Consequence of conflict in Afghanistan continues……

The first type of migration was a massive and forced exile of mostly rural Afghans to the neighbouring countries, Pakistan and Iran. This migration was directly related to the Soviet intervention in 1979 and had its peak in the mid-1980s. The exile still continued between 1985 and the beginning of the 1990s, but during the same period more than 1.5 million Afghans returned. The second half of the 1990s brought an extreme drought that forced thousands of Afghans to flee their homes in search of food and water. The Afghans, remaining in Pakistan and Iran, originated primarily from rural areas, where they had been small farmers, village artisans and tenants, or were lower middle-class shopkeepers, civil servants and bazaar craftsmen. Some of the middle-class people managed to continue their journey to industrialised countries.

Around 70 percent of the Afghans that had sought refuge in Pakistan were ethnic Pashtuns of rural origin. In Pakistan, the refugees were divided into groups either based on location where they are settled or upon the time frame during which they migrated. A majority of the 1.2 million Afghan refugees living in Pakistan lived in the refugee villages in Northwest Frontier Province, Baluchistan and the Punjab.18   Three-quarters of them were women and children. Millions of rural Afghans ended up in refugee camps in Pakistan’s North-Western Frontier Province, where they became dependent on aid supplies, provided to them by the numerous international aid agencies that had sprung up around Peshawar. Members of the former urban middle-class tried to build a self-sufficient existence in the cities. In recent years, international aid has almost dried up. There are signs of increasing ‘asylum fatigue’ leading to pressures on Afghan refugees to return. Sections of several refugee camps have been evicted and closed down. Pakistani authorities are increasingly growing harsh towards Afghan refugees, subjecting them to arbitrary detention, bribery and physical harassment. 

 To be continued…..