used about this decorative wallpaper.
| I |
WAS BORN IN KABUL, and I am, if only through blood
ties—not by love or the constancy of family—half-Afghan.
Being Afghan in this way, Afghan-born or half-Afghan,
as though it is a condition, has always felt complicated
to me: it means that my interest in and attention to the
country of my birth was not decided for me. |
I have chosen to be connected to this particular condition
in part because of the suffering I can see among the Afghan
refugees all around me in my city, in my Karachi; because
of the friendliness, because of something mountainous and
something destroyed about all the Afghans whom I have
met at conferences and textile bazaars and electronics
markets and airport terminals. There is a pride, now somewhat
fractured, that I gravitate toward; it is the same sort
of wounded confidence that comes to the surface when I
correct people who presume that I was born in Pakistan.
I have an open heart, I confess. I’m from a lot of places, and
I leave myself in suitcases and airports and border places.
| AMEAN J/18% GREY |
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A student at Hasan Islamia Public School in Karachi. |
According to the UNHCR, for the past two decades Pakistan
has been home to the largest refugee population in the
world. Afghans who fled their homes after the Soviet invasion
in 1979—and the American-and Saudi-backed civil
war that quickly followed—settled in Pakistan and Iran.
By 1988, according to a New York Times article written that
year, some 3.3 million Afghans were living in Pakistan.
Another two million had settled in Iran—perhaps an easier
place to adjust to, given the connection between Dari
and Persian, and yet a crueller host to its linguistically familiar
refugees.
Afghans in Iran are forced to work below the radar, thanks
to laws that make it difficult for them to legally hold jobs;
and the country’s recent high levels of unemployment have
made it increasingly hard to find labour even in the black
market. Low-paid construction work and under-the-table
odd-jobs are no longer a safe bet for those without identity
cards—and the refugees will never get identity cards; they
are treated like ghosts, as shadows of people. When I was
in Tehran three years ago, the only Afghans I noticed were
little boys selling chewing gum and hard candy for pennies
off wooden slabs tied around their necks.
After 11 September 2001 and the American invasion of
Afghanistan, another wave of refugees fled from the rubble.
The number of Afghans in Pakistan swelled to five million—
including those who had been born here to refugees
who came after 1979.
| AMEAN J/18% GREY |
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The school, based at Afghan Muhajir Refugee Camp, offers education to 190 students. |
The refugees in Pakistan live in camps—in actual camps.
Before it was closed in 2002, the Jalozai camp in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), one of the largest in the
country, resembled a plastic city: tens of thousands of Afghans
lived in tents made from garbage bin liners or thin
plastic sheets. Jemima Khan, the author and journalist
who brought the world’s attention to the squalor of Jalozai,
wrote this about her first visit to the camp: “At first
sight, the camp resembles a vast dumping ground. Thousands
of aimless people are wandering between endless
rows of miniature makeshift plastic tents, one next to the
other with no space between them…children barefoot and
in rags are everywhere…the few latrines that do exist have
not been dug deep enough and are overflowing, running in
filthy streams through the camp and into tents.” Jalozai, a
UNHCR official told Khan, was “fast turning into a death
camp,” so dire was the condition of its refugees.
In the summer of 2007, I visited one of the largest Afghan
refugee camps in Peshawar, Kacha Garhi. At the time,
the camp was home to more than 100,000 refugees—and
it was a week away from being shut down. The Pakistani
government, assisted by the UNHCR, had been pushing for
repatriation since 2002, trying to uproot the refugees who
had only just escaped a fresh round of war and occupation.
In 2005, Pakistan began a registration process by which
Proof of Registration (PoR) cards were issued to about 2.15
million refugees over the next two years. In Iran, meanwhile, the official number of Afghan refugees dwindled
to under a million as repatriation programs were pursued
in earnest, a move that caused the Afghan parliament to
write an open letter to the Iranian state asking the government
to halt their deportation drive until the worst of the
winter had passed.
The mud homes in Kacha Garhi each housed an average
of 20 people. I myself saw 11 people file out of one house myself,
walking sideways in alleys that were too cramped to
allow more than one person through their dusty corridors.
Garbage and open, festering sewers were everywhere. Bulldozers
were already in action, razing parts of the camp to
the ground. Three years later, Kacha Garhi has come back
into action as a refugee camp, but now it houses Pakistan’s
own internally displaced, refugees from the army’s wars in
Swat and Waziristan.
In 2007, Pakistan began seriously pursuing repatriation.
According to the UNHCR, 350,000 Afghan refugees were
repatriated between the spring and winter of that year,
each armed with a generous 100-dollar stipend—though
in Katcha Garhi, I was told the real figure was closer to 60
dollars. Many in Pakistan claim that that families took the
money, crossed the border, gave the cash to friends or relatives
still stuck in Afghanistan, and then turned around
and returned to Pakistan. Or that they come and go between
the two countries, leaving when danger strikes either
soil and returning when safety is assured. The official numbers are dubious at best: according to the UNHCR, 80
percent of the Afghan refugees in the NWFP were repatriated
in 2007—though only three percent of those in Sindh
returned home—leaving two million refugees in Pakistan.
As of March 2009, the UNHCR reported 1.7 million registered
Afghan refugees in Pakistan, with the largest communities
in Peshawar, quetta and Karachi. But the number
of unregistered remains unknown.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Jonathan Ross
4 March 2011
11:28 PM
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The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live.
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have micro wave radiation,wifi,taser's,poverty,depleted uranium.hungry children,wars, bombs,guided missiles and misguided men.
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tahir
4 February 2011
02:38 PM
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Very informative article regarding the plight of refugees and the people serving the humanity selflessly.
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Tahir
4 February 2011
12:09 AM
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Very good thought provoking article. Condition of poor is very bad in Pakistan. Those who help the needy and miserable are dear to God and will be rewarded by Him.
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