Daily Times

Swat: A 20-point public declaration passed at a jalsa organised by the Awami Workers Party on Sunday, or the Swat declaration, demanded the establishment of an independent Truth Commission to determine the root causes of terrorism as well as factors that contributed to its emergence in the country.

Other demands in the declaration were abolition of Article 247 of the Constitution and of all security check points in the region, besides immediate transfer of power in the Malakand Division to civil administration. It also called for reassessment of losses caused by the War on Terror, accountability of funds spent on the so-called rehabilitation of IDPs, establishment of welfare trust for those affected in WoT, particularly women and orphans, and use of natural resources for the welfare of local population and placing tobacco on agriculture list instead of on commerce list.

“Abolish Article 247 of the constitution so that the Provincial Administered Tribal Areas (PATA) could also be mainstreamed and saved from manipulations by unelected state institutions as well as non-state actors,” Fanoos Gujar, the federal president of the Awami Workers Party, demanded at a jalsa held at Balogram Football Ground near Mingowara on Sunday.

Gujar said that FATA and PATA regions, particularly the Malakand Division, had been turned into a strategic zone and a launching pad by international and national powers-that-be for their power games at the cost of the blood and livelihood of local people.

“This region has suffered enough. All the basic constitutional rights of the people should be guaranteed now,” he said, adding that though people of the region had been given the right to elect their representatives to the provincial assembly, but the acts and laws passed by the assembly were not automatically applicable to PATA and the consent of the governor with approval of the president was needed to extend the laws to the region. “It was a mockery of representative democracy and democratic governance,” he lamented.

Gujar sought an immediate end to the use of religion as political and policy tool so that the wave of religious extremism and radicalism could be reversed.

“How did extremism and terrorism emerge in this region. We demand a proper and through investigation into the real causes and factors of the phenomenon of terrorism,” he said.

The AWP president pledged unconditional support for the cause taken up by the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, and warned the federal government to take serious actions to redress grievances of Pashtun residents all over the country, particularly in the tribal region. He lashed out at the mainstream media for its blackout of the 10-day sit-in held by the PTM activists and their subsequent rallies across the country.

Gujar further spoke about the plundering of the natural and mineral resources of the region by vested interests, and demanded that natural and mineral resources should be tapped for the benefit of the local population. He stressed that industrial processing units relevant to the natural resources found in the area should be established in the region to provide job opportunities to the locals.

Further in his speech, Gujar demanded an inquiry into alleged embezzlement of funds donated by the UN in the wake of the second Gulf war for Pakistanis stranded in Kuwait (in the aftermath of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait).

“Pakistan was not meant to be a fiefdom of the feudals, and their backers among the mullahs and the military establishment, to be ruled through brute force. The country belongs to the people and has to be ruled through representative democracy.” He reiterated that the AWP believed in the struggle for the rights of downtrodden, disenfranchised and oppressed nationalities without discrimination on the basis of creed, colour, ethnicity and religion.

Akhtar Hussain, a lawyer of the Supreme Court and the general secretary of the AWP, also addressed the gathering. He declared that terrorism was the outcome of state’s own policies and those of its imperial patrons.

Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, president of the AWP Punjab chapter, said that the state had been busy in creating terrorists on its own in the past, and was now claiming to have eliminated them, but at the expense of ordinary people’s lives. He denounced the stereotyping of Pashtuns by the state, their racial profiling and harassment in the Punjab as well as in major cities of the country outside Punjab.

Published in Daily Times, March 12^th 2018.