UAE government has issued an order on November 18, banning workers from 13 nations, including Pakistan from entering the country till further orders.
The Covid-19 pandemic is rapidly reshaping global geopolitics and diplomacy and many countries are using this opportunity to take some tough decisions for their own welfare.
The UAE government, through an order issued on November 18, has banned workers from 13 nations from entering the country till further orders, to ensure its national security and law and order
An Al Jazeera story highlighted, 'The UAE had temporarily stopped issuing new visas to Afghans, Pakistanis, and citizens of several other countries over security concerns.'
Pakistan has been facing the heat even before the issuance of the order banning workers from 13 countries. Last week, Pakistan's foreign ministry had said that UAE had stopped processing new visas for its citizens
The list of the countries facing ban include war-torn nations like Syria, Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan, to countries from the anti-Saudi bloc, like Turkey and Pakistan.
News reports from the Pakistani media reveal that the Pakistani government was not informed about the decision. The Pakistani leadership says the decision by the UAE government is 'Pakistan specific' and pandemic is not the actual reason to ban Pakistani workers.
Before the pandemic, the UAE and Gulf countries hosted more than 4.5 million Pakistani workers. Data reveals that more than 87 per cent of Pakistani migrant workers went to the UAE and Saudi Arabia in 2019. In fact, the abandonment and lay-offs of Pakistani workers started in the UAE in massive numbers with the initial advent of the pandemic.
According to Pakistan Foreign Office data, more than 13,000 Pakistanis workers lost their jobs in the UAE at the beginning of April 2020. However this phenomenon is not new, only that it has intensified due to the pandemic.
An economic report by the State bank of Pakistan released in February 2017, said that the country's foreign remittances fell nearly 2 per cent during the first seven months (July 2016 to January 2017). It highlighted that the decline came from Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Top security officials and bureaucrats of UAE have been expressing their concerns about the rising number of crimes committed by Pakistanis and the thriving of Pakistani criminal gangs.
Not just UAE, but crimes committed by Pakistanis in almost all the Gulf countries are also burgeoning. In October 2016 report by Pakistan's Express Tribune news platform said, 'Official documents of the Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis state that currently there are about 1,834 Pakistanis detained in various jails of Saudi Arabia.'
Data from subsequent years reveal that Saudi has been executing the largest number of Pakistanis as compared to nationals of other countries - most of them for heroin smuggling.
These executions include 20 in 2014, 22 in 2015, seven in 2016, and 17 in 2017. In April 2019, a Pakistani couple was beheaded in Saudi Arabia for smuggling heroin.
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