Fareed Ahmad
Thousands of Afghans have been forcibly deported from Pakistan in the past few weeks. Since March 30, 800,000 have been told to leave Pakistan or face deportation. This is a dramatic escalation of the racist onslaught on Afghan nationals in Pakistan, more than 845,000 have already been forced to return to Afghanistan in the past 18 months.
The Pakistan government has decided to repatriate nearly 4 million Afghan refugees who entered the country in the 40 years up to 2023. In the 1980s, the government set up the Ministry of States and Frontier Regions (SAFRON) to help Afghan refugee agencies in their work.
At that time, the main condition for registering Afghan refugees in Pakistan was that they belonged to the Mujahedeen groups that were fighting against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The main reason for this was to provide manpower and training for those groups in that reactionary war. These groups were strongly supported by American imperialism and the Pakistani state.
This changed in 1992 after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan and Afghan refugee camps were closed. A large number of refugees arrived during the civil war, but a major increase occurred after the Taliban regained power in Kabul in 2021, when about 800,000 refugees came to Pakistan.
Bourgeois lies
According to the Pakistani government, there are three reasons for its drastic measures: first, alleged security threats, second, economic burden, and third, state sovereignty.
The government claims that Afghan citizens are affiliated with extremist groups such as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. However, they do not provide any solid evidence for these allegations. Indeed, they completely ignore the fact that hundreds of thousands of the supposed “extremists” actually fled from reactionary Islamist rule.
According to various ministers, a large number of Afghan refugees are living illegally in Pakistan. The fact that more than 80 percent of those detained had valid documents, however, belied the government’s claim, leading to a sudden change in strategy in November 2023. Now, they pick up Afghan refugees from their homes, schools, and markets without any legal action and transfer them directly to detention centres, well knowing that the vast majority actually have legal status.
The economic crisis in Pakistan is currently more severe because of the country’s semi-colonial position in global capitalism. That is why it has become the centre of crises and conflicts arising at the global level. Although the capitalist government, the different bourgeois parties and the media are all blaming the Afghan refugees for the crisis, the fact is that they have benefited the capitalists here by working for very cheap wages for decades. The state is avoiding its own responsibility for the system’s failure and the capitalist crisis by blaming the Afghan refugees.
Afghan families who have been living in Pakistan for generations are now in deep fear as communities and families are falling apart. Parents have stopped sending their children to school for fear of arrest. They are not going to hospitals for necessary medical care because of this fear. There is a sense of emotional vulnerability, especially for women and children who endure the humiliation of police raids.
Even in these circumstances, Afghan refugees are showing great courage. They have strengthened their communications so that all are kept informed of police raids by various means. Many of them have moved to safer places and have also arranged for legal assistance. One thing is very clear about the police raids: they are hitting almost exclusively the working and poor Afghans, but the Afghan elite are relatively safe. Even under repression, the power of capital and class privileges obviously matters.
Rise of racism
Racism against Afghan refugees in Pakistan has increased sharply because the state has been continuously spreading racist propaganda for the past two decades and this has had an impact on the general public. Many believe the racist lies that Afghans are occupying their jobs and businesses and are also involved in terrorism. But the reality, as we have said before, is completely the opposite. The most shameful behaviour in this regard is that of a section of the left that has taken a nationalist position against young Afghan refugees, calling them a burden on the economy and a demographic shift, and in favour of their expulsion.
Despite all this, there are examples of ordinary Pakistanis helping Afghan refugees and rejecting government propaganda, especially where they were living together at the neighbourhood level. But, in the absence of any significant political movement against the expulsion of Afghan refugees, they do this in the form of silent support.
Afghan refugees, many of whom have been living in Pakistan for decades, would be third or fourth generation foreigners in Afghanistan. They have jobs, homes and relationships in Pakistan that have been built over decades of hard work. Now, they are to be sent back to Afghanistan under the Taliban regime. This means destroying their lives and livelihoods that have developed here alongside the local population. In particular, the lives and future of women, girls, ethnic and sexual minorities, especially the Hazara, journalists and those associated with the former government or international organizations are in grave danger in Afghanistan.
The Taliban regime has systematically dismantled women’s rights. Girls are barred from secondary and higher education, and their movement is severely restricted. The situation is even worse for women who do not have a male relative in their family, facing forced marriages, arrests, and increasing gender-based violence, without any legal protection. Ethnic and religious minorities also face systematic discrimination. The decades of US and European imperialists’ intervention and occupation in Afghanistan destroyed Afghan society, and the way US imperialism fled Kabul made it clear how imperialism throws away what it uses. American and Western European claims of human rights, democracy, and women’s rights are nothing but a lie, and those who believed in them now face the end of their lives and imprisonment at the hands of the Taliban.
The situation of Afghans who came to Pakistan after 2021 is very worrying. The US and the European Union left them at the mercy of the Taliban. The civil war imposed by US imperialism through its Afghan proxies has destroyed Afghan society. Today, many are displaced to different countries while those who are returned to Afghanistan are facing the worst violence by the Taliban and warlords.
Action needed
In these circumstances, the forced expulsion of Afghan refugees will mean nothing but a life of torture and imprisonment for many. In these circumstances, we demand an end to the harassment of Afghan refugees, the release of all those detained and an end to the forced evictions. We call on the global labour movement to organize against the repatriation of Afghan refugees in Pakistan and internationally.
All Afghan citizens in Pakistan should be granted Pakistani citizenship and full rights. The systematic racism at the government level needs to be ended, the state needs to provide jobs, suitable homes and education for their children, paid for by taxing the rich and the capitalist class. This needs to be linked to a common struggle of the whole Pakistani working class and poor against the crisis, for jobs and wages which cover the cost of living and which are indexed against inflation. Such a fighting unity requires massive mobilisation to prevent and stop the deportations and it can also be the basis for overcoming national divisions between Afghan and Pakistani workers.
We call on all the working class and the left internationally to fight against similar racist deportations of Afghan and other refugees in Europe, the US or other countries. Indeed, internationalists need to fight to open the borders of Europe or America to Afghan refugees, provide visas, full citizenship and jobs for them. Those imperialist states, and allies like Pakistan, have occupied and ruined Afghanistan for decades for their own geo-strategic interests. Now they want to make the Afghan refugees pay for their destruction. Only our joint, international struggle can stop them.