We spoke with families who were among the 3 million people displaced by the intense violence in the northwest area of Pakistan. Many identified themselves as poor people, with meager resources, who were alarmed and fearful about the possibility that, upon return, they would find their animals, crops, shops, and stores destroyed.
In October 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited with women students at a Pakistani university, a week after two suicide bombers had walked into their campus and, simultaneously, blown themselves up. Six people were killed. Twenty were injured. The students who met with Mrs. Clinton were mourning loss of life at their university. One of the students summed up frustration voiced by several of her colleagues, saying: “We don't need America, things were better before they came here.”
Since May of 2009, U.S. military and State Department officials have steadily urged Pakistan’s government to wage military offensives against insurgent groups--first in northern Pakistan, during the spring of 2009 and, since October 13, in South Waziristan. Militant attacks, launched as retaliations against Pakistani military offensives, have killed 250 civilians in October and another 100 during the first two weeks of November. Many of the attacks have been in urban areas targeting universities, markets, army headquarters, security facilities, NGO and UN workers, a bank, a consulate, police stations, and even the highly guarded office of a spy agency.
Details of the horrifying carnage caused by the suicide bombings and other attacks have filled Pakistani press reports. Less well known are the hardships and grievances borne by people who’ve fled villages and towns where the military offensives are waged. The Pakistani military doesn’t allow journalists to enter the battle zones. However, refugees fleeing the areas have reported fierce fighting and constant bombardment. Some allege that the homes of ordinary people have been bombed and that many thousands of people are still trapped in the battle zones, unable to leave and bereft of basic necessities.
Pakistan’s mountainous region of South Waziristan is home to 600,000 people. Some 350,000 have trekked through rough terrain, abandoning their homes, to register as refugees with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Many had already endured weeks of bombardment by artillery, Pakistani fighter jets, helicopters, and U.S. unmanned drones.
The Pentagon has been funneling money to Pakistan’s military, along with supplies. “We are doing everything within our power to assist Pakistan in improving its counterinsurgency capabilities,” Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Mark Wright told a Reuters correspondent. “U.S counterinsurgency funds put military assistance to Pakistan on a wartime footing, much like the way the United States supplies the security forces of Iraq and Afghanistan.” (Reuters, October 16, 2009)
Some refugees believe that Pakistan’s army acts intermittently against the Taliban just to keep U.S. aid flowing. “This fight [in South Waziristan] is for American dollars,” said Zahidullah Mehsud, a 19-year-old student, at a registration center for those displaced by the operation in Dera Ismail Khan. “The government always has some deal with the Taliban. It is ordinary people who suffer. This is all an ISI game.”* (Saeed Shah, McClatchy Newspapers, October 22, 2009)
As yet, little or no aid has been made available to 126,000 displaced people who are members of the Mehsud clan, which comprises a majority of the residents in the area of southern Waziristan now under attack. This has fueled further resentment. Weary refugees are crowding into the homes of ordinary Pakistanis from the same extended clan.
In late May of 2009, Voices for Creative Nonviolence formed a small delegation to visit Pakistan. We spoke with families who were among the 3 million people displaced by the intense violence in the northwest area of Pakistan. Many identified themselves as poor people, with meager resources, who were alarmed and fearful about the possibility that, upon return, they would find their animals, crops, shops, and stores destroyed. How would they make a living? How would they survive?
Reports of the UNHCR indicate that the nightmare fears have become reality for numerous families. An estimated 1 million people in the northwest remain displaced and in need of humanitarian assistance, according to a November 9 UNHCR report. “This includes some 88,000 people in 10 camps in NWFP (the Northwest Frontier Province), for whom UNHCR is currently preparing a package of extra relief supplies for winter.”
Reporting from a Pakistani field hospital run by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the BBC met with scores of victims wounded by land mine explosions. The father of a 14-year-old boy whose hands were blown off while he was playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance expressed anger over the government’s failure to remove the land mines before telling people it was safe to return. The father worked as a jeweler before the military offensive began, but after he and his family fled the fighting, his shop was looted; now he has no income, and his home was damaged in the shelling.
The BBC also reported that more than 200 corpses, believed to be bodies of suspected Taliban, were found across the valley in the weeks following the so-called successful conclusion of the military offensive. Pakistan’s independent Human Rights Commission has called for an investigation into reports of numerous extrajudicial killings and reprisals carried out by security forces.
Military offensives that promise to smash or eradicate “the bad guys” may accomplish short-term “successes” by locking up or killing armed resisters and promising that the military will provide peace and security. But military establishments aren't set up to address the long-term desperate grievances that afflict impoverished people and give rise to support for militant groups of resisters.
According to conservative estimates, 75 percent of Pakistan's population of 170 million lives on less than $2 a day. The majority of Pakistanis yearn for food security, clean water, a livelihood that can sustain their families, and education that will help their children break out of impoverishment. Young men who are jobless, shut out of education, are resentful of social structures that favor wealthy landowners and other elites and they are drawn to Taliban groups that promise a Robin Hood sort of redistribution. These Taliban groups have been dealt a temporary setback by the military offensive, but the fundamental problems of hunger, lack of clean water, illiteracy, and joblessness haven’t been tackled.
Meanwhile, U.S. drone attacks continue, in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Using “eyes in the skies” by piloting unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones), the U.S. analysts can see and attack suspected Taliban or Al Qaida fighters, along with anyone else who might happen to be in the vicinity. But the UAVs won't help us understand the acute need for humanitarian relief, diplomacy, negotiation, and dialogue in a region already overwhelmed by attacks, counterattacks, bloodshed, and death.
Nor will the drone surveillance help us understand the frustrated grief of young students who believe things were better before the Americans arrived.
*Inter Service Intelligence Directorate of Pakistan
Kathy Kelly is the Co-coordinator, Voices for Creative Nonviolence based in Chicago, Illinois. Continually involved in work to end war and occupation, she recently initiated the Peaceable Assembly Campaign. For more information, see the WAMM calendar and www.vcnv.org. |
