Pakistan: Four million in north denied rights, says Amnesty International

MINGORA, 15 June 2010 (IRIN) - Amnesty International (AI) has criticized the Pakistani government and the militants it is fighting in parts of Khyber-Pukhtoonkhwa Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) on the border with Afghanistan for violating international humanitarian law and human rights, even though conditions in other areas, such as Swat, are improving.

"Nearly four million people are effectively living under the Taliban in northwest Pakistan without rule of law and effectively abandoned by the Pakistani government," Claudio Cordone, acting Amnesty head, said at a press conference in Islamabad on 10 June.

"The Pakistani government has to follow through on its promises to bring the region out of this human rights black hole and place the people of FATA under the protection of the law and constitution of Pakistan," said Cordone.

Amnesty's report, As if hell fell on me, documents among other things the use of civilians as human shields by militants, restrictions by both the Pakistan army and militants on civilians leaving areas of fighting and "insufficient care" by the military to protect civilians. The government disputed this.

The London-based rights watchdog also said more than a million displaced people were "in desperate need of aid" and narrated accounts of abuses by tribal lashkars (militias), set up with government support to keep the Taliban at bay.

"The lashkars are almost as bad as the Taliban. They use guns to threaten people and have killed in the past," said Imtiaz Kassim, 35, a resident of Upper Dir District in Khyber-Pukhtoonkhwa.

The Minister for Human Rights, Mumtaz Alam Gilani, called the report "unfortunate and incorrect". Pakistani security forces had made significant gains against Taliban militants and had uprooted their bases in most parts of FATA, he said. "When there is war, there [are] no civil rights," he told the media in Islamabad.

"For us, things are still grim," Ghani Uddin, a farmer in FATA's Bajaur Agency, said. "There are targeted killings of those who oppose the Taliban. We have no idea when things will get back to normal. There is also no work as so many shops and businesses have closed down."

Positive Swat

In some areas of Khyber-Pukhtoonkhwa, notably Swat District, residents say their lives have greatly improved since the army drove out the Taliban in 2009.

In an area where two years ago schools were being burned down and girls prevented from attending classes, 30-year-old school-teacher Fyza Akbar contends with a class of six-year-olds prone to giggling fits because she discarded her burqa two months ago, allowing her hair to tumble out from below her loose dupatta (head scarf).

"They have rarely seen women without veils, except their mothers or sisters inside their own homes," Akbar told IRIN, adding that she took off her burqa because "the Taliban are no longer here to impose it".

Following a two-day fact-finding mission to Swat, the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan reported an improvement in human rights there and no incidents of public floggings or patrols by militants - a regular feature of life in Mingora, the principal city of Swat before the April 2009 military operation.

"Things are better here and life is almost normal," Salim Shaukat, a Mingora-based lawyer and social activist, told IRIN. He said about 20 percent of women had returned to work where they could opt to wear chadors (shawls) rather than burqas and most people were not as fearful as before.

kh/ed/mw