Hazara Town is probably the only place in Pakistan where bullets have divided families without any war.
“My two sons live in Australia; one had gone legally and the other illegally,” says Fatima Essa. “The third one is in Indonesia in detention,” she quickly adds. Fatima’s story is shared by many other women living in the heavily barricaded Hazara Town in Quetta, which is home to the largest number of the Shia Hazaras. “This place is not safe for them anymore. So, we sent them abroad to live safely outside Pakistan,” says the 60-year-old mother.
Hundreds of the Hazara men, like Fatima’s sons, have fled the country recently to seek asylum in other countries. Hundreds others have been killed in targeted gun attacks or bomb blasts in Balochistan. Hundreds of others lucky enough to have survived such attacks, now live in trauma, some with lifelong physical disabilities.
“Our Eids and other occasions are meaningless without our men,” says Zohra, the elder sister of another Hazara man, Kaleem, who left the country three years ago. “Not a single day passes when we do not remember our children.”
In social gatherings one only see the elderly and young women, as the exodus of the men continues. Year 2013 was bloodiest in the province. Two suicide bombers targeted a snooker shop in Hazara Town’s busy market, killing around 100 men and women and injuring 120 others. “Leave or face death,” read the pamphlets distributed downtown by a militant outfit days later, threatening the shopkeepers.
Therefore, on a cold September morning, a group of twelve young and frightened friends hugged their parents for the last time before setting out on a dangerous journey. Fatima’s third son and Zohra’s younger brother were among them.
Fleeing talent
Pakistan is home to around 9500,000 Hazaras, a number larger than the population of Washington DC. Of them 600,000 lived in Quetta. Islamist groups have been targeting the Hazaras in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Pakistan, the Sunni militant outfit, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, has claimed various attacks.
Around 100,000 Hazaras, mostly young men in their 20s, have thus migrated from Pakistan to other countries in the past three decades, according to the statistics compiled by the community from 2015.
They claim to have a 100 percent literacy rate, which, unlike the majority of Pakistanis, should ideally pave the way for a better future. But, no one is willing to employ them. Kaleem, for example, who did his Bachelors in Arts from Bolan Medical College in Quetta in 2012, wanted to become an actor, but had to leave his dreams behind along with his homeland.
His father sold his shop and borrowed some more money from relatives to send him abroad. “I was so confused, didn’t know what to do after threatening pamphlets were distributed,” he says. “(Kaleem) could not live here safely. It was a difficult decision that I had to take finally to send him abroad.”
Fighting fire or water
Confused and scared, all twelve friends, including Kaleem and Zakir, set out on their journey to try to illegally enter Australia. I decided to trace them, but taking a different and safer route: Around 11 hours on a flight from Karachi to Jakarta via Dubai. From the window seat, I tried to make out the jungles and great Indian Ocean below, where Hazara migrants had been risking their lives for years to illegally enter Australia, their ultimate destination.
I arrived on an October afternoon when hand-pushed trolleys rolled in and out of the Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Jakarta, as passengers chatted and laughed. Consisting over 13,000 islands, Indonesia, which has the largest Muslim population in the world, did not seem to be terribly ‘Muslim’ compared to Pakistan. In Jakarta, pubs sell liquor. You can listen to music and dance.
It had taken rounds of conversations on Facebook from Karachi and several telephone calls in Jakarta to persuade Kaleem to speak out. Finally, he spoke over the telephone from Surabaya Island where he along with hundreds of illegal migrants were living under detention of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
“We had the sea in front of us. And the fire (in Quetta) behind us. Where do we go,” he asked. “We tried to enter Australia illegally in a boat. But the Indonesian coast guards arrested us.”
The rest of the story was told by his friend, Zakir, whom I meet in Menteng area of Jakarta, where he had come to meet a Hazara friend from Afghanistan. “It’s a horrific story,” he started to say, settling on the carpet in a cramped single-bed room, with an ugly toilet, refrigerator and air-conditioner. “From Quetta to Bangkok we were taken on legal documents.”
Bangkok is where the real adventure started. From Bangkok the agents smuggled them through Malaysia and then through the jungles of Indonesia. The twelve friends were stuffed into two cars like luggage. “We were crossing the borders where there were soldiers with guns. We were constantly afraid that they could shoot and kill us. From Thailand to Malaysia we traveled in a wooden boat that could break in the middle of sea.” One of them was put in the boot of a car.
Each migrant paid the agent up to Rs700,000. Since they were detained three years ago, all 12 of them have been living on different islands including Surabaya and Jakarta and are under constant watch of the UNHCR.
Detained abroad
Sharing faith and bad luck, Kaleem and Zakir spend their days together. “We live in Jakarta separately. So, sometimes I visit when both of us feel bored,” Zakir says. An Italian bass guitar hangs from the wall he plays sometimes to lighten the heavy moments.
During a two-hour conversation, the Afghan migrant did not utter a word, too scared it would reveal his identity. He lay on the bed and buried himself in his smartphone.
After spending three months at the UNHCR detention centers, most of the migrants are set free to live outside but within the city and are required to record their attendance twice a day. Their travel documents stay with the UNHCR until their asylum claims are accepted or rejected.
For the Hazaras fleeing both Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Australian sub-continent is a paradise on earth, where Asians have continued to flock, mostly illegally on boats. Indonesia is the second last country from where the agents had been transporting them to Australia on those boats but without documents.
However, Australia started to crack down on illegal boat arrivals in 2012 and many were sent back. Up to 10,000 refugees are now stranded in Indonesia, many of them Hazaras from Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to statistics from October 2015.
“The [Indonesians] used to tease us. Sometime they beat us because we are migrants,” says Kaleem, who was forced to move from one locality to another in Jakarta. “They don’t like us. They say you are [stateless] migrants.”
After three months in detention the only freedom the illegal migrants can gain is the permission to visit other Hazara friends. When the two meet they discuss two things: happy days in Pakistan and the horror of migration. “The only thing we can do is eat and sleep, then eat and then sleep. We have nothing to do but to wait,” Kaleem says. “I don’t know where the UNHCR will send us. We will have to go wherever they send us. I just want to go to Australia, but I will never go back to Pakistan.”
Zakir’s answer is the same. He is worried about his parents and two younger brothers who are still in Pakistan.
Christians in Sri Lanka
Last year, Pakistan was ranked among the most dangerous countries for religious minorities. Marginalized and persecuted on the basis of faith, Shia Hazaras, Christians, Hindus and the Ahmadiyya are constantly fleeing the country. Thousands of them are living in Thailand and Sri Lanka where the authorities are not ready to accept them.
On a humid December Sunday evening in 2016, a group of young choir members sang hymns, welcoming Christmas. But instead of singing in local Sri Lankan languages, they sang in Urdu, as all of them were Pakistani Christians, who had escaped persecution.
Some 100 worshipers prayed for strength and patience in, what they described as difficult times. Initially, none of them were ready to disclose their identities. Among them was a Muslim-Christian couple, who shared their story off the record for fears of being identified.
The woman said she was a Muslim widow who decided to marry a Christian man she had fallen in love with in the Punjab. They got married but this infuriated her family, who threatened to kill them. “Three years ago, we left Pakistan and came here out of fear of being killed,” she explained. In Negombo, they arrived to join a long queue in which hundreds of Christians, Shias and Ahmadiyya members were already seeking asylum.
In the last few years, militant groups linked to the Taliban or Islamist groups have openly claimed attacks on their localities and places of worship, killing hundreds and injuring many more. When they are not being attacked, these minorities face discrimination in education and jobs.
Today, the city of Negombo looks like a mini-Pakistan, where hundreds of them are living quietly and unnoticed.
A 50-year-old Christian, Martha Barkat, said she was waiting for asylum with her four grown-up children and two grandchildren since in 2012. “My son worked as a male nurse, who used to tend to Muslim patients at home,” she explains. “One day, he was taking the patient to the doctor when they came under armed attack.” They discovered that the attackers were linked to terrorists. “My son was so scared that he left the job and the country. After him, those people kept harassing us, so we also left,” she adds. She regrets her decision, sometimes.
Colombo had good diplomatic relations with Islamabad which had helped it end militancy by the Tamils. But, relations dramatically changed two years ago, when the Sri Lankan authorities suddenly stopped issuing on-arrival visa to Pakistanis, saying they misusing the facility. Some 100 migrants, mostly men, were forcibly sent back. Only women, some of them pregnant, were only allowed to stay. Political observers say New Delhi was pressuring Colombo to counter the growing influence of Islamabad in the island country. It left hundreds of the asylum seekers stuck and scared.
The Sunday mass is conducted by four Pakistani Bishops, who are attending an International Bishops Conference in Colombo, and had specially arrived to meet the frustrated families. After mass, they gather in a hall packed with the migrants, who almost lose patience. Martha almost shouted. Her one son was arrested by the police and her newly born grand-daughter is registered in either country. “Life is getting as difficult as it was for the Israelites who had fled the atrocities of the Pharaoh in Egypt. We cannot do any work, whatever we can we do secretly because we have to pay thousands,” she says in one breath, as if opening up after being silenced for years.
“Let alone food and other things... We spend life in constant fear,” she almost shouted as the bishops tried to explain international laws and diplomatic complexities.
Martha says she herself was a social worker in Karachi, where she headed a charity organization. “For years, I helped and sheltered special children. But, today there is no one to protect my children,” she says after meeting the bishops. Inside the hall, the migrants asked the bishops to press America or European countries to take them in.
Sri Lanka might be an attractive place for tourists all over the world but for migrants like Martha Barkat it is a life more difficult than what they had back in Pakistan. “In Pakistan, we lived a luxurious life. Here we see meat after months, not to talk of other things,” she says.
After the UNHCR criticized the Sri Lankan government, the deportations were stopped. But lengthy processes still test the patience of the families. Fernandes Matthew, another Pakistani Christian, said his family lost their asylum claim ten years after waiting in limbo, as the UNHCR officials cast doubt over delayed procedures. For some months now Matthew and his family have been in hiding. Like many others, he also does not want to go back to Pakistan.
“Some 200 Ahmadiyya who came here have been quickly settled in the US, where churches are accommodating them. But, we are still waiting,” he says. “I brought my sons when they were minors, ending their education, but now have grown up. But, they cannot get an education. We cannot go back to our country, because a false blasphemy case is registered against us.”
The bishops promise they will do something before leaving for Pakistan. No one really buys it.
“My two sons live in Australia; one had gone legally and the other illegally,” says Fatima Essa. “The third one is in Indonesia in detention,” she quickly adds. Fatima’s story is shared by many other women living in the heavily barricaded Hazara Town in Quetta, which is home to the largest number of the Shia Hazaras. “This place is not safe for them anymore. So, we sent them abroad to live safely outside Pakistan,” says the 60-year-old mother.
Hundreds of the Hazara men, like Fatima’s sons, have fled the country recently to seek asylum in other countries. Hundreds others have been killed in targeted gun attacks or bomb blasts in Balochistan. Hundreds of others lucky enough to have survived such attacks, now live in trauma, some with lifelong physical disabilities.
“Our Eids and other occasions are meaningless without our men,” says Zohra, the elder sister of another Hazara man, Kaleem, who left the country three years ago. “Not a single day passes when we do not remember our children.”
In social gatherings one only see the elderly and young women, as the exodus of the men continues. Year 2013 was bloodiest in the province. Two suicide bombers targeted a snooker shop in Hazara Town’s busy market, killing around 100 men and women and injuring 120 others. “Leave or face death,” read the pamphlets distributed downtown by a militant outfit days later, threatening the shopkeepers.
Therefore, on a cold September morning, a group of twelve young and frightened friends hugged their parents for the last time before setting out on a dangerous journey. Fatima’s third son and Zohra’s younger brother were among them.
Fleeing talent
Pakistan is home to around 9500,000 Hazaras, a number larger than the population of Washington DC. Of them 600,000 lived in Quetta. Islamist groups have been targeting the Hazaras in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Pakistan, the Sunni militant outfit, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, has claimed various attacks.
Around 100,000 Hazaras, mostly young men in their 20s, have thus migrated from Pakistan to other countries in the past three decades, according to the statistics compiled by the community from 2015.
They claim to have a 100 percent literacy rate, which, unlike the majority of Pakistanis, should ideally pave the way for a better future. But, no one is willing to employ them. Kaleem, for example, who did his Bachelors in Arts from Bolan Medical College in Quetta in 2012, wanted to become an actor, but had to leave his dreams behind along with his homeland.
His father sold his shop and borrowed some more money from relatives to send him abroad. “I was so confused, didn’t know what to do after threatening pamphlets were distributed,” he says. “(Kaleem) could not live here safely. It was a difficult decision that I had to take finally to send him abroad.”
Fighting fire or water
Confused and scared, all twelve friends, including Kaleem and Zakir, set out on their journey to try to illegally enter Australia. I decided to trace them, but taking a different and safer route: Around 11 hours on a flight from Karachi to Jakarta via Dubai. From the window seat, I tried to make out the jungles and great Indian Ocean below, where Hazara migrants had been risking their lives for years to illegally enter Australia, their ultimate destination.
I arrived on an October afternoon when hand-pushed trolleys rolled in and out of the Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Jakarta, as passengers chatted and laughed. Consisting over 13,000 islands, Indonesia, which has the largest Muslim population in the world, did not seem to be terribly ‘Muslim’ compared to Pakistan. In Jakarta, pubs sell liquor. You can listen to music and dance.
It had taken rounds of conversations on Facebook from Karachi and several telephone calls in Jakarta to persuade Kaleem to speak out. Finally, he spoke over the telephone from Surabaya Island where he along with hundreds of illegal migrants were living under detention of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
“We had the sea in front of us. And the fire (in Quetta) behind us. Where do we go,” he asked. “We tried to enter Australia illegally in a boat. But the Indonesian coast guards arrested us.”
The rest of the story was told by his friend, Zakir, whom I meet in Menteng area of Jakarta, where he had come to meet a Hazara friend from Afghanistan. “It’s a horrific story,” he started to say, settling on the carpet in a cramped single-bed room, with an ugly toilet, refrigerator and air-conditioner. “From Quetta to Bangkok we were taken on legal documents.”
Bangkok is where the real adventure started. From Bangkok the agents smuggled them through Malaysia and then through the jungles of Indonesia. The twelve friends were stuffed into two cars like luggage. “We were crossing the borders where there were soldiers with guns. We were constantly afraid that they could shoot and kill us. From Thailand to Malaysia we traveled in a wooden boat that could break in the middle of sea.” One of them was put in the boot of a car.
For the Hazaras fleeing both Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Australian sub-continent is a paradise on earth, where Asians have continued to flock, mostly illegally on boats. Indonesia is the second last country from where the agents had been transporting them to Australia on those boats but without documents
Each migrant paid the agent up to Rs700,000. Since they were detained three years ago, all 12 of them have been living on different islands including Surabaya and Jakarta and are under constant watch of the UNHCR.
Detained abroad
Sharing faith and bad luck, Kaleem and Zakir spend their days together. “We live in Jakarta separately. So, sometimes I visit when both of us feel bored,” Zakir says. An Italian bass guitar hangs from the wall he plays sometimes to lighten the heavy moments.
During a two-hour conversation, the Afghan migrant did not utter a word, too scared it would reveal his identity. He lay on the bed and buried himself in his smartphone.
After spending three months at the UNHCR detention centers, most of the migrants are set free to live outside but within the city and are required to record their attendance twice a day. Their travel documents stay with the UNHCR until their asylum claims are accepted or rejected.
For the Hazaras fleeing both Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Australian sub-continent is a paradise on earth, where Asians have continued to flock, mostly illegally on boats. Indonesia is the second last country from where the agents had been transporting them to Australia on those boats but without documents.
However, Australia started to crack down on illegal boat arrivals in 2012 and many were sent back. Up to 10,000 refugees are now stranded in Indonesia, many of them Hazaras from Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to statistics from October 2015.
When the two meet they discuss two things: happy days in Pakistan and the horror of migration. "The only thing we can do is eat and sleep, then eat and then sleep. We have nothing to do but to wait," Kaleem says. "I don't know where the UNHCR will send us"
“The [Indonesians] used to tease us. Sometime they beat us because we are migrants,” says Kaleem, who was forced to move from one locality to another in Jakarta. “They don’t like us. They say you are [stateless] migrants.”
After three months in detention the only freedom the illegal migrants can gain is the permission to visit other Hazara friends. When the two meet they discuss two things: happy days in Pakistan and the horror of migration. “The only thing we can do is eat and sleep, then eat and then sleep. We have nothing to do but to wait,” Kaleem says. “I don’t know where the UNHCR will send us. We will have to go wherever they send us. I just want to go to Australia, but I will never go back to Pakistan.”
Zakir’s answer is the same. He is worried about his parents and two younger brothers who are still in Pakistan.
Christians in Sri Lanka
Last year, Pakistan was ranked among the most dangerous countries for religious minorities. Marginalized and persecuted on the basis of faith, Shia Hazaras, Christians, Hindus and the Ahmadiyya are constantly fleeing the country. Thousands of them are living in Thailand and Sri Lanka where the authorities are not ready to accept them.
On a humid December Sunday evening in 2016, a group of young choir members sang hymns, welcoming Christmas. But instead of singing in local Sri Lankan languages, they sang in Urdu, as all of them were Pakistani Christians, who had escaped persecution.
Some 100 worshipers prayed for strength and patience in, what they described as difficult times. Initially, none of them were ready to disclose their identities. Among them was a Muslim-Christian couple, who shared their story off the record for fears of being identified.
The woman said she was a Muslim widow who decided to marry a Christian man she had fallen in love with in the Punjab. They got married but this infuriated her family, who threatened to kill them. “Three years ago, we left Pakistan and came here out of fear of being killed,” she explained. In Negombo, they arrived to join a long queue in which hundreds of Christians, Shias and Ahmadiyya members were already seeking asylum.
In the last few years, militant groups linked to the Taliban or Islamist groups have openly claimed attacks on their localities and places of worship, killing hundreds and injuring many more. When they are not being attacked, these minorities face discrimination in education and jobs.
Today, the city of Negombo looks like a mini-Pakistan, where hundreds of them are living quietly and unnoticed.
A 50-year-old Christian, Martha Barkat, said she was waiting for asylum with her four grown-up children and two grandchildren since in 2012. “My son worked as a male nurse, who used to tend to Muslim patients at home,” she explains. “One day, he was taking the patient to the doctor when they came under armed attack.” They discovered that the attackers were linked to terrorists. “My son was so scared that he left the job and the country. After him, those people kept harassing us, so we also left,” she adds. She regrets her decision, sometimes.
Colombo had good diplomatic relations with Islamabad which had helped it end militancy by the Tamils. But, relations dramatically changed two years ago, when the Sri Lankan authorities suddenly stopped issuing on-arrival visa to Pakistanis, saying they misusing the facility. Some 100 migrants, mostly men, were forcibly sent back. Only women, some of them pregnant, were only allowed to stay. Political observers say New Delhi was pressuring Colombo to counter the growing influence of Islamabad in the island country. It left hundreds of the asylum seekers stuck and scared.
The Sunday mass is conducted by four Pakistani Bishops, who are attending an International Bishops Conference in Colombo, and had specially arrived to meet the frustrated families. After mass, they gather in a hall packed with the migrants, who almost lose patience. Martha almost shouted. Her one son was arrested by the police and her newly born grand-daughter is registered in either country. “Life is getting as difficult as it was for the Israelites who had fled the atrocities of the Pharaoh in Egypt. We cannot do any work, whatever we can we do secretly because we have to pay thousands,” she says in one breath, as if opening up after being silenced for years.
“Let alone food and other things... We spend life in constant fear,” she almost shouted as the bishops tried to explain international laws and diplomatic complexities.
Martha says she herself was a social worker in Karachi, where she headed a charity organization. “For years, I helped and sheltered special children. But, today there is no one to protect my children,” she says after meeting the bishops. Inside the hall, the migrants asked the bishops to press America or European countries to take them in.
Year 2013 was bloodiest in the province. Two suicide bombers targeted a snooker shop in Hazara Town's busy market in Quetta, killing around 100 men and women and injuring 120 others. "Leave or face death," read the pamphlets
Sri Lanka might be an attractive place for tourists all over the world but for migrants like Martha Barkat it is a life more difficult than what they had back in Pakistan. “In Pakistan, we lived a luxurious life. Here we see meat after months, not to talk of other things,” she says.
After the UNHCR criticized the Sri Lankan government, the deportations were stopped. But lengthy processes still test the patience of the families. Fernandes Matthew, another Pakistani Christian, said his family lost their asylum claim ten years after waiting in limbo, as the UNHCR officials cast doubt over delayed procedures. For some months now Matthew and his family have been in hiding. Like many others, he also does not want to go back to Pakistan.
“Some 200 Ahmadiyya who came here have been quickly settled in the US, where churches are accommodating them. But, we are still waiting,” he says. “I brought my sons when they were minors, ending their education, but now have grown up. But, they cannot get an education. We cannot go back to our country, because a false blasphemy case is registered against us.”
The bishops promise they will do something before leaving for Pakistan. No one really buys it.