Ordered to leave.

Byline: Muneeb Ur Rahman

Where do the people belong to? The land, where they are born and raised or the land their ancestors used to live in? The answer to this simple question sometimes becomes very complex especially if you are a refugee.

For decades Pakistan has remained as a haven for escaping conflict and upheaval in Afghanistan, hosting about 5 million Afghan refugees at a time. Pakistan has been generously hosting Afghan refugees since 1980. Starting from the US-sponsored, Afghan Jihad against the former Soviet Union, with an off-and-on continued policy of allowing them a warm welcome for the past 40 years. Some refugees are registered, some are unregistered while others, through irregular channels like forgery and bribery, have become formal Pakistani citizens. However, this is not possible for every impoverished Afghan refugee as it requires a potential middleman to have a connection with high officials and is an expensive process.

After decades of hosting Afghan refugees. The Pakistani caretaker government has set November 1 as the deadline for 1.7 million undocumented Afghans to leave the country or face deportation. This is incredibly difficult and heartbreaking for individuals who are born and raised in a country, and one day a 28-day deadline is announced for them to leave the country and ordered to go to a country that might have been a home to their ancestors but they have only heard about that place and had never seen and been there. This situation becomes more bayonet when the economic and security situation of a country ordered to go are dire and one has no home to return to and has the fear of being detained if deported to that country.

The Pakistani government has remained silent on human rights laws which advocate that states should grant nationality at least to those refugees born on their territory and not convicted of any criminal charges and offense against the national security of that state. Unfortunately, Pakistan did not enact nor establish any comprehensive policy and procedure to determine the refugee's status and treated them with ambiguous Foreigners Act, 1946. This uncertain status of residence is even for the thousands of Afghan refugees born and raised in Pakistan. These poor refugees born and raised in Pakistan are considered Pakistani agents in Afghanistan and are being humiliated on both sides and remain stateless.

We need to understand that no one ever choses to be a refugee by his or her own will...