Green Terror

AUGUST 2000 - The green Pakistani passport can shake up any Passport Control anywhere in the world – day or night. This little document, as successive generations of suffering Pakistanis have learnt, seems to have unusual powers in creating agitation and suspicion in the minds of officials who receive it and fear and anxiety in those who are unfortunately carrying it.

At most airports around the world, and most are run better than what we offer here, the immigration areas are well-staffed and designed to take on loads of passengers alighting from numerous flights or just as many, taking off at any given time. Long queues of passengers move along numerous lines and are whisked through, some faster, some slower. But in spite of Murphy’s Law which brilliantly states that the line you are not moving in is always the line that is moving faster, the minute any Pakistani, armed with all the necessary visas, places his green passport on the counter, unexplainable things start to happen.

The confusion begins with the opening of the passport. Accustomed as the world is to open passports from the left or ‘English’ side, the Paki-passport immediately throws everything into chaos, since when it is opened from the customary side, all it reveals is a form that neither contains your name, picture or any details. Instead, it informs those who might be interested about foreign exchange for travelling expenses and on the opposite page, a long list of conditions and other terms, in a language which cannot be read in 98% of the countries where Pakistanis usually travel. This is as brilliant a start as any traveller can hope for.

The passport control official, who is now quite perplexed, has a choice of either working his way from the foreign exchange form ‘backwards’ to arrive at the front which is actually at the back, or if he is a more enterprising sort, dump the given route and go straight to the back which is actually the front, yikes ! In the first option, hazardous at all times, he runs smack into another form (the continuation of the first one travelling in the right, sorry wrong direction) and further down the road, into a long line of blank pages which bear the crest of the government of Pakistan and an icon at the base that resembles a tortoise about to start moving or a python seen from the side as it slithers along or if you are blessed with an active mind, an octopus, but only if you are nautically inclined. Neither images, you will agree, do much to soothe frayed nerves of stressed-out immigration officials. If however, the official chooses to go to the front, more confusion awaits.

The entries are in English, but disconcerting since they are opening the wrong way. Personal information follows first and picture later. And in between, the address is sandwiched. If the official continues, he or she will soon arrive at the visas but if they have come from the other side, they are likely to reach the visas long before they meet the passport owner. All this is strange and unsettling for most officials. On top of it, given our international image of terrorists, fundos and bread-basket cases, only adds to officials viewing the Pakistani standing before them, with the utmost concern and skepticism. The passport successfully endangers the credentials of most Pakistanis, even genuine ones.

At most airports, it is now fairly standard procedure for immigration officials to scan fat books containing names of fugitives and other equally successful entrepreneurs who are wanted by the FBI, Scotland Yard, CIA, Interpol and a dozen more outfits. It is quite usual to see officials poring over the books, scanning the passport picture, shaking the document for heroin to fall through and carry out other such maneuvers to establish the genuineness of the document. As others, more fortunate than us, belonging to Ethiopia, Chad and Fiji Islands float through, we are stranded as openly incredulous officials check the veracity of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

It has of course no logic that a passport that is only used abroad, and therefore in a non-Urdu environment, should be back to front. Were the document in use within the country and only in one language, this would be perfectly understandable. If this ridiculous arrangement as it exists is a sign of our nationalism then all one can say is that this is the work of demented people. Nationalism does not give you the liberty to make a fool of yourself carrying a document which causes unnecessary confusion leading to suspicion. Given our reputation for slipping into countries as remote as Greenland, no one can blame immigration desks across the world for getting paranoid when face to face with the green book. What will it take to convince policy makers to use common sense when planning such things as passports, is not for us petty mortals to dare suggest, but it is time the government brings this farce to an end and prepares a document that will be regular and commonly acceptable. I don’t think it requires the CE’s approval or a mandate from the people. At the same time, while re-ordering new passports even though existing ones may still be half empty, may bring in much needed revenue to the GOP, it is inconvenient tiresome and an unnecessary expense. Many frequent travellers end up stapling ‘old’ passports to new ones since the visas are in one and the new dates in another ! With the world creating new technology to make life simpler, we here are determined to make easy things even more complicated.

But other than the little inconveniences aside, the important point still rests on the reception the green passport evokes irrespective of the country it is presented in. While we can all thank the thousands of heroin smugglers, fake passport holders, plundering thieves, corrupt bureaucrats and armed forces icons, fleeing politicians and ‘political’ asylum seekers for having given the country the rich image it now wears around its neck like a rope, the average person who is not into the above national activities, suffers because of this sordid image. Our leaders, past and present, who have looted freely with both hands and brought the country to financial ruin and have then chartered special flights to go abroad and beg for alms, have added their bit to tarnish an already soiled image. A friend once suggested that the best way to travel abroad was to carry the green thing concealed in a leather cover and reveal it only under absolute duress. However, a few years ago, on a hot afternoon at an Italian airport where I followed a Ethiopian gent whose passport elicited no response from the sleepy immigration official and where mine sent 440 volts surging through his system, I was grimly reminded of our precarious position in what our leaders love to call, ‘the comity of nations.’