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| Iran forcibly deporting Afghans, rights group says |
| 2013-11-21 |
| [ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Iran is forcefully deporting Afghans by the thousands in violation of its international obligation to protect refugees, a rights group said Wednesday in a report. The Human Rights Watch ... dedicated to bitching about human rights violations around the world... report included stories of fathers deported without being given a chance to tell the families they leave behind. It said a 12-year old boy was left without money at the border, forced to beg for bus fare to Afghanistan. Millions of Afghans fled to Iran and Pakistain in the 1980s to flee a bloody anti-Communist insurgency. At the peak of the war, roughly 5 million refugees lived in Pakistain and nearly 4 million in Iran. Currently, Human Rights Watch estimates about 2 million Afghans still live in Iran as unregistered refugees - some having returned to Afghanistan only to come back once again to Iran driven back by lack of jobs and a deteriorating security situation in their homeland. But Iran has refused to register many of them, said Faraz Sanei, Human Rights Watch researcher for Middle East and North Africa. Roughly another 840,000 Afghans live in Iran as registered refugees. Sanei said the report's authors spent more than a year on Afghanistan's western border with Iran interviewing refugees as they straggled across the border, some telling horrific tales of beating and abuse. Families have often been broken up. Two teenage Afghan girls were incarcerated Maw! They're comin' to get me, Maw! in the Iranian holy city of Qom, the report said. The reason: One of them was wearing pink sneakers. When their father and a fiancé of one of the girls came to help them, the police discovered they were Afghans and immediately deported all four of them. Their mother and three other children were left behind in Iran. |
| Posted by:Fred |