| What percentage of Afghans can read? |
"The goal is to persuade people to not sell all their belongings and put their lives in the hands of human traffickers, because they risk being sent back to the country from which they came," Joran Kallmyr, a state secretary at the justice ministry, told AFP.
The adverts, entitled "Stricter asylum regulations in Norway" and published in English and the Afghan Dari language on the front page of two Afghan newspapers, explained that people coming from areas of Afghanistan designated as safe or who hold a residency permit in another country will be expelled, by force if necessary.
Norway has recently seen a rise in the number of asylum requests from Afghans, even outnumbering those from Syrians in the past three weeks, with 2,212 applications from Afghans and 2,138 from Syrians.
Some of the Afghans arriving in Norway have previously stayed legally in Russia, and Oslo has decided to send those people back to Russia, or, if that isn't possible, to Kabul
...the capital of Afghanistan. Home to continuous fighting from 1992 to 1996 between the forces of would-be strongman and Pak ISI/Jamaat-e-Islami sock puppet Gulbuddin Hekmayar and the Northern Alliance, a period which won Hek the title
Most Evil Man in the Worldand didn't do much for the reputations of the Northern Alliance guys either....
Fearing a reputation as an open country, Norway launched a Facebook campaign in early November informing potential asylum seekers about how difficult it is to get residency in the Scandinavian country.
The adverts published since Monday in the Afghan press come on the heels of a Danish government initiative earlier this year, which bought ad space in Lebanese newspapers aimed at dissuading Syrian refugees from coming.
Norwegian authorities on Thursday also temporarily beefed up random border controls and introduced systematic identity checks on ferries arriving from Germany, Denmark and Sweden.
After neighboring Sweden on Tuesday announced a drastic tightening of its previously very generous asylum regulations, Oslo now fears that many migrants will head to Norway instead.
Since the beginning of 2015, some 30,000 asylum seekers have arrived in Norway, a country of 5.2 million people which is a member of the border-free Schengen zone but not the European Union
...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing...
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