Daily Times

Recently, the president of Pakistan signed two orders whereby the Political Parties Order 2002 was extended to FATA and some changes were introduced in the British-legislated Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR) that have been governing FATA since 1901. The people of FATA can now participate in political activities inside FATA and all political parties of Pakistan can legally operate in the area. The changes in the FCR accorded limited human rights to the tribal people. No one can be indefinitely detained and people will have a right to appeal in the FCR tribunal. Cases will be decided in a fixed timeframe and arrested people can be released on bail. Women, children below the age of 16 and elders above the age of 65 will no longer be subject to the collective punishment provisions process. No person in FATA can now be deprived of their property without being provided compensation. The political agents’ use of state funds will now be subjected to audit by the auditor general of Pakistan.

The newly legislated reforms can and should be seen as the first step towards legal, political and socio-economic development in FATA. The PPP-led coalition government deserves credit for taking this much needed first step. But, nevertheless, the reforms are insufficient. Also, there are practical hurdles in the implementation of these reforms that only the government can remove. One would, therefore, like this government to be more assertive and courageous in dealing with FATA on legal as well as security issues.

A recent report by Amnesty International declared FATA as a “human rights-free zone” in Pakistan. The area remains a human rightsifree zone to a larger extent despite the recent reforms. The archaic and draconian collective responsibility law is not totally done away with in the new reforms. This is an affront to the established human rights in the constitution of Pakistan as well as international human rights instruments. Also, the reforms do not concur with one of the key principles of human rights: separation of the judiciary and the executive. The FCR Tribunal, the appellate authority where FATA residents can appeal against decisions, has no judge and is staffed by bureaucrats alone.

The biggest hurdle is the presence of the terror sanctuaries in the area. The sanctuaries contain the ‘strategic assets’ of the security establishment of Pakistan. These sanctuaries have to be destroyed before the people of FATA can benefit from the reforms. This implies that the policy of strategic depth has to be given up. There is no sign that this has happened. The PPP government has no control over the security policy that entails the abuse of FATA as a base for terrorism and has thus far shown no sign that it has the will to confront the powerful generals to release FATA from the military-militant occupation. With the terror sanctuaries in the area, only the pro-Taliban religious political parties that already dominate the politics of the region through mosques and mullahs supported by the local political administration will benefit from the extension of the Political Parties Act. Anti-terror political parties, like the ANP, Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party and PPP, will not be able to freely operate in the area. The political will of the tribal people will remain under siege of terror and the people may have to withdraw from the political process or align themselves with the religious parties as a means to escape the deadly anger of the Taliban and the state security apparatus behind them. Thus, while theoretically the extension of the Political Parties Order is a giant step forward, practically it would take no less than the total shift in the military-controlled security policy regarding Afghanistan to make terror-free political participation for the tribal people an attainable civil rights entitlement.

Moreover, all over FATA, development projects have been contracted to the Taliban or people close to the Taliban in the last decade or so. This has been part of the security establishment’s policy to nurture and strengthen the militants’ control over tribal society. This is linked with the security policy vis-à-vis Afghanistan. Will the auditor general of Pakistan, who is authorised to audit the political administration’s utilisation of funds, be able to put an end to the contracting of development projects to the Taliban or people close to them? This again seems unlikely without a shift in the security paradigm of Pakistan.

No modern state, including Pakistan, can have any justification whatsoever in terms of the international human rights treaties to subjugate a section of its population to laws like the FCR. The system worked for British colonial interests and so it presented it to the world as being the wish of the tribal people. It also worked well for the jihadi misadventures of the Pakistani state since the 1948 Kashmir war and so it preserved the system. The will of the tribal people has never been taken into consideration by both states, the British and Pakistani. From the tribal people’s perspective, the FCR has always meant ‘regulation of state crimes against their innocent people’ and, since 9/11, it implies the ‘regulation of state terrorism against the innocent people’. Seen in this context, the recent legal reforms hardly seem anything more than cosmetic measures. For a real change of affairs in FATA, the FCR must be totally abolished, for which there is a consensus in the area, the region must be fully integrated in the legal framework of Pakistan and the state security paradigm should shift.

The writer is the author of Taliban and Anti-Taliban