[Thousands of supporters cheered and chanted songs including “What is this freedom?,” a popular protest ballad about wartime repression. The emotional crowd included students and professionals drawn by social media, and burqa-covered tribal women carrying posters of husbands or brothers who were seized in security raids and never seen again.]
By Pamela Constable and Haq
Nawaz Khan
 |
|
In a rare public
challenge to Pakistan’s powerful armed forces, thousands of Pashtuns rallied April
8
in the northwestern city of Peshawar to call for an end to abuses by the police and military.
(Abdul Majeed/AFP/Getty
Images)
|
PESHAWAR,
Pakistan — The slight,
sad-faced man of 26, in a plain white tunic and a red embroidered cap, might
seem miscast as the emerging leader of millions of ethnic Pashtuns and the
voice of pent-up grievances that this struggling tribal minority has
accumulated in the years since the Cold War arrived in next-door Afghanistan a
generation ago.
But when Manzoor Pashteen took the stage at a
recent rally in this Pashtun heartland city, the self-effacing veterinarian was
transformed into an impassioned firebrand. He demanded that Pakistan’s security
forces produce hundreds of missing detainees and stop harassing residents of
his native Pashtun tribal belt, where conflicts with Taliban militants have
been raging for years.
Thousands of supporters cheered and chanted
songs including “What is this freedom?,” a popular protest ballad about wartime
repression. The emotional crowd included students and professionals drawn by
social media, and burqa-covered tribal women carrying posters of husbands or
brothers who were seized in security raids and never seen again
“Pashtun discontent has been like lava,
bubbling along for years and waiting to erupt,” Afrasiab Khattak, a former
senator from the Pashtun-based Awami National Party, said in an interview last
week. By building links with large but unorganized Pashtun communities in
Karachi and Quetta in the southwest, Khattak wrote Saturday in the Nation
newspaper, Pashteen’s Peshawar-based movement “has already become a political
force to be reckoned with.”
Pakistan’s Pashtuns have borne the brunt of
cross-border conflicts that have pitted Pakistani troops against both Afghan
Taliban insurgents and domestic militant groups. Commingled with a huge Afghan
refugee population, repeatedly displaced by fighting and constantly
crisscrossing the Afghan border, Pashtuns have often been stereotyped as
criminals, insurgents and tribal terrorists.
Pashteen and his associates, largely young and
educated Pakistanis who grew up in the chaos and routine violence of war, say
they seek only justice under the law and the constitution, not to provoke
ethnic unrest or secession. They take inspiration from nonviolent activists of
the past, especially Bacha Khan, a Pashtun independence leader who worked with
Mahatma Gandhi in India before the partition that created Pakistan in 1947.
But their explosion onto the national scene
has aroused suspicion and concern in some quarters, especially in the powerful state
security apparatus, which has been startled and angered by Pashteen’s
accusations. His most provocative slogan charges that “the uniform is behind
terrorism.” Military officials insist they have worked hard to eliminate
terrorism from Pakistani soil, while U.S. officials accuse Pakistan of
harboring Taliban insurgents.
“The Taliban are the product of the military.
Our people have been caught between them for years, and they have suffered
endless abuse and humiliation,” Pashteen said in an interview last week. He
described a litany of abuse in the conflict-afflicted tribal areas, from
soldiers confiscating a poor man’s chickens to insurgents brutally enforcing
Islamic rules. “We want peace, and cruelty from either the army or the Taliban
is not peace,” he said.
Publicly, the military has responded with
mixed signals. Officials agreed to a few of the PTM’s demands, such as ending a
requirement that anyone entering the militarized border tribal areas must
present a special citizenship ID card. The army chief, Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa,
met with Mehsud’s family in Peshawar and vowed to bring justice, but he also warned
that “engineered protests” would not be tolerated, a clear reference to the
April 8 rally.
Behind the scenes, critics allege that
security agencies have pressured mainstream Pakistani media not to report on
the movement’s events, which have received almost no television coverage. They
said government workers have been warned not to attend its rallies, and that
security agencies are behind a competing spate of rallies where speakers have
denounced Pashteen’s movement as treasonous and alleged that it is backed by
Indian and Afghan intelligence agencies.
The new Pashtun movement has received an
outpouring of support from Afghans, including a strong endorsement from
President Ashraf Ghani, an ethnic Pashtun. But this has only made the movement
more controversial, because relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan are
tense. Both have repeatedly accused each other of sponsoring cross-border
insurgent and terrorist attacks.
Pashtun political parties in Pakistan, on the
other hand, have reacted warily to the nascent movement, partly out of fear of
competition and partly because of concern that it could sabotage their longtime
efforts to succeed within the formal political system, especially a campaign to
bring full legal and political rights to the neglected, federally controlled
tribal areas by merging them with the rest of Pakistan.
The Awami National Party, the country’s
largest and oldest Pashtun party, has been especially critical. It recently
removed two of Pashteen’s close associates from party posts after they refused
to leave his movement. One former party official has worked to bring victimized
tribal women to speak at PTM rallies — both an extraordinary departure from
conservative Pashtun culture and a rare threat to security forces that are
widely popular with the public and have long justified mass raids and
detentions in the name of quelling Islamist terrorism.
On April 8, a woman whose face was covered by
a burqa came to the stage and told her story to the spellbound crowd. In an
interview last week, she recounted again how her husband, a factory worker, had
been detained by soldiers with no explanation in 2015, how she went to many
army and police facilities but learned nothing, and how she has struggled to
support her children alone ever since.
“My husband worked from morning until night
to feed us. If he did anything wrong, he should be taken to court,” said the
woman, 30, who gave her name as Basroza and said she had never been to school.
“I just want to know if he is dead or alive. This way, it’s like he was never
even born.”
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