Daily Times

PESHAWAR: Dozens of married Pakistani women to Afghans refugees belonging to different localities of Peshawar on Monday appealed to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Raheel Sharif and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan to bestow Pakistani nationality to their Afghan husbands.

“We are reluctant to go to Afghanistan as we have received threats from Afghans living in Afghanistan that if we go there. Our husbands have been deported on Torkham border to their ancestral homeland Afghanistan”, said one of the women while talking to reporters.

More than 35 women of various localities of provincial capital including Corporation Colony, Madina Colony, Dalazaq Road, Charsadda Road, Patang Chowk, Ghareeb Abad and other places gathered in their shuttlecock veils and covered faces at Sher Shah Suri Road and hold a protest demonstration against the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Government. Carrying placards inscribed with different appeals regarding a process to provide nationality to their husband and come back to Pakistan.

“We did not see and even made a visit to Kabul how can we live there and adjust ourselves with those people”, asked a woman having a child in her arms. “My husband was a driver and earning livelihood for my seven kids now my husband has been departed to Afghanistan wherein he is jobless”, she lamented.

She claimed that her husband was born in Pakistan 40 years ago and settled here but due to current Afghan refugees’ crisis her husband also prey victim of expulsion. “I am a Pakistani by nationality and have my Computerized National Identity Card (CNIC), Pakistan is our country. Why Government of Pakistan does not introduces a process to give nationalities to those Afghans who married to Pakistani women”, she suggested. “Every country in the world bestows on nationality to immigrants but Pakistan does not provide this facility to our Afghan husbands”, she asked.

Interestingly, another woman on the condition of anonymity said that some 3 or 4 children had been carried by their Afghans fathers with them to Afghanistan forcefully. She said that one of the children had returned to Pakistan after a long process and spending more than Rs 60,000.