Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: Speakers at a roundtable conference on Monday endorsed the proposed merger of FATA with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP).

The event titled: Integrating FATA: Issues and Challenges had been organised by the Shaheed Bhutto Foundation.

The speakers demanded the government de-notify the undeclared status of no-go areas and revisit Pakistan’s policy towards Afghanistan. “Such a merger will bring the tribal areas into the mainstream and remove the prevailing sense of deprivation,” they said.

PPP Senator Farhatullah Babar said the way forward to bring tribal areas into the national mainstream was to demilitarise these areas. “Peace and progress will elude the tribal areas as long as there is no peace in Afghanistan,” he said. He called for revisiting the Afghan policy and reining in non-state actors.

Babar said that the latest reforms report had many weaknesses. “However, it also has some positive points which need to be built upon. The Parliament should critically review it and make solid recommendations for carrying out reforms in a structured manner in a given time frame,” he said. He said that the Parliament should take the lead. “Even if there is a change in the government, the reforms process should not be reversed,” he said.

He said that the report failed to transfer administrative and legislative powers from the president to the Parliament, retained the colonial structures of remote-controlled governance and made only cosmetic changes to the Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR).

Babar also agreed that in case of a merger of FATA with KP, the governor should be from FATA and for this, the required constitutional cover needed to be added as the recently produced FATA report contained several legal anomalies. Senior Analyst Ayaz Wazir said that FATA had always been treated as a stepchild by the centre. “One FATA reforms committee did not have a single Pashto speaking member,” he said.

He proposed holding a referendum over the question of FATA’s integration into KP or making it a separate province.

Seasoned bureaucrat and analyst Khalid Aziz said that FATA was an underdeveloped area in terms of all human development indicators. “Therefore, FATA should not be turned into Provincial Administered Tribal Areas (PATA). Rather, it should be made an integral and segmenting part of KP,” he said.

He said that when he was working as a political agent for North Waziristan Agency in 1976, Zulifqar Ali Bhutto had visited the area. “He consulted the officials and launched a comprehensive package of reforming FATA, which was dust-binned then. It needs to be implemented in the light of latest developments,” he said.

Ajmal Muhamamd Mian, who headed the FCR Committee, said that the Reforms Committee’s 2016 Report contained four options: maintaining the status-quo, forming a Gilgit Baltistan-like council, merger with KP or making an independent province.

“Out of all the options, I side with merging with KP conditionally. An urgent and fair course of law needs to be adopted. Otherwise, it will just become another report stored at the FATA Secretariat,” he said.

Senator Rubina Khalid said that local government elections should be held in FATA. “It will add more credence to the voice of FATA, similar to the Political Parties Act 2012, which had provided political space to political and representative forces in FATA,” she said.

Faisal Kareem Kundi, former deputy speaker of the National Assembly, criticised the transition period of five-years, as proposed in the FATA Reforms Report and demanded that the integration should be completed immediately. “However, it should be made smooth and realistic as no daydreaming or politicking can be afforded. FATA’s stands at a critical juncture of its history,” he said.

Senator Sajjid Hussain Turi from Kurram Agency criticised the existing system. “It has not been favourable to the locals as it has always been remote-controlled from FATA Secretariat or Islamabad with clandestine and malicious designs,” he said.

Haji Shaji Gul Afridi, a FATA MNA, appreciated the role of ZA Bhutto, who had visited Landi Kotal in 1972 and pioneered FATA reforms. “After Bhutto, nobody took interest in this,” he said. He demanded an equal distribution of resources and representation when FATA merged with KP. The speakers demanded abolition of the FCR, amendment to Article 247-A of the Constitution and merger of FATA with KP to ensure provision of all basic rights to the local people.

The proposed recommendations of the FATA Reforms Committee were largely endorsed by the participants of the policy dialogue. However, it was stressed that the recommendations should be implemented with the consensus and due participation of the people of FATA.