December 16 marks the 38th anniversary of the breakup of Pakistan when the Eastern wing of the country emerged as Bangladesh after an India-backed secessionist movement. The occasion calls for highlighting the plight of about 250,000 so-called Biharis or stranded Pakistanis still languishing in unsanitary camps in Bangladesh.
Who are the so-called Biharis or stranded Pakistanis?
In pre-independence India, the Biharis were an Urdu-speaking Muslim minority in the Hindu dominated province of Bihar. In 1947, at the time of independence or partition, the Biharis moved to what was then East Pakistan. When the civil war broke out in East Pakistan, the Biharis, who consider themselves Pakistani, sided with the Pakistan army.
More than one million Urdu-speaking Biharis (also called stranded Pakistanis) were left behind as the Pakistani army and civilians were evacuated since the East Pakistan became an independent state, Bangladesh. All properties belonging to non-Bengalis were confiscated by the executive order of the interim President of Bangladesh. At the same time, there were summary executions by firing squads, mass decapitations, rape and mutilation. In the wake of revenge killings they fled their homes and sought sanctuary in some 166 Red Cross camps while awaiting repatriation to Pakistan. By the end of 1972 there were over one million displaced persons in these camps, which were so squalid that one UN official declared in desperation that the site he had visited could be described as nothing more than a concentration camp.
In 1972, when the Bangladesh government offered citizenship, an estimated 600,000 accepted it but over 500,000 persons opted to repatriate to Pakistan. Those choosing relocation to Pakistan anticipated that their move would be swift. They were wrong. Despite an agreement signed by Bangladesh, India and Pakistan to repatriate all these people to Pakistan, the government of General Ziaul Haq issued an ordinance in March 1978 stripping all Pakistanis left in Bangladesh after December 1971 of their nationality, unilaterally, retroactively, arbitrarily and en masse.
Now they found themselves unwelcome in both countries. Pakistani governments disowned these people on the grounds that their entry into Pakistan would create greater racial, linguistic and ethnic problems in the country and Bangladesh scorned them for having supported the enemy.
Ironically neither the United Nations nor the International Red Cross and Crescent Society recognize them as refugees. hey have been denied refugee status because they are not considered displaced people. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has not addressed the plight of the Biharis.
Promises of repatriation
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