Pakistan’s Union of Religious Schools (madrasas) announced Wednesday it will not expel foreign students from its institutions despite the presidential order to do so, Pakistani news outlets are reporting.
Following the London bombings on July 7, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf decided to prevent foreign students from entering his country to study in religious schools. Musharraf also ordered all madrasas to expel their foreign students by the end of 2005. These decisions were taken after reports had shown that some of these schools were recruiting terrorists.
Pakistani officials indicated that there are some 1,400 foreign students in Pakistan; most of them come from Southeast Asia, North America, and Africa. Pakistani authorities have recently expelled some 100 of these students, who were studying in Multan and Karachi.
The Union of Religious Schools, which represents some 12,000 schools, said the order was a violation of human rights. “We would not expel any [foreign] student,” Hanif Jallundhari, a central leader of the union told a press conference in Islamabad, according to AFP.
Jallundhari said that about 60 percent of the foreign students had already left Pakistan since July, but that the rest, having valid travel documents, would not be expelled. He said that the union had requested a meeting with President Musharraf but so far had not received a response from the government.