Homeland of danger
MURAD is just two days old, but he’s already got a hell of a story to tell his friends when he grows up.
The tiny baby boy, wrapped in a blanket and bound with what looks to be blue baler twine, entered the world in a hospital near Haripur, hours away from where his parents live. That hospital was the fourth one his mother and father had tried, having been turned away from the previous three. Having been delivered by Caesarean section, he is living in a school with his parents in the countryside 90 minutes outside the Pakistani capital Islamabad, and he could shortly be returning to his home. How much of it is left standing is anyone’s guess.
The reason Murad – the name translates as “meanings” in Urdu – was born in a school housing Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) is due to the ferocity of the fighting between Pakistani government troops and the Taliban in the regions bordering Afghanistan. His father, Noor Habib, from the Swat region in which there is a heavy Taliban presence, says they faced a lot of problems in escaping to safety. “We had to move by foot and travel a lot,” he says, adding the family plan to leave for home this week “so we can be out of this scorching heat”.
His mother, Zahida, says very little. Two days ago she gave birth via Caesarean, and now she is weak, panned out on a makeshift bed, sweltering in temperatures that can reach 45C. The room they are in is like a fan oven, and like so many of the displaced people living in the school, all they want to do is return home. The problem is the uncertainty of what they will find when they get there.
While Murad has had an entry into the world his parents will never forget, to a large extent their plight and that of an estimated two millions IDPs in Pakistan has been too easily forgotten by the world. While allied troops are waging a deleterious war with the Taliban in Afghanistan, the hold of the Islamic militant group of northern areas of Pakistan has consumed the efforts of the country’s government in recent months. Fierce shelling of Taliban positions has led not just to fatalities among the local population, but to a massive internal migration of people, simple folk who may already have witnessed violence perpetrated by the Taliban and who have been squeezed out of their home areas by both sides. Just last week an American drone missile blew to smithereens a house in north Pakistan, allegedly killing the local Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud. His death was immediately hailed by the government; if in fact he was killed.
On page one of a national newspaper last week, the lead story claimed two of the possible successors to Mehsud had engaged in a shoot-out, with one of the men dying. The same page carried another story, however, in which the man supposedly shot in the first story called a BBC radio station to claim that Baitullah Mehsud had not been killed in the first place. All the while, families such as Murad’s wait for the green light to return home. That’s when it gets tricky.
The Haripur-based rural development programme (RDP), in partnership with Trocaire, has spent recent months distributing packages of non-food items, hygiene kits and food items to 1,000 families in need. Some families have stayed in the schools, others with host families, or in the words of one RDP chief, Ahsan Khan, “every nook and cranny”.
“At least we were successful to an extent to provide support to the vulnerable families,” he says. “We hope that at least 50% [of the IDPs] will stay for the next two or three months because the [military] operation is going on.
“The most important thing is that we do not know what is the success of the army over there.”
Problems with the gathering of information and communicating it to the IDPs have left many displaced families suspicious of any government assurances. The concern among the aid community is that some families are being told to go home before it is safe to do so. In many cases electricity and water supplies will not have been restored, and the “return grants” provided by government will not pay for repairs. Many of those displaced are farm workers whose livestock have been killed.
They were unable to harvest this year’s crop because they had to flee, and the growing of maize has been banned by the government because it is seen as a crop that provides cover to Taliban forces. At the school near Haripur, families staying with host communities arrive and collect food. The streamlined system means no queuing, although many of the families are happy to wait around in the shade of the buildings.
The stories they tell are not easy listening. One man says that where he lived, the Taliban cut off two fingers on the hands of young girls so they could not write if they went to school.
Men recount how their neighbours were killed, sometimes shot by the Taliban, sometimes as a result of government shelling. One man now staying with a host family must pay 3,500 rupees (€30) a month to remain there, meaning the women in his family have had to sell whatever jewellery they had. One man said he was living with a host family, meaning 20 people are sharing one house as he lives off donations.
Another man, Hunjul Sardan from the village of Kabl, a place at the forefront of the conflict, did not know who to blame: “I had 21 cows. It costs 50,000 rupees to buy one cow. I am now going to return to my home and it is gone.” He spreads his hands to illustrate how his house and livelihood have been wiped away in one fell swoop.
The majority of IDPs are loathe to express an opinion either way. In some cases they are wary of the government, as it may well have been an army shell which smashed their house or damaged their business. They have also, in many cases, found government commitments to be less than water-tight. On the other hand, they dare not speak out against the Taliban, as they haven’t gone away, and anyone could be listening. Through the summary and violent “justice” meted out by the Taliban, anyone found to be opposed to their extreme views can find themselves strung up on a goal post as a warning to others.
In Haripur, the blame is laid at the doors of both sides by almost everyone. One exception is Sharifah Mare, the owner of a marble factory in the area of Buner. He has twinkling eyes and matching moustache and a gold watch on his hand, but little else of his past life, now that he is an IDP staying in the school. “You must ask me, who are the Taliban?” he begins, before answering his own question. “The jobless and the absconders. The criminals. These people are Taliban.” His friend, Abdullah Khan, is a counsellor in his homeland area. One of his brothers is still at home minding the village. Abdullah feels the government has also handled the crisis badly. He has been here three-and-a-half months and no government agency has given them any support, he says. “The government has failed, particularly in Haripur,” he stresses. “There is less likelihood the country will support the government because the government has failed to provide support. We are not afraid that we will die there [back at home], because we already have all the problems here and we are fed up.”
The roads of Pakistan are similar to those of many other countries, bar one exception. Every few minutes trucks that are more like a carousel on wheels drive past, licked to the last with every available colour, as though it drove through a beauticians. In Pakistan the love of the owner for his vehicle is conveyed through the ornate carvings on the doors, the metal tassels hanging from the bumper, or the fine detail painted on the side. These days some of the trucks are carrying supplies to and from communities hosting IDPs. In the town of Jalala, more than two hours drive from Islamabad, is another hosting area: a camp, the nearest one to the Swat region. Here the sun beats down relentlessly on tents spread over acres of dusty land. For some time, for too long, it has been home to families who now just want to get out.
Here, Trócaire’s partner agency is the Noor Education Trust (NET), with which it is operating two projects: an intervention and advocacy programme, aimed primarily at helping eliminate gender-based and domestic violence, and a protection programme for women and children in the camp. Pakistan is such an overwhelmingly patriarchal society that women would not even consider being interviewed by a man. This is unfortunate, for a number of reasons, but in particular because in many cases women have had to flee their homes with their children while their husbands have stayed behind to mind their property. According to NET psychologist Mirbah Karama, the mental toll has been immense. “The families when they come here from their homeland, they do not have jobs... They feel a burden on themselves and they have stress, anger, insecurity. Male family members go to the distribution points, they leave them [the women] back alone.
“They also have psychological disorders. They cannot sleep if they hear anything flying overhead. Girls who are coming to us, we have sessions with them and it is a feeling of catharsis for them. It can often be the first time they have spoken about their problems,” she says.
Honour killings are not unknown in areas of Pakistan. Mirbah says she was aware of one story in which a woman was left behind by her friends in one of the war-torn areas and missed the curfew set to keep civilians off the streets at night. She went to her brother’s house, but instead of welcoming her inside, he killed her. In another case a woman with two daughters was left to fend for herself after her husband married again. In the Jalala camp women were all but absent during our visit, and similarly in the makeshift tented village not far away where some families live in a tiny area and cramped tents with erratic electricity supply. The problems are likely to get worse in the short term in both places, as a nearby school which is home to 24 families has to be vacated for the start of the school year. Those families moving to Jalala camp will find plenty of space due to the number of families leaving to go home, but no tents, as the returning families have brought them with them.
Some 738 families still reside at the Jalala Camp, where in one hut the men gathered form a circle of grievances. The list is long: camp management is slow and inactive, say some, and medical supplies have been slow. Some people say they have not received state entitlements which have been given to people living in host communities.
Other people have been waiting weeks for verification of their status, or in some cases their identity, so they can access grants, and many say that while they have been receiving food, it’s not the right food. That said, the camp is pristine by the standards of a humanitarian crisis.
On the other side of the road, where the camp extends further, the people there say that they are happy with their conditions, but they echo the universal view: we want to go home, and for it to be safe enough to do so. The camp manager, Fayaz Ali Shah, has some vaguely encouraging, but worrying words for the IDPs. “We have been telling them for months that they should not feel that there will be complete peace [on their return home],” he says.
“It will continue for another two, three, four months. There may be some mishaps, some explosions, some firing definitely could take place. Some of the [Taliban] elements are still there.”
There is little succour in those words for many of the IDPs, and he admits that the vacating of the schools will put renewed pressure on the camps, so much so that when asked if he thinks the camp will cope he replies: “I do not think so.”
Instead, the “higher-ups” will make a decision to extend the camp or form a new one, in the hope that more people return home and ease pressure on existing services. As if to contextualise the threat of ongoing violence, he expounds on his theory that incidents take place in the country on almost a daily basis. He cites “personal enmities” as one reason, the presence of “miscreants” as another. This candid appraisal may have some grounding in truth, given that the country itself was formed following a violent and bloody breakaway from India, but thankfully the other side of the coin is shown in the surrounding community and in the tented village. In the latter, Mian Rahim sleeps in a tent with his wife and four daughters. He has received support from a local politician, who helped him to get some wheat flour. The fact that his house at home in Kabl has been looted, according to reports, has been eased by the help he has received from his fellow IDPs. He walked 40km by foot to escape, he says, taking two days and one night. When asked if he blamed the Taliban or the government for his predicament, he answered: “God help us.”
Not far away, Chashman Musakhel invited eight families from Nagoha in Swat region to stay in his house. Four families have since returned, meaning 11 people are still staying. The editor of a bimonthly magazine, he is a man of some means, but his generosity is still touching, He did it, he says, “out of human sympathy”, even going so far as to sleep on the veranda of his brother’s house when his own home was full. Sat next to him in one of the rooms is Abdul Wahed, one of those availing of his hospitality. He has Sciatica and doesn’t know when he will be able to return home with his family, but both he and Chashman seem to have formed a special bond. Abdul left in such a hurry that he attended his sister’s wedding but noone could stay for the food. Since then he has been in debt to Chashman, who in turn says: “We are like family members, like brothers – they are no longer strangers.”
The lot of many IDPs is far removed from that of Abdul’s. In a school outside Haripur some families staying there were on the brink of being ejected by the principal before the NDP intervened. Elsewhere, it is understood some IDPs who have gone to state agencies asking for their entitlements have ignored and in some cases threatened with having their name passed to police as a terrorist or militant if they do not go away. It is also understood that a number of people staying in various camps, possibly as many as 200 over recent months, have been arrested for questioning over alleged links to the Taliban. Children are also vulnerable.
At the school mentioned above near Haripur, some children have found themselves working for less than a dollar a day in nearby brick-making factories, in which the companies are contravening child labour laws. There are also legitimate concerns about children’s welfare. Close to the town of Swabi, which borders the Malakand division of the North West Fronter Province affected by the armed conflict, is another school hosting IDPs.
Here they are provided with support by the Pakistan Village Development Program (PVDP), an admirably proactive organisation and Trocaire partner which has been providing essential food and household items to families. PVDP has also been helping men, women and children with the psychological trauma of fleeing the brutal violence and the difficulties of coping with life as an IDP. In one room is a handmade poster illustrating what land mines may look like, should anyone come across one on their return to their home areas. One of the drawings shows a land mine disguised as a children’s toy. It is little wonder the PVDP has a lengthy list of families rated the most vulnerable and in need of counselling.
Much of that counselling falls to Nighat Sultan, a psychologist who has heard horror stories from women who have become delusional because of the trauma they have suffered, imagining that a dead child is still sat on their laps even as they are interviewed. Children, she says, have developed epilepsy because of what they have endured. Depression and isolation can be eased by weekly sessions, though she worries what will happen to some of her clients unless they receive further treatment on their return home.
Without telling the men her profession, Nighat has also managed to probe the fears of some of the men, and bad memories abound. Farid Khan, a former merchant seaman from Kuzibanda in Swat, recalls how he just escaped in time as his house was hit by a shell. Khalid Khan’s uncle died when his house was hit and his orchards have been destroyed by the Taliban. One woman’s husband was hit by a shell and will never walk again, leaving her to plead with NGOs for a wheelchair for him. Nighat herself has family that is missing because of the conflict.
“They also need my help but I cannot help them because I do not know where they are,” she says. Some families have availed of the government’s return grant of 25,000 rupees, but find themselves being dropped by bus in a bazaar in the town of Mingora in the Swat Valley, from where they have to make their own way with dwindling funds. According to Nosheen Malik, the forceful executive director of the PVDP: “They just push them like animals to their own areas.”
Much of the process surrounding the return of these vulnerable IDPs is shrouded in misinformation and confusion. The truth, according to Trócaire, is that this point in time, the start of what will hopefully be the recovery phase, is the key moment. If the aid community can enter the areas to where people have returned home and can help them, then the vacuum that might otherwise exist will be filled. If not, that vacuum could be filled by the handful of shadowy charities with Taliban links, or by the Taliban itself, offering to pay poor, disenfranchised people a wage to join its cause, with the promise of instant power but misery for the whole population. This is the danger now.
Trócaire director Justin Kilcullen, on a tour of the area, says the scale of the current crisis has been “difficult” to get across to the public at a time when the amount of money given to aid agencies by the Irish government has been cut, which in turn has meant Trócaire having to reduce its programme in the area. He stressed, however, that the humanitarian crisis here is still a priority for the organisation.
“The problem is that there is no clear end to the crisis... Some people are going back, but back to insecurity, or finding themselves being moved to other camps that are less well serviced than the ones they have left,” he said.
Pakistan, he says, is now at a “critical” point, one which could have repercussions on the global political and economic scene for the next two decades. By then, Murad will be a young man. It remains to be seen whether his inauspicious beginning could be a lucky omen, a story that will be shared by hundreds or thousands of others, or simply the shape of things to come.
* For more information or to make a donation visit www.trocaire.org
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