Kickbacks taken outside Pak Embassy in Kabul

KABUL (Pajhwok): People have to wait ‘for days’ outside the Pakistani Embassy in Kabul to obtain visa due to increasing number of applicants and lack of facilities at the embassy.

The Pakistani embassy blames the situation on the increasing number of people applying for visa, saying the Embassy issues visas to thousands of Afghans on a daily basis.

A Pajhwok Afghan News reporter visited the diplomatic mission at 2am midnight and saw some 300 people, including 20 women, sleeping in streets and on roadsides in front of the embassy.

The applicants said they had to wait from dawn to dusk to submit their passports and other documents for visa issuance.

The reporter said most of the applicants wanted to take their patients to Pakistan for treatment. Others said they lived in Pakistan as refugees and some said they wanted to attend funeral ceremonies and wedding parties in Pakistan.

A majority of the visa seekers were traders, laborers and students. Some of them had brought blankets and other needed materials with them while others stayed awoke the entire night in front of the Embassy.

Most of the visa applicants complained that some of the embassy workers left their seats early and that applicants who paid bribe were able to get their job finished quickly

Hekmatullah, a resident of Paktia province, who wanted to take his ailing mother to a Pakistani hospital, said he had been awaiting his turn to summit visa application for the past four days. Officials in military uniform in front of the Embassy received money from applicants, he claimed.

Bilal Ahmad, another visa applicant, said: “Everyone takes money here, they delay your work until they are paid money.”

Mohammad Edris, 40, who reached the embassy at around 3am before dawn, said police outside the embassy took bribe from applicants. He wanted to visit Pakistan with his ailing wife.

Edris said people seeking visas started arriving at the Embassy at midnight in order to avoid rush.

He also complained about lack of discipline among visa obtainers, saying yesterday when the embassy officials started collecting passports for visa stamps, more than 50 individuals at once ran towards the window, prompting the officials to close the window.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA)’s spokesman Shakib Mustaghni told Pajhwok Afghan News the ministry’s consulate department had discussed such issues with the Pakistani Embassy and talks would continue until the problems were resolved.

Mustaghni said the main problem that more than 2,000 people daily visited the Pakistani Embassy seeking visas.

The issue has also been discussed with Pakistan and Islamabad has been suggested to hand over the issuance of visas to the private sector, he added.

Press attaché at Pakistan Embassy in Kabul, Akhtar Munir, told Pajhwok that they worked five days a week.

At the start of a week, he said, people came in large number and were issued visas, but their number declines in later days of the week.

About 3,500 to 4,500 Afghans are issued visas daily in Kabul, Jalalabad, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif and Herat cities, according to Munir, who said emergency patients were issued urgent visas the same day they applied for.

He said embassy officials had to work late in night and start work early in the morning due to the large number of applicants.

According to him, no other embassy issued much a large number of visas to Afghan.

He said the Pakistani government had a plan to hand over the visas’ issuance to the private sector in order to ease and facilitate the process for people.

In response to a question regarding middlemen and kickbacks taken in front of the embassy, Munir said embassy officials had never been found indulged in such illicit acts.

“What happens outside the embassy is the responsibility of the Afghan government to deal with,” the diplomat said.

mds/sns/ma