Without knowing FATA
From the Blog PkColumnist.com: Without knowing FATA - President Asif Ali Zardari, in his speech at Naudero on the occasion of the third death anniversary of Benazir Bhutto, enumerated the achievements of his party, proudly recounting them one by one. His party, he said, gave Pakhtuns their identity by renaming NWFP Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, addressed the grievances of the Baloch through the package of Aghaz-e-Huqooq-e-Balochistan, gave good governance to Punjab and made the four provinces agree to the NFC Award. All the provinces, and the newly created Gilgit-Baltistan, benefited from the People's Party-led government in Islamabad. But not FATA which, despite the resentment of the people there, is still governed by the political agent system through the Frontier Crimes Regulation. The civil and military officials holding important positions concerning the tribal areas, and whose importance in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa is only because of FATA, do not hail from that area. They have no interest in or knowledge of that area, or have anything at stake there except the coveted posts they occupy. When their tenure or position ends, their interest in FATA dies with it. Their children never study there, nor do their families live with them in FATA. It was the same situation even when FATA was more peaceful than any other part of the country. Having little or no knowledge of FATA, they fail to grasp the importance of the customs and traditions of the local people. Nor do they have an understanding of the intra-tribal undercurrents in the handling of routine matters. Instead, they resort to the easy way of imposing their own wishes in the garb of government orders. And when those wishes are not met they make life miserable for the people by imposing heavy fines and long jail sentences on them, and by demolishing their houses on petty charges. This situation has become even worse with the arrival of the army in the area. Its personnel treat even minor violations of petty orders as challenges to their authority and as threats to national security. One such incident took place recently when the security personnel set the bus of a local tribesman on fire. The tribesman, Mr Badshah Jan, who had invested his life's savings in the bus, was deprived of it by the soldiers when they burnt it to cinders on the flimsy charge of smuggling of fertiliser into the tribal areas. His bus was on a routine journey from Tank to Wana last April 22 when it was set on fire after being stopped at Kaur, a checkpoint near the border with South Waziristan Agency. The only crime of the owner of the bus was his loading of six bags of fertiliser onto the vehicle for use on his own crops in his native village in Wana. One wonders whether "smuggling" of six bags of fertiliser was such a crime as to deserve such a drastic punishment. Their transportation in open view can hardly be described as smuggling, in any case. Given that the bags did not contain some banned substance such as, say, enriched uranium for the making of atomic bombs, is Wana not a part of this country for the fertiliser's transportation there to be regarded as smuggling? If its transportation was indeed a crime, should the owner of the vehicle not been tried in a court of law? For some strange reason, there was not a squeak in the media on this uncondonable excess. Instead of sympathising with the owner of the bus, those higher up in the hierarchy made him suffer even more. Avoiding him completely, they did not even bother to grant him a hearing to listen to his grievance, although he visited their offices in Wana and that of the political agent in Tank, as well as the additional chief secretary of FATA in Peshawar. I brought this to the notice of the additional chief secretary myself when I met him recently. He promised to resolve the matter and even made a note of it in his personal diary, as a gesture of reassurance, but nothing has come of it so far. As if this were not enough, the army grabbed a prized piece of land belonging to Wazirs near its camp at Zeri Noor in Wana, through the political agent, at a throwaway price. Those who resisted selling the land at such a low price were arrested and thereby blackmailed into signing the deal. And in return the "saviours" do not expect to be held in contempt by the people. How can the hearts and minds of the tribesmen be won when their properties are destroyed or grabbed against their wishes? What the corps commander said to me when I met him in his office soon after he took over charge of that post is fresh in my mind. His emphasis was on "winning the hearts and minds" of the people through development and close cooperation with them, and not through use of force. Needless to say, in reality the troops' actions on the ground negate the efforts of the army chief, who tried to narrow the gap that so widely existed between the people of that area and the armed forces. During all these years the people of FATA have seen nothing but death and destruction. They need the kind of sympathies that were showered on victims elsewhere in the country. If the soldiers cannot be generous enough they should, at least refrain from taking unnecessarily and excessive actions. Acts like these should not merely be followed by expressions of regret but by immediate compensations. That is, if we are really serious about winning the hearts and minds of the people in FATA, and not bent upon cultivating their hatred. To be continued . Read Full Post
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