Archive: Pakistan

AlJazeera: Pakistan keeps borders closed to thousands

From the archive (2001): a translated AlJazeera dispatch on Afghan refugees at the Pakistani border — early citizen translation filling a reporting gap, years before social media.

QeRN Academy

22 Oct 2001 • 1 min read

Editor’s note (2026): In 2001 this site translated AlJazeera dispatches because few Western outlets carried them. That gap — who reports, who translates, who archives — is an institutional one, and it has not closed; it has moved to new platforms. Kept as a record of citizen translation work done years before social media made it commonplace. See About the QeRN Archive and Knowledge That Benefits.

**750 refugees cross border by force **

Afghan girls looking for food in garbage at a refugee camp near Peshawar, Pakistan

Pakistan is not allowing any more Afghan refugees into its territory. Thousands of refugees are amassed at the border while hundreds managed to get into Pakistani territory by force during a violent clash between stone-throwing refugees. According to the BBC, the refugees at the Chaman crossing have not had food in days.

A spokesperson for the Pakistani Foreign Ministry, Riad Muhammad Khan, said that old men, women and children were being allowed accross the border. The spokesman said that Pakistan shares a 2500 km border with Afghanistan and it is impossible to close it completely. He added that the Pakistani government is doing whatever is inits power to allow agencies to deliver food and other supplies to the refugees.

Workers with UN agencies have been appealing to the Pakistani government to open the border to the refugees. One UNHCR official said that there were about 15,000 refugees on the other side of the border. The official also made clear that the majority of the refugees were fleeing the bombing on Kandahar

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