Decades of conflict in Afghanistan has led to millions of Afghan refugees dispersed throughout the world, including over 3 million in Pakistan. Now, many face expulsion under the Pakistani government’s recent crackdown, which will enter its second phase on 15 April 2024, impacting at least 1.3 million Afghan refugees.
The nation-wide crackdown was launched with full force and immediate effect on 15 September 2023, creating a humanitarian emergency, particularly in regions closer to the Durand Line – the 2,640-kilometer colonial border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Over the next three months, some 400,000 Afghan refugees were forcibly repatriated to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. This is the highest number of refugees expelled from Pakistan within a brief period.
During this time, there were reports that Pakistan had also begun arresting Afghan refugees, and while the state narrative claimed that only undocumented refugees were being arrested, there were reports of police harassing and illegally detaining Afghan refugees despite possessing valid documents. Some refugees complained that the Pakistani government was intentionally delaying the registration renewal process, despite its scheduled commencement in June 2023. Most recently, The Guardian reported that some Pakistani officials were illegally charging an ‘exit fee’ of as much as $830 from each Afghan refugee who had fled persecution by the Taliban after the fall of Kabul in August 2021 and sought refuge in Pakistan.
Local journalists interested in covering the crisis at Torkham and Chamman – two of the largest checkpoints on the Durand Line – were reportedly halted by a boundary line marked by local security officials. This measure prevents journalists from approaching and filming refugees. The lack of open access to assembly points where these refugees gather and live in tents for days, sometimes weeks, before being forcibly repatriated, compromises public interest journalism, insofar as the right of these people to be heard and their suffering to be witnessed by both the proximate and distant audience.
This crackdown is taking place as Pakistan is getting ready for the country’ general elections – a time marked by political chaos and security turmoil. In the absence of an organized plan for Afghan refugees, their challenges have only worsened as they continue to live in temporary settlements in fear of being picked up by Pakistani police anytime. And yet, the Pakistani media remains conspicuously silent on the challenges faced by the largest refugee group in the country.
The muted response of Pakistanis to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees over the last few months mirrors the Pakistani media’s near-absent coverage of the humanitarian toll of forced repatriation. This is despite social media platforms being flooded with witness accounts of refugees testifying that Pakistani police officials were destroying their valid Proof of Registration cards (issued to documented Afghan refugees) in an attempt to ‘round up Afghan refugees’. However, social media alone cannot substitute journalism that exposes human rights violations and holds power centers accountable. Due to the perceived ‘enemy’, ‘terrorist’ and ‘traitor’ images of Afghan refugees in the Pakistani media, and their proliferation into the broader public conversation, their digital testimonies are deemed ‘fake’ and fail to move public opinion on the issue.
In a conflict or crisis, citizens often look to the media to determine who is to blame, shaping broader public opinion. The way Pakistani media strategically portrays Afghan refugees develops a frame through which the Pakistani public understands and responds to their forced repatriation. As the public sifts through information in the digital realm, from sources of varying quality and accuracy, figuring out who is responsible for what can become a complicated undertaking. In the light of this logic, Afghan refugees are an easy target of the Pakistani media that promotes the narrative of the political and military elite. Afghan refugees in Pakistan are framed as a threat and burden, a crisis imaginary: a framework developed by LSE’s Lilie Chouliaraki and her co-author Myria Georgiou. Writing in the context of Europe, they argue that a crisis imaginary presents migration and asylum seeking as a sudden, shocking and unmanageable event that puts “us” under pressure, generating what David Shariatmadari calls “the toxic metaphors of the migration debate.”
An example of this was witnessed in the western media’s coverage of the refugee exodus from Ukraine during the Russia-Ukraine War (February 2022–present). Whether it was Charlie D’Agata of CBS News who described Ukraine as “relatively civilised, relatively European” in comparison to countries like Iraq and Afghanistan or Peter Dobbie from Al Jazeera English, who remarked on live TV, “these are prosperous middle-class people… these are not obviously refugees getting away from the Middle East” or NBC News correspondent Kelly Cobiella who said, “to put it bluntly, these are not refugees from Syria, these are refugees from Ukraine…. They’re Christian, they’re white, they’re very similar” – media coverage exposed the structural biases and reproduced what Lilie Chouliaraki calls a hierarchy of human life, in which some people’s lives and their suffering are represented as more deserving than others.
In my new book, I show how such routinely accommodated narratives of race, religion and security are a symbolic manifestation of the cataclysmic power that presents refugees – and in the context of my book Afghan refugees – through a crisis imaginary to build a ‘truth’ for the audiences that through reinforcement becomes an incontestable reality for the public. In doing this, I present a theoretical account of peace journalism as a deliberative practice. I explain how, through deliberation, peace journalism questions media bias and negative coverage, and has the potential to encourage the public to get involved and speak up.
I also note that the re-articulation of deliberativeness in journalism practice is fundamental to promoting critical thinking among the audience, especially on issues that are perceived as the problems of the ‘other’. In the absence of a deliberative peace journalism practice in Pakistan, Afghan refugees will continue to be framed as a ‘burden’, ‘enemy’ and a ‘threat’, similar to the crisis imaginary perception of refugees seen in Europe. This perception legitimizes their de-humanisation and forced repatriation, to an extent that the only legitimate way for Afghan refugees to exist in the Pakistani media narrative is by being physically absent.
For more information, see the author’s latest book, Afghan Refugees, Pakistani Media and the State: The Missing Peace (Routledge, 2024)
Ayesha Jehangir
Ayesha Jehangir is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Centre for Media Transition at the University of Technology Sydney. She completed her PhD in war, conflict, and peace journalism in September 2021 from the School of the Arts, English and Media at the University of Wollongong, where she was awarded Examiners' Commendation for Outstanding Thesis. Ayesha’s research explores the mediation of human suffering and social justice from war and conflict zones, particularly focusing on peace journalism, the refugee voice, digital self-representation, and digital borders. Ayesha is the author of Afghan Refugees, Pakistani Media and the State: The Missing Peace (Routledge, 2024). She is the inaugural Peace Fellow of the International Association of Media and Communication Research (2024-2026); a Fredrich-Ebert-Stiftung Fellow of War and Peace Journalism (Afghanistan); and an FES-Deutsche Welle Fellow of Online Journalism (Germany). She also serves as an elected co-secretary of the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia. Before joining academia, Ayesha worked as a journalist in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Germany, and Australia.
