“Every beardy man is not a terrorist”
By Hassan Ghani
Rafiullah Hanif was born a refugee in Pakistan. With tensions rising in his host country, he faces the prospect of forced repatriation along with nearly 3 million other Afghans to a homeland still in conflict.
Curious and a little amused by the spectacle of one of their friends being interviewed, several young men insisted on crowding into the front room of Rafiullah’s tiny mud-brick family home. Journalists don’t come to these parts very often.
At 22 years old, born a refugee, Rafiullah Hanif is articulate but shy. The presence of an audience probably didn’t help with his nerves, although he was too polite to say so.
“There are a lot of Afghans living here, so we feel like we’re in our own home, in our own country,” he told Al Jazeera.
At the end of a dusty, potholed road, 25 kilometres south of Peshawar, Shamshato was one of several refugee camps established in Pakistan during the 1980s following the Soviet invasion of neighbouring Afghanistan. Rafiullah’s parents were among a vast number of Afghans who fled across the border to seek shelter.
Over time, most Afghans moved from the camps into the cities, but Shamshato remains a home to tens of thousands of some of the poorest refugees.
According to the Pakistani government, there are still almost three million Afghans living in Pakistan.
“When we migrated here, we were considering Pakistan our second home, but we’re facing a lot of problems.” Rafiullah’s friends, watching from behind the camera, nodded in agreement.
He talked of daily, sometimes brutal, harassment by the police, restrictions on movement and employment discrimination.
http://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/shorts/afghan-refugee-beardy-man/