2023-11-02 15:05:19
Amjad Ali
Peshawar (Pakistan), Nov 2 (EFE).- Resigned but calm, the first Afghans who were arrested by the Pakistani authorities arrived at the detention centers this Thursday once the deadline that the Government granted to undocumented migrants like them to leave the country if they did not want to be forcibly deported.
Aboard a police van, seven Afghan migrants were transferred today by security forces to one of the 49 centers that the Government designated near the border with Afghanistan, where it plans to take the detainees before expelling them from the country.
“We are happy to be back,” one of these detained migrants told EFE, with a relaxed expression, shortly after getting out of the police vehicle while being escorted by the authorities.
He is one of hundreds of undocumented foreigners who have been arrested since yesterday the deadline that the Pakistani Government gave them to leave the country if they wanted to avoid forced deportation expired.
An ultimatum that sent tens of thousands of migrants, especially Afghans, towards the border crossings, causing chaos at several crossings that were overwhelmed by long lines of trucks packed with people or people sleeping rough due to the slowness of the process of immigration, which has led many of them to remain waiting.
This has been the usual scene in recent days at the Torkham Pass, one of the main crossings between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and close to the detention center to which the group of seven Afghans who the authorities arrested a few kilometers from were transferred. distance.
“They were arrested in the Lower Dir district, in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa,” an official at the detention center, Abid Ullah, told EFE.
The facility, located on the outskirts of the northern city of Peshawar, and about 40 kilometers from the Torkham Pass, is designed to accommodate undocumented foreigners detained by the authorities in the coming days, where their data will be processed before to send them to their countries of origin.
A process that required little time in the case of the seven newly arrived Afghans, who informed officials that it would not take long for them to get back into the police van to be deported by Torkham.
“Their registration process has been completed, so they will be deported directly without any additional processing at the border,” said a Federal Investigation Agency official who asked not to be identified.
Ullah added that around forty other Afghan migrants were also on their way to the detention center, after which they would be deported this afternoon once their details were registered.
Although the Pakistani Government announced last Tuesday that it would not begin arresting undocumented migrants in its country until today, after the chaos at the borders prevented thousands of them from returning to their country, the authorities made the first arrests yesterday. of foreigners omitting the agreed truce.
But once that period officially expired, the authorities warned of a possible intensification of arrests.
“We will intensify the repression as soon as we receive orders from the Ministry of the Interior,” the additional deputy commissioner of the detention center, Muhammed Imran, told EFE.
However, he did not provide information on what would happen to the thousands of Afghans who continue to wait near the Torkham crossing to return to their country.
This operation to expel undocumented migrants from Pakistan, including 1.7 million unregistered Afghans, takes place despite the UN’s call for the Asian country to stop the deportation of Afghans since many of them fled as refugees from Afghanistan and are in the process of formalizing their transfer to third countries.
This is added to the fear that the majority of returnees have towards the Taliban regime, which has ruled Afghanistan since 2021, imposing its strict fundamentalist vision of society.
But Pakistan, like other states in South Asia, is not part of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and lacks specific legislation for this group.EFE
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