Daily Times

KHYBER AGENCY: Jamat -e-Islami (JI) FATA Naib Ameer, Zar Noor Afridi on Wednesday asked the Federal Government to merge Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA) into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or declare it as Provincially Administered Tribal Areas (PATA).

Speaking at a press conference held at Landikotal Press Club, Zar Noor Afridi said that FATA was the territory of Pakistans but it was managed without any legal system since the independence of Pakistan.

The JI leader asked the government to give the FATA a similar status like that of the PATA. The jurisdictions of High Court and Supreme Court should be extended to these areas without any further delay in order to provide the tribal people with swift and a just legal system, he maintained.

“We reject implementation of FATA Good Governance Regulations in FATA as Frontier Crimes Regulation and FGGR were the two sides of the same coin that could not facilitate the FATA people. The FCR and FGGR have deprived 10 million tribesmen of their basic rights,” he opined.

“None of the FATA people had been given any single facility by the FCR as it was British made draconian law to suppress and deprive tribal people of their basic rights,” Zar Noor Afridi maintained.

He said that the proper judicial mechanism in FATA, under the constitution of Pakistan in true letter and spirits should be implemented in the tribal areas. The JI leader demanded of the federal government that FATA should be declared as a Tax Free Zone for the next hundred years. He said a network of educational institutions should be spread out in FATA.