The Punjabi and Pakhtun IDPs of Parachinar

Analysis: The Punjabi and Pakhtun IDPs of Parachinar

by Farhat Taj

Someone recently informed me that there are Punjabi IDPs from Parachinar who live in deplorable conditions in Attock, Hasan Abdal and Rawalpindi. I had the opportunity to talk to some of these Punjabis who had settled in Parachinar during the pre-partition British era. Since then their future generations lived and prospered in Parachinar in peaceful coexistence with the majority Shia Pakhtun and minority Sunni Pakhtun tribes. They never felt the need to go back to their native areas in Punjab. Like the Pakhtuns of Parachinar, they also speak Pashto in a Kurmawal accent. They informed me that even if there had been tribal tensions or conflicts in Parachinar in the past, they were never threatened by any of the involved parties. This peace, protection and respect accorded to the tiny Punjabi minority — a total of 30 families — is truly in line with the Pakhtun tribal culture.

All this changed in November 2007 when rival Shia and Sunni sectarian gangs, with links to Punjab-based sectarian organisations and arguably financed and indoctrinated by eternal Arab and Persian rivals, unleashed a reign of terror on the Sunnis of Parachinar. The Sunnis, regardless of ethnic discrimination and gender, suffered death and destruction. Many were killed and their houses and other properties were burnt to the ground. The Punjabi IDPs informed me that they could only save their lives when they ran away and took refuge in compounds belonging to the Kurram Militia. “Our houses and shops were burnt to ashes when we were hiding with them,� said one of the Punjabi IDPs. Like the Sunni Pakhtun tribes of Parachinar, the Punjabis had no option but to become IDPs as they went to different parts of Punjab. “We were prosperous people; we had homes, shops and other businesses. We have lost everything and live almost like beggars,� said one
Punjabi IDP who now lives in Attock. They say they have received no help at all from the government.

The Punjabi IDPs have an additional problem: no state authority is ready to own up to them. One man explained: “They keep saying we are not their [state authority’s] responsibility. When we go to the government of NWFP, they tell us to go to the government of Punjab, which in turn says that we are not their responsibility. Similarly, the FATA secretariat has also shown us the door. We just do not know who is the state authority rendered to register us as IDPs and provide some help.�

There has always been a native Sunni Pakhtun minority in Parachinar of about 6,000 people. They belong to Zazi, Ghilji, Parachamkani, Ali Sherzai, Mengal, Muqbal and Utayzai tribes. The biggest tribe in Parachinar is Shia Toori where the Shia section of the Bangash tribe also lives. For centuries both Shia and Sunni tribes lived in harmony under the tribal code of Pakhtunwali. Most disputes were peacefully resolved through the jirga system. Armed clashes, if any, were tribal rather than sectarian over resources like land and water. The state’s inability or unwillingness to crush the Punjab-based sectarian gangs, especially Sipah-e-Sahaba (Sunni) and Sipah-e-Mohammed (Shia) bolstered them to engage in bloody clashes for control over the Shia-dominated Parachinar. In April 2007 there was a clash in Parachinar among people linked with external sectarian organisations resulting in a soured relationship between the Shia and Sunni Pakhtuns in the town. In
November 2007 there was another clash in which many of the Sunni tribesmen, women and children were killed, their houses and businesses burnt and a number of them were made to flee Parachinar. They now live as IDPs in many parts of the NWFP in miserable conditions.

The Sunni IDPs informed me that many of them have not even been registered as IDPs in over two years. Those who have been registered have received meagre help in the form of cooking oil, wheat, sugar and blankets, and that too only a couple of times.

The IDPs expressed concern over last week’s news in an Urdu daily that the FATA secretariat has stopped all kinds of aid to the Parachinar IDPs. According to the IDPs, the only people approaching them with some promise of help were linked with jihadi groups. The IDP mothers that I am in contact with are terrified that the jihadis will take their children for suicide missions. Many of the IDP children have never been able to re-enter schools since they left Parachinar and have ended up in child labour. Parents are especially worried about teenage boys who they fear might end up committing crimes due to poverty and lack of any educational facilities.

Both the Pakhtun and Punjabi IDPs have requested the government to either offer them material help in their struggle for survival or restore the writ of the government in Parachinar so that they can go back. In the latter case they have also requested for some help from the government, as they have to restart their lives from scratch. Both complain that state authorities in the FATA secretariat, the government of NWFP, and the government of Punjab treat them with arrogance and contempt. The Pakhtun IDPs expressed their disappointment in the parliamentarians, especially the gentlemen from Kurram agency, namely Sajid Tori, Munir Orakzai and Rashid Ahmed Khan. Whereas these parliamentarians enjoy luxurious lives, go on visits abroad and educate their children in good schools, they never visit the IDPs to see how they struggle to survive or consider their children worthy of education, claim the IDPs.

Both Punjabi and Pakhtun IDPs were of the view that the media and the government of Pakistan offered sympathy, attention and help to the victims of bomb explosions in Karachi and Lahore and all they requested was the same meting out of treatment from both the media and the government. They constantly kept asking, “Are we not Pakistani?�

It is lamentable and even strange that the state has not been able to establish its writ in a small city like Parachinar in over two years. Why do we have a strong army that has not been able to kill sectarian terrorists massacring Sunnis, Shias, Pakhtuns and Punjabis in the Kurram agency?

According to many people of FATA, the state has deliberately created this chaos in their area to hide the jihadis from the Arab world, Central Asia, Europe and North America and, of course, from Pakistan and Afghanistan in pursuit of strategic depth in Afghanistan. The more the chaos in FATA and the rest of Pakhtunkhwa, the easier to deceive the world and hide these Islamists who love to kill in this world for a place in paradise in the hereafter. The more the people of FATA suffer, the more the chaos being generated. Thus the people of FATA — Pakhtun, Punjabi, Shia, Sunni, Sikh, Hindu and Christian — must suffer for an indefinite period until ‘strategic depth’ is attained in Afghanistan.

Moreover, through this column I would also like to challenge the international ‘scholars’ of the Pakhtun tribal culture who circulate around the ‘pedantic’ notion that whatever happened in Kurram agency is ‘tribalism’ rather than sectarianism, i.e. the Pakhtun tribal culture is the root cause of the massacre of the Shias and Sunnis in the area rather than the extreme versions of Sunni and Shia Islam, financed by the Arabs and Iranians, executed through the Punjab-based sectarian gangs and imposed on the helpless people of Kurram agency. I challenge them to elaborate how their ‘scholarly’ opinion explains the tragedy of the Punjabis in Parachinar! The Punjabis did not belong to any of the local tribes. They did not take sides with any of the tribes. They themselves admit they never felt threatened during the tribal clashes in the past but in November 2007 they were targeted just because they are Sunnis. They say they suffered because of
sectarianism rather than tribalism; tribalism, they say, has always protected them.

The writer is a research fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Research, University of Oslo and a member of Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy. She can be reached at bergen3
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010\01\16\story_16-1-2010_ pg3_5