Roving Periscope: No IMF bailout yet as the UAE bans Pak ‘beggars’ coming on visit visas
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Angered with Pakistani ‘beggars’ visiting on visas, the UAE has banned visitors from 24 Pakistani cities on charges of obtaining visit visas and later begging in Middle East countries.
According to the media reports, quoting Pakistan Overseas Employment Association (POEA)’s spokesperson Adnan Paracha, the UAE immigration officials have increased their ‘restrictions’ on Pakistani nationals applying for visit visas.
When he asked officials to take action against scrupulous travel agents, Pakistan Foreign Office spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch insisted that the UAE had not banned or blacklisted the issuance of visas to Pakistanis from specific cities.
But the media reported that the UAE government already forbade issuing visit visas to Pakistani nationals from 22 cities, and added two more last week to the list. The ban includes even businessmen.
According to Paracha, the travel agents send the people on visit visas misleading them that they were being sent on a work visa. Later, when these visitors find no employment, they start begging in the streets of the UAE and are expelled by the government.
In August 2022, 80 Pakistanis were deported from the UAE for possessing fake return tickets, and other issues.
Initially, the UAE listed 12 Pakistani cities from where visitors were disallowed. Ten more cities were added to the list, followed by an additional two.
The Pakistani cities banned by UAE are Abbottabad, Dera Ghazi Khan, Quetta, Khoshab, Muzaffargarh, Sargodha, Attock, Dera Ismail Khan, Kasur, Kurram Agency, Nawabshah, Sheikhupura, Bajaur Agency, Hangu, Kohat, Larkana, Para Chinar, Skardu, Chakwal, Hunza, Kotli, Mehmand Agency, Sahiwal, and Sukkur.
This news came at a time when the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which gave no lifeline so far to Pakistan, bailed out Sri Lanka with USD 2.9 billion in assistance and Ukraine with USD 15.6 billion in aid only last week.
Instead of taking a decision on Pakistan’s request for a USD 1.1 billion tranche from an already sanctioned loan of USD 7 billion in 2019, the global lender has been imposing fresh terms and conditions on Islamabad which, some reports showed, sought to arm-twist Pakistan to desist from taking forward its nuclear bomb and missiles programs and import of weapons and defense material.
