BBC News – Pakistan lawless tribal areas ‘fuelling rights crisis’

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly NWFP) tribal areas

Safeguards are not applicable to security personnel working in the tribal areas, Amnesty says Pakistan is failing to address thousands of human rights abuses taking place in its tribal areas in the north-west, Amnesty International has said.

In a new report, the campaigning rights group says people are being terrorised by both the Taliban and the military.

It claims that abuses are allowed to take place with impunity as constitutional safeguards do not apply.

Militants have been driven out from some of the tribal areas but these districts are not yet fully secure.

“After a decade of violence, strife and conflict, tribal communities are still being subjected to attack, abduction and intimidation, rather than being protected,” said Amnesty International’s Polly Truscott.

‘Legal wilderness’

The report, entitled The Hands of Cruelty, describes how what it calls the region’s “legal wilderness” is fuelling a human rights crisis.

It details cases where men and boys have been arbitrarily detained by armed forces for long periods with little or no access to due process or proper safeguards, as well as documenting multiple cases of deaths in custody.

Many of those detained have made allegations of torture, claims which have rarely investigated, it says.

Amnesty says that, because constitutional safeguards are not applicable to the tribal areas, armed forces are using broad new security laws to commit violations with impunity.

“By enabling the armed forces to commit abuses unchecked, the Pakistani authorities have given them free rein to carry out torture and enforced disappearance,” Ms Truscott said.

Amnesty is urging the Pakistani government to reform the legal system in the tribal areas which, it says, is perpetuating the cycle of violence.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-20706955

Dawn – Fall in polio vaccination refusal cases in Pakistan

Islamabad, 23 October 2012. Pakistan has witnessed a sharp drop in the number of families refusing to get their children vaccinated against polio, officials said Monday, while lamenting that nearly half a million children were left un-vaccinated.

“The number of refusing families has declined (44 per cent) from 80,330 during the first national polio round held in January to 45,122 in October,” the World Health Organization, the UN and the government said in a joint statement.

Around 32 million children were targeted during the three-day nationwide drive last week, backed by the government and WHO.

Prayer leaders from mosques’ loudspeakers have been telling parents not to give polio vaccine to their children, dubbing the campaign a Western “conspiracy” to reduce the population of Muslims.

Earlier this year, a Pakistani doctor was jailed for helping the CIA track down al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in 2011 using a fake hepatitis vaccination programme, leading the Taliban to ban immunisation in some areas.

“The success achieved notwithstanding, every unvaccinated child constitutes a major challenge,” said Elias Durry, a senior coordinator for polio eradication at WHO.

“It is a cause of grave concern that polio teams across the country have still missed 484,344 children during the last polio round,” Durry said.

He expressed concern over polio teams “persistently missing the same children that have remained unvaccinated for the last many campaigns”.

Shahnaz Wazir Ali, a senior adviser to the prime minister, called for reaching out to the children who could not be given polio vaccine drops during the latest campaign.

“We need to take adequate steps to ensure that the number of children missed for reasons other than refusals is also brought down,” she said.

Pakistan is one of only three countries where the highly infectious crippling disease remains endemic, along with Afghanistan and Nigeria.

There have been 30 confirmed cases of polio in Pakistan this year according to the government, 22 of them in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

http://dawn.com/2012/10/23/fall-in-polio-vaccination-refusal-cases-in-pakistan/

372.The Man in Blue – The North West Frontier Province

The North West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan is part of the inheritance of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, taken over in 1849 by the East India Company and after the 1857 Mutiny by the British Empire.

In the period before independence of India and Pakistan the leading political party of the NWFP would probably have preferred to be part of India. This might be because they were conquered by Panjabis in the past, and did not fancy being part of a state dominated by Panjabis.

It was good for the North West of India that Ranjit Singh conquered this border area of Afghanistan, and so controlled the Khyber Pass. But the Sikh Kingdom conquered the NWFP against the will of its population. It was ruled very harshly by the likes of General Paolo Bartolomeo Avitabile, an Italian general in the service of Ranjit Singh.

Avitabile was a ruthless ruler, summary executions became usual, and he had people executed by throwing them from the top of one of the city’s mosques. What was true then is true still : Pathans, whether in the NWFP or in Afghanistan are not the easiest to people to rule (and neither are Sikhs).

Under the Lahore Kingdom, under British rule and as part of Pakistan the so-called tribal areas were given a degree of autonomy because it was simply too difficult to control them. The Swat Valley which is very much in the news these days was a semi-independent princely state until 1969.

Although the valley does not have as turbulent a history as the tribal areas, part of the reason why there is support for the Taliban in Swat is that they were integrated in Pakistan without having any say in the matter.

I am just trying to give you a feel of the modern history of the NWFP and of the role played by the Sikhs. I have no brilliant suggestions on how to solve the present problems in the province.

Pakistan could of course give the NWFP back to Afghanistan, and maybe some parts of the border areas of Baluchistan as well. This will change the nature of the problems, but will not make them go away. Having violence in areas just across your borders is different from having them just inside your borders, but is not necessarily much better.

Pakistan should try to reach out to the people of the NWFP and their traditional leaders, bypassing the Taliban, and allow local autonomy in exchange for adherence to basic human rights.

I would be very surprised if this were to be accomplished by corrupt and incompetent Pakistani politicians like Ali Asif Zardari and Nawaz Sharif.