The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) government has raised concerns and sought an explanation from the Afghan refugees’ commissioner after the United Nation High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) introduced a new syllabus for schoolchildren at the refugee camps.
In a notification issued yesterday, the provincial home ministry termed the fresh changes in the syllabus for grades one to six as being “anti-Pakistan”.
The syllabus contained content including showing the Pak-Afghan border as the controversial Durand Line, projecting India as a friendly country to Afghanistan, showing Gilgit-Baltistan and Kashmir as part of India, and displaying the Afghanistan flag on every page.
The changes were made without the approval of provincial or federal departments.
Apart from the nature of these revisions, the KP government also questioned the timing of the revisions in the school syllabus.
The development came a day after Pakistan and the US clashed at the United Nations.
The US urged Pakistan not to give sanctuary to terrorist organisations while Pakistan demanded that the Trump administration address safe havens inside Afghanistan and its income from the narcotics trade.
The exchange took place on Friday at the UN Security Council meeting on the issue of Afghanistan’s relations with its Central Asia neighbours, and the link between peace and security.
Deputy US Secretary of State John Sullivan said that the US cannot work with Pakistan if it continued to give sanctuary to terrorist organisations and that the country needed to stop this and join efforts to resolve the Afghan conflict.
Pakistan’s ambassador to the UN Maleeha Lodhi strongly countered that Afghanistan and its partners, especially the US, needed to address the “challenges inside Afghanistan rather than shift the onus for ending the conflict onto others”.
It must be noted that a radio tower that was streaming messages from Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) into Pakistan’s territory was destroyed on Thursday by the country’s armed forces on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in North Waziristan.
The radio station was set up near Dwa Toi and was allegedly transmitting enemy’s propaganda, a security official said.
On Friday, Pakistan’s ambassador to the US, Aizaz Chaudhry, said that Pakistan wanted to send back Afghan refugees and any Taliban and Haqqani Network elements present along with them to their own country.
He said that the Afghan refugees had become a security threat for Pakistan.
Lodhi: pointed out that Afghanistan and its partners, especially the US, needed to address the ‘challenges inside Afghanistan rather than shift the onus for ending the conflict onto others’.
