Controversial Take: Maybe We Should Think of Them As People Too!

• 25020402
• Oct 25, 2024
• 4 min read

Updated: Oct 28, 2024

“If there was an attack on campus, where would you hide?” is a question that circled around my friend group after the horrifying ordeal of the 2018 APS attack. We discussed at great length which tactics we would devise to save ourselves because the Convent school I was studying in had received threats from the Taliban forces. I vividly remember the conversations shifting from boybands and books to gun control, the political system and death. This was all when I was in seventh grade, and these serious conversations were shrouded by a veil of naivety and adolescence, but were still in our minds at all times. I distinctly remember my grandmother pulling my siblings and I aside before every school day, after the school shooting, to bless us with prayers of safety. This dissonance from reality to cope with the horrific climate of the real world stretched on for as long as I can remember. I would watch the TV blaring with reports of school shootings, threats of outbreaking wars, explosions and wonder if I could get away with not completing my algebra homework if a public holiday was announced. There is something awfully chilling about going through social media stories of coffee shops and beach plans and then seeing a report of a family pleading for help to escape Gaza. The world we live in has become so horrifying that I truly believe it is impossible to become desensitized to the topics that would generally send one into a spiral of nihilism and despair. Conflict has become any everyday term in our vocabularies that until a substantial amount of people have been affected, we breeze past these atrocities and continue our mundane tasks to feel some semblance of peace.

In 2024, the government of Pakistan announced that they would be deporting the 1.4 Million Afghan refugees they have been hosting since 1979. This news began a discourse at the blatant unethical decision of Pakistan as the refugees were fleeing a war torn Afghanistan in hopes of starting anew, and that most of these Afghans had been living in Pakistan for decades and considered themselves to be citizens. On the other side, people were making claims of drug and gun trafficking to support this deportation. During all this uproar, the Afghan refugees who had their entire lives and ancestral homes stripped away from them, were having their worth decided by a few people who had grouped them under the umbrella of terrorists. Behind the flowery words of ‘policies’ and ‘safety’ the government decided to treat these refugees like common fugitives.

It is important to understand two key takeaways from this issue. Firstly, dismissing 1.4 Million people as dissidents is highly unethical. Secondly, why are there no questions being raised about the national and global communities failure to provide relief to these people that have been living in our country for the past four decades. Since 1979, there has been no substantial aid and rehabilitation to relieve Afghan refugees from the trauma of living in a conflict zone. The most widely known livelihood for them is Afghan children rooting through trash to sell parts. Most of them have been taking shelter in tents and resigning themselves to a life on the brink of poverty. Pretending that this fault lies in them and not the government and international communities that promised to shelter them is a huge failing. It is not so easy to dismiss them if we visualize the lives of these refugees and the hardships they have undergone to survive. However, the tactic to ‘otherize’ them and create an ‘us versus them’ narrative has played us right into the hands of the warmongerers that created this disastrous situation in the first place. If we trace this problem to the root cause, the Cold War was the primary reason for this chain of events. The clash between two Superpowers desperate to prove their status in the international hierarchy began this problem. Countries like Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Vietnam, Palestine and much of the developing countries became the casualties of war. The people within these borders who had no direct correlation to this had to pay with their lives; a story as old as time.

Behind intellectual discourse about the validity of allowing these refugees to stay, there are millions of human lives that are at stake. What separates them from us? Would we be debating so unfeelingly if this situation was inflicted on us or our loved ones? Would we be so quick to judge them for not being able to flourish in a country where they do not have the rights to basic education or healthcare? What has the country done to improve their living standards before placing the blame of trafficking and violence onto this group? Are those founded on truth or to provide a justification for displacing millions? At the end of the day, it is easy to avert blame by claims of desensitization and ‘survival of the fittest’, terms we have had ingrained in us to prevent critical thinking and dehumanizing anyone who is not directly related to us. That seems like a great way to avoid responsibility and play right into the hands of the imperialist powers that have been shying away from reparations and answering for the blood on their hands.