[Pakistan voted last year to merge those borderlands, once known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, into the country’s political and legal mainstream. At a stroke, the move assigned the region’s five million residents — the vast majority of them from the ethnic Pashtun minority — the same constitutional rights as other Pakistanis, including access to the national civilian justice system.]
By
Ben Farmer
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Pakistani soldiers in
North Waziristan in January. The military has cracked down
on protesters in the
northwestern tribal belt in recent days. Credit Farooq
Naeem/Agence
France-Presse — Getty Images
|
PESHAWAR,
Pakistan — With the
Pakistani military’s crackdown on protesters in the northwestern tribal belt in
recent days, the security forces have asserted themselves as the true masters
of justice in the region.
Commanders have said that an alternative
antiterrorism court system will be used to prosecute leaders of an ethnic
Pashtun protest movement that witnesses insist has stayed peaceful. Roads have
been closed, and a curfew imposed.
But this is the year things were supposed to
be different in the tribal belt, which has waited for something other than
summary justice for decades and was promised it would finally happen.
Pakistan voted last year to merge those
borderlands, once known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, into the
country’s political and legal mainstream. At a stroke, the move assigned the
region’s five million residents — the vast majority of them from the ethnic
Pashtun minority — the same constitutional rights as other Pakistanis,
including access to the national civilian justice system.
Before, it had been run under a harsh
frontier code set up long ago by British colonial masters, who put each tribal
region under the near-complete power of a single governor. Residents were
denied basic rights like access to lawyers or normal trials, and collective
punishment for the crimes of an individual was common.
Manzoor Pashteen, the leader of the Pashtun
civil rights movement, known as the P.T.M., said that the recent campaign by
the security forces had made a lie of last year’s abolition of the old colonial
justice code.
“It is very obvious now that FATA and its
administrative strings are still in the hands of the army,” he said, using the
old acronym for the tribal areas. “In the current authoritarian governance of
the army, we don’t think justice could prevail.”
There had been some signs of change. Last
month, in one interim court set up in a federal building on the outskirts of
the city of Peshawar, even some people waiting their turn to face prosecution
under the new system dared to hope things would go better for them.
“Under the old system, we were put in jail
and ignored,” said Hajji Amir Khan, a trader in his mid-40s awaiting a court
date in Khyber District on charges of smuggling hashish. “I would not be given
the chance to be heard by any court.”
Mr. Khan said he had been framed by the
police after refusing to pay a bribe. But still, he said, “I am hopeful that I
will get relief in this system.”
Many of those hopes were dashed over the past
two weeks, when the army began moving more aggressively against the P.T.M. The
movement is centered in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, which now includes the
former tribal areas.
The P.T.M. has for the past year been a thorn
in the side of the military, accusing the security forces of extrajudicial
killings, of whisking away dissidents to secret jails and of other abuses.
The army, which accuses the movement of being
controlled by Afghan and Indian intelligence agencies, has grown increasingly
infuriated. And the Pakistani news media, under heavy intimidation from the
authorities, has largely stayed quiet about the topic altogether.
Tension boiled over on May 26, when the
security forces shot into a crowd of protesters in the North Waziristan tribal
area as they traveled to a sit-in, leaving at least 13 dead, members of the
movement said. P.T.M. activists and witnesses said the demonstrators were
unarmed. The authorities say that demonstrators opened fire first, hurting
several officers, though video clips of the demonstration have not shown that.
Two senior supporters of the P.T.M. who are
also members of Parliament, Mohsin Dawar and Ali Wazir, remain in custody, as
do several members of the group.
Smaller demonstrations have broken out across
the region, but some have been squelched, including one on Monday in Peshawar,
in which protesters said that the security forces used batons to drive off
demonstrators at a peaceful sit-in. And last week, four soldiers were killed in
a roadside bombing in North Waziristan, once a militant stronghold.
The unrest has led the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa
government to ask for the postponement of the first-ever provincial elections
in the newly merged areas. The poll had been scheduled for July 2.
The crackdown follows many warnings by rights
advocates that any promise of civil protections would be in vain, given the
military’s increasing grasp on power in the country.
“The experience of the last few days has
exposed the oppressive control of the army in total violation of the laws and
the Constitution,” said Afrasiab Khattak, a former senator and a campaigner for
Pashtun rights.
For years, residents of the tribal areas have
complained of being caught between the brutality of the militant groups that sheltered
there, including the Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda, and the military.
The Pakistani military frequently conducted
operations against militants in those regions, often at the request of the United
States and its allies struggling over the border in Afghanistan. One of the
most extensive of those offensives, centered on Waziristan in 2014, was hailed
by Pakistanis for nearly completely stamping out a domestic terrorism campaign
by the Pakistani Taliban that had scourged the country since 2008.
But it also dislocated hundreds of thousands
of residents of the tribal areas. And many aspects of de facto martial law in
the region created simmering outrage among the Pashtun population there that
eventually gave birth to the P.T.M. last year.
As the movement gained momentum, Pakistan’s
military began accommodating some of its demands, such as reducing the number
of checkpoints in North and South Waziristan, easing aggressive searches,
relaxing curfews and starting demining programs.
But many in the tribal regions say the
security forces never truly relinquished control. And even with the tribal
areas’ merger with Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the advent of the national civilian
justice system, local officials say a slow start on funding those institutions
has left the security forces with even more authority.
“We, the people of the tribal area, were
promised by the Pakistani government that after the merger, police and courts
would be dealing with the law and order situation and disputes resolution,”
said Malik Nasrullah Khan Wazir, a prominent tribal chief from North
Waziristan. “But so far, very little has happened in this regard. In the rest
of Pakistan, civil law enforcement agencies are supposed to maintain the law
and order situation. But in tribal areas, we have been left at the mercy of the
army.”
More than a century of government neglect and
two decades of fallout from military operations are unlikely to be undone
quickly. But some sort of progress is critical, local officials say.
Nizamuddin Salarzai, a politician in Bajaur
District who is running in provincial elections this year, said, “The tribal
people are being dragged through yet another phase of governance nightmare.”
“Militaries aren’t trained either for
policing or dispensation of justice,” he added. “The absence of both judiciary
and properly trained and empowered police after the military operations has
brought the military and the public in direct contact with each other on a
daily basis — hence creating frictions.”
Ihsanullah Tipu Mehsud contributed reporting
from Islamabad, Pakistan.
