KARACHI: For nearly 40 years, Baz Mir, a young Afghan who escaped war and uncertainty in his home country, called the dusty outskirts near the southern Pakistani city of Karachi his home, where he built a life from scratch in a temporary settlement for people like him.
As bulldozers closed in on what remained of the Afghan refugee camp, the 48-year-old father of six watched on the walls of his modest house tremble, not just by heavy machinery but also from the emotional weight of a life being dismantled.
Mir, his wife, mother and five children are among 1,384 Afghan nationals who are still awaiting repatriation to Afghanistan from Karachi, according to official documents reviewed by Arab News. Authorities say over 14,000 have already returned to Afghanistan from his area, including one of Mir’s son and his wife.
Since late 2023, Pakistan has gradually repatriated more than 1.5 million Afghans blaming them for a surge in militancy and crime. Human rights groups have criticized the policy as collective punishment, warning it would uproot families with no safety net across the border.
“If I have lived here for 40 years and I see my house being demolished in front of me, of course my heart will break too,” Mir, who came to Pakistan in 1989 as a teenager, told Arab News, standing inside his modest home as authorities brought in heavy machinery to demolish the settlement.
But as families depart, a new kind of chaos is taking root in the form of land grabs.
On Tuesday, Karachi police launched a pre-dawn anti-encroachment operation over reports of land grabbers storming the area and marking empty houses as their own.
What began with markings on walls quickly escalated into clashes.
“Around 12 to 14 people were arrested after they attacked police with sticks and stones,” Shayan Anjum, a police officer overseeing the operation, told Arab News. “We are clearing it to hand over the possession to rightful owners.”
The Afghan refugee camp comprises more than 3,100 houses, according to police records. Of them, up to 250 are occupied by Pakistani families, while the rest were built or inhabited by Afghan refugees.
But now others have set their eyes on these houses.
“Wherever a house was empty, they sat there. Where people were still living, they wrote their names on the walls and left, claiming that house as theirs,” Mir said, adding that refugee families leaving for Afghanistan were bothered by both land grabbers and the sounds of the bulldozers dismantling homes.
Officials confirm these attempts.
A recent police report warned that “certain land mafia elements and illegal grabbers are making attempts to illegally occupy and encroach upon” portions of the said land, but those doing so deny wrongdoing and insist they are reclaiming “what was always theirs.”
“Sindhis have returned to their own land and homes, what’s wrong with it,” asked Ali Babbar, an activist who was leading a group of protesters whom the police called “landgrabbers.”
Afghan refugees load their belongings on a bus as they prepare to leave for Afghanistan, in Karachi on April 8, 2025. (AFP/File)
Babbar lamented the authorities were questioning “locals” about documents, while Afghans had lived at the same place for decades.
“For 50 years, these people haven’t been given proper housing,” he said, criticizing the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) for not providing housing to the poor people in Sindh, of which Karachi is the provincial capital.
Tensions flared again on Wednesday as Babbar among a group of men pelted stones at police, while the law enforcers responded with tear gas shelling before resuming the demolition drive and arresting some of them.
Amid this chaos, dust and debris, Mir tried to come to terms with the harsh reality.
“It hurts deeply. You spend forty years at a place and then everything is broken right before your eyes, everything gone,” he said. “It would be better if they demolished it after we leave, we won’t feel as much pain.”
