Long Journey Back to Heaven

November 02, 2009

By Mustafa Qadri

The government has responded with its own brand of ruthlessness. Taliban fighters are not the only ones targeted. Family members, even those who played no part in the conflict, and others forced by circumstance to support the insurgents, have been killed. Key Taliban commanders who surrendered to authorities have only days later been found dead, with officials claiming they had never been in their custody in the first place. Corpses have been discovered floating down the rivers while others dangle from electricity poles with notes warning of dire consequences for the Taliban and its supporters. Some villagers claim that state security forces have even warned them against giving a Muslim burial to fallen Taliban fighters (in Islam the dead are supposed to be buried immediately). Others say that family members have been kidnapped by security forces and threatened with death if their militant relatives, currently in hiding, do not turn themselves over to the authorities.

And the army has been accused of arresting tribal Pashtuns not linked to the militancy simply because they belong to clans associated with the Taliban. They also stand accused of a widespread and systematic campaign of murder and intimidation of those perceived to be sympathetic to the Taliban. According to eyewitnesses and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, the Army and state paramilitaries have carried out reprisal killings on a mass scale.

Before the April offensive, some estimates placed the Taliban as occupying 11% of Pakistan, almost all of which was in the North-West Frontier Province and Federally Administered Tribal Areas that are presently the focus of military operations being conducted by Pakistan and US forces. Now the main districts of the Swat valley, including Mingora, are firmly under Army control. The government says it hopes to repatriate the displaced over the coming months, emboldened by a raft of aid packages from the United States and other foreign governments, as well as support from international institutions known as the Friends of a Democratic Pakistan.

The task ahead is massive. Many of their communities now lie in ruins. Hundreds of schools and hospitals have been destroyed by Taliban or Army bombardment. It is a trauma that many find too difficult to discuss openly. Some, like young schoolgirl Mannu, use song to express their grief.

My sweet land has caught fire,
Not just from one side but from everywhere.
The fire has engulfed everything,
Our people, our customs, our schools, our markets.
My beautiful land, with its valleys and peaks, its perfumed flowers,
All have lost their lustre.
In every direction there is war.
The people, who laughed, who sang, are now silent.
The once majestic and peaceful River Swat has dried up.
I pray to you God, bring back the paradise, the peaceful Swat I remember.

Emboldened by her recital, Mannu feels comfortable enough to express her thoughts about the situation in Swat. ‘The Taliban say they want sharia, but what kind of sharia is this–killing and looting? It’s just a game to them,’ she says. Mannu has dared to seek an education in a region of Swat where the Taliban openly forbade women from doing so. ‘I’m not afraid of going to school,’ she says defiantly when asked about her studies. Risking physical harm as the Taliban destroyed more than 200 schools, Mannu continued to attend one of the few schools that remained open before eventually fleeing with her family.

‘We’re not afraid because we are doing the right thing,’ says Ziauddin Yousufzai, a school teacher from Swat, when I asked him if he feared for his life when he chose to continue instructing both boys and girls after the Taliban issued death threats against him. ‘Islam tells us that getting an education is compulsory for every girl, wife, for every woman and man. This is the teaching of the holy Prophet. I own Islam as much as it is owned by the Taliban. Why I should I be dictated [to] by the Taliban, why should I follow the Taliban model of Islam? The Holy Koran is my book as well. I have a right to act on it. Allah hasn’t said to me that I must follow the Taliban type of Islam. So that is why it’s very clear and Islam allows me, Islam rather motivates me to give education to my children because education is light and ignorance is darkness. And we must go from darkness into light.’