Failure of Foreign Office to advise its missions abroad, as also the foreign governments, of the shape and design of Pakistan's newly introduced 'Machine-Readable Passport' has caused more hardships, nay miseries, than ease in travel by Pakistani students, workers and businessmen. The reason is that the newly introduced machine-readable passport (MRP) is held suspect and the owners are prevented from further travel at foreign airports and are put to severe hardships on this account. Among them are ladies and children also.
Pakistan Immigration authorities started issuing the MRPs from last week of October but the officials in the Schehrazad Complex in Islamabad had not sent a single signal abroad till last Wednesday.
Ironically, the computerised MRP system was adopted to lend authenticity to Pakistan passport because of common complaints of its being fake or forged. The new system was the surest guarantee of the passport being genuine.
However, the Interior Ministry officials claim that they had sent out a prototype of an MRP to Foreign Office for circulation to embassies abroad, and foreign missions here to relay it to their home governments.
This claim could not be verified from the Foreign Office official spokesman who was on leave.
In Interior Ministry, too, no one was able to specify the date when this important information, including the specimen of MRP, was relayed to Foreign Office.
Reports of interrogation of Pakistanis holding the MRP at foreign airports started filtering into the country since early last week and peaked on Wednesday when Karachi reported that one of UAE airports had sent back several Pakistani expatriates while in transit to a third country.
There are strong outfits of passport detectors now employed by several Gulf airports, particularly Dubai which has become a popular transit point between East and West. A multinational force in dark suits equipped with pocket size laser detectors roams the departure lounges and checks the travel documents of all nationalities.
They are fully conversant with the designs, formats and contents of passports of various countries and have the authority to veto boarding to anyone whose documents cause suspicion or do not have onward confirmed bookings in case transfer flights to a third and fourth country are involved.
Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry has quoted another case and sent a communication to the Federal Government pointing out the failure of Foreign Office. It referred to the problems faced by a Pakistani trader who was stuck up in Teheran en route to Frankfurt and Croatia.
After having been denied boarding to resume his travel, he approached Pakistan Embassy for a confirmatory letter for his passport for presentation to the German and Croatian missions but the Home Consular Section there declined to oblige saying that it had not received any information from Islamabad. The businessman was still held up in the Iranian capital.
The KCCI chief, Khalid Firoz, in a statement has said that in the absence of adequate knowledge about the change of the passports, both in its format and contents, the businessmen travelling abroad have been experiencing lot of difficulties and inconvenience.
The Pakistani travellers abroad, particularly in western countries, were being looked down with suspicion on one pretext or the other, the statement added, pointing out that lack of knowledge about the Pakistan's new passports could add to their misery.
In Islamabad, while the official spokesman was on short leave on Wednesday, inquiries were diverted to the Director General, Headquarters. One of his duties is to liaise with missions abroad, but he declined to entertain any telephone call.
His staff said that newsmen should await the return of Masood Khan to office to answer their queries.