An elderly displaced man carries a sack of rations on his shoulder in northern Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Mar 10 2015 (IPS)

A doctor shakes his head in despair as he examines a 10-year-old child at the Jalozai refugee camp, about 35 km by road from Peshawar, capital of Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province.

“He is severely malnourished,” Dr. Zeeshan Khan tells IPS. “He is vulnerable to diseases like diarrhoea, and other infections.”

“Back home we had agricultural land, which produced enough food for us. We used to sell our surplus grain and vegetables for an income, but now we are becoming beggars." -- Shah Faisal, a refugee from Khyber Agency in northern Pakistan
Identifying the problem is about all the doctor can do. In this camp, there are too many refugees and too little food. Until that situation changes, kids like little Ahmed Ali will continue to feel the pangs of hunger, and the creeping fear of illnesses that his body is too weak to fight off.

Ali came to Jalozai with his family last year, when Operation Khyber-1, a government-led military offensive in their native Khyber Agency, part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), forced thousands to flee for their lives.

Ali, together with his parents and siblings, has now joined the ranks of some three million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in northern Pakistan, forced out of their towns and villages over the course of a decade: first by militant groups operating in this remote tribal belt that borders Afghanistan, and – more recently – by Pakistan’s armed forces, as they carry out a determined campaign against designated terrorist groups in the area.

One such offensive code-named Operation Zarb-e-Azab began last June, with the military focusing its firepower on the 11,585-square-km North Waziristan Agency where militants have operated with impunity since crossing over the Afghan border in 2001.

Launched in response to the deadly June 2014 terror attack on the Karachi International Airport, the operation has been hardest on civilians.

An estimated 900,000 people were displaced last year, nearly all of whom took refuge in Bannu, an ancient city of the KP province where ‘tent cities’ were erected to house some 90,000 families.

Each fresh wave of displacement has put more pressure on the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government to feed, heal and shelter thousands of newly uprooted citizens, while simultaneously tending to some 2.1 million ‘permanent’ refugees who have fled the various agencies of FATA since the Taliban and other militant groups claimed the region as a base of operations in 2001.

Meeting the needs of such an enormous refugee population has put tremendous strain on the government.

Provincial Disaster Management Authority Spokesman Adil Khan says that each family receives a monthly allocation of 90 kg of wheat, one kg of tea leaves, five kg of sugar, two kg of rice and two litres of oil in order to alleviate extreme hunger.

But most households IPS spoke with, in camps across the northern province, say this isn’t enough for families comprised, on average, of 10 or more people.

In Bannu, for instance, there are still 454,000 displaced persons, despite robust efforts to relocate families or unite them with their relatives in the area. According to the director-general of health for the KP province, Pervez Kamal, more than 15 percent of the remaining IDPs were malnourished as of January 2015.

“The foodstuffs we get aren’t sufficient to feed my 10-member family,” says Darwaish Gul, a former resident of FATA’s Bajuar Agency, who now resides in a camp in Bannu.

“Back home, we were farmers, growing our own food,” the 60-year-old refugee tells IPS. “We always had enough grain, vegetables and fruits. Now, we have only one meal a day, and always go to sleep hungry.”

The government has refuted such claims, insisting that its emergency aid and food rations are sufficient to feed every hungry mouth in the camps.

But a United Nations report released in the summer of 2014 pointed out that 31 percent of IDPs didn’t receive relief supplies or food items since they lacked computerised national identity cards.

Army officers stand opposite displaced families as they collect their monthly allocation of food supplies in northern Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Of the refugees who arrived from North Waziristan alone, over 15 percent did not qualify for food aid. These included displaced families who had no male members (seven percent), families headed by children (four percent) and families headed by people with disabilities, or elderly persons (five percent).

The situation was compounded by the fact that many of the displaced from North Waziristan trekked for miles in 45-degree Celsius heat to reach Bannu. Scores collapsed along the way, and those who made it safely were severely malnourished, dehydrated or otherwise weakened by the journey.

With limited food and medical supplies, thousands have not fully recovered from the ordeal. They are in need of specialised care, but only the most basic services exist to meet their many needs.

Iqbal Afridi, the FATA representative of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), an opposition political party, tells IPS that the situation is “extremely precarious”, with scores of families either experiencing, or on the verge of, hunger.

He runs an association of affected people, and last November he led a contingent of IDPs from Bara, a township in the Khyber Agency, to the Peshawar Press Club to protest – among other things – the lack of medical supplies, inadequate food rations for the displaced, and miserable – if not non-existent – water and sanitation facilities, which has enabled the spread of diseases.

Others say they just want to expedite government clearance from the camps so they can return to their homes. Nearly every week, groups of IDPs protest in Peshawar, either through marches or sit-ins, always condemning the lack of resources allocated to their basic survival.

“We have been demanding early repatriation to our ancestral homes as our lives have become miserable,” Shah Faisal, a refugee from Khyber Agency now living in a camp in KP, tells IPS. “We left our home for the sake of peace but peace is still elusive.

“Back home, we had agricultural land, which produced enough food for us. We used to sell our surplus grain and vegetables for an income, but now we are becoming beggars,” he contends.

IDPs in northern Pakistan wait in line for rations at a refugee camp in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Some experts say a health crisis is not far off. Jawadullah Khan, a doctor who has worked extensively with refugees in the Bannu and elsewhere, tells IPS that people here are badly in need of balanced diets, and clean water.

“We have been trying our level best to provide the best healthcare facilities to the displaced population as they are more vulnerable to diseases,” he says.

In Jalozai refugee camp, which houses families from five out of FATA’s seven tribal agencies, Ahmed Ali has finished with the doctor and is walking back to his tent. Until the government of Pakistan comes up with a national strategy to deal with its displaced population, this little boy will have no respite from hunger.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Some voters waited in line for up to eight hours to cast their ballots on May 11. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim, Irfan Ahmed, and Ashfaq Yusufzai
LAHORE, May 13 2013 (IPS)

Flanked by loyalists, friends, journalists and excited family members, former Pakistani premier Mian Nawaz Sharif, head of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N), seemed relaxed on the night of the May 11 general elections.

With a remote control in his hand, he sat back on a soft leather sofa in the heavily guarded executive room of the party’s headquarters in Model Town, Lahore, and scanned TV channels to find the most current results.

Outside, hundreds of raucous PML-N supporters, crowded around giant screens erected for the public, cheered loudly every time a favourable result was announced.

The party and its loyalists had good reason to celebrate. Before the night was over, it was clear that the PML-N had won an overwhelming number of votes in Punjab, the country’s most populous province, which accounts for 148 out of 272 National Assembly seats.

By Monday morning, though several provinces’ votes had yet to be counted, congratulations for the prime minister-in-waiting had already come in from neighbouring India, and from Pakistan’s closest western ally, the United States.

Watershed moment

This past weekend’s elections marked a watershed moment in Pakistan’s history. Accustomed to long periods of military rule, generally imposed via coup d’état, the country has not experienced a proper democratic transition since 1962.

This year, fears were running high that the Taliban would follow through on its May 1 warning that it would bomb all the polling stations to prove its disdain for the “system of infidels, which is called democracy.”

The lead-up to Election Day was marred by violence, with 121 people lying dead by the time campaigning closed 48 hours ahead of voting.

In Karachi, tensions between rival groups like the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), led by former cricket legend Imran Khan, hung thick in the air, with analysts predicting bloody skirmishes at polling stations.

The caretaker government, meanwhile, dispatched over 70,000 troops onto the streets to ensure that peace and order prevailed.

The day began with a bomb blast in eastern Karachi’s Landhi area, killing 11 and injuring over 40. Despite this initial tragedy, it quickly became clear that the mood among the people was not one of violence and terror, but of enthusiasm and camaraderie.

Defying all threats by the Taliban and intimidation by armed political activists, voters came out in droves, determined to cast their ballots.

The Election Commission of Pakistan reported a voter turnout of 62 to 70 percent, the highest ever in this country of over 170 million.

Heartening sights such as a man being carried into a polling booth on a stretcher caused people to “burst out in applause,” tweeted Kamal Siddiqi, editor of the English daily ‘Express Tribune’.

Indeed, many of those out on the streets said they were casting the vote for the very first time. “I had never bothered before; but this time I am completely mobilised,” a woman in her early fifties, waiting patiently in a long queue in a school-turned-polling station in the affluent Clifton area, told IPS.

Not far away, in Karachi’s Defence Housing Authority, 48-year old homemaker Tarrannum Lakda was frustrated by the eight-hour wait to cast her vote but she refused to call it a day – she wanted her voice to be counted in this historic election, she told IPS.

Still, the voting process was not without its flaws.

As Lakda stood in the sun, the presiding election officer ventured out to inform the waiting citizens that the ballot papers, boxes, voter lists and stamps had still not arrived.

Similar hold-ups were experienced across the city. Analysts and election observers have blamed the MQM for engineering delays in a bid to deter the PTI’s urban youth base, many of them first-time voters, drawn to Khan’s condemnation of drone strikes in the country’s tribal belt and his vow to end corruption.

Various sources told IPS that pre-poll rigging had begun the night before.

“My mother is a government teacher in a school in Bufferzone (an MQM stronghold) who was appointed to report for election duty,” a youth living in the area told IPS under condition of anonymity. “But on Election Day she was informed not to report for duty as she would be replaced by someone else.”

Other anomalies included MQM members entering the Nazimabad area and confiscating students’ identity cards, or “forcing residents to vote for them”, a local student who did not want to be named told IPS.

Five religious parties – the Jamaat-i-Islami, Sunni Tehrik, Jamiat Ulema-i-Pakistan, the Sunni Ittehad Council and the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (Haqiqi) – pulled out of the race on Saturday, alluding to “irregularities and poll rigging” in Karachi. For its part, the MQM also “boycotted” the polls in a few constituencies, citing the very same reasons.

Across Pakistan, election violence claimed a total of 38 lives, with over 150 injured.

Taliban stronghold takes a turn

While rival parties battled it out in the southern Sindh province, and Sharif and his supporters basked in their glory in the eastern Punjab province, it was the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province that really expressed a desire for change.

Devastated by the ongoing militancy and fed up with living under the Taliban’s boot, KP residents turned out in droves, buoyed by the presence of scores of PTI workers on the streets, monitoring the poll stations, encouraging voters to come out of their homes, and generally livening up a process that had promised to be, at best, dull and at worst deadly.

Unlike in previous election years, plenty of women were seen at polling stations in cities like Mardan and Peshawar.

By the end of the day the PTI had bagged 32 out of a total of 124 seats, becoming the largest political party in the province. Many senior politicians like ANP Chief Asfandyar Wali Khan, former KP Chief Minister Ameer Khan Hoti and former Federal Minister Ameer Madam lost to new candidates fielded by the PTI.

Though the party suffered huge defeats in Pakistan’s three other provinces and at the federal level, PTI activists flooded the streets and held processions in KP’s capital Peshawar to celebrate their victory in the north.

The climate was much less joyful in the adjacent Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where most people failed to cast votes for the region’s 12 National Assembly seats.

The PTI is now poised to form a provincial government in the violence-wracked northwest with the Jamaat-i-Islam, though Khan has announced his intention to go into opposition at a national level.

According to Al Jazeera English, Khan said Sunday that the mark of a strong democracy is a “strong opposition”, which has been missing in Pakistan for ten years.

Looking ahead

Analysts say Pakistan must now look beyond the elections, and its prime minister-in-waiting must set his eyes on the many challenges that lie ahead, such as tackling terrorism and solving the energy crisis that has crippled the country: according to some estimates, Pakistan faces a shortfall of more than 7,000 megwatts, or 40 percent of total electricity demand.

Salman Abid, a political analyst based in Lahore, told IPS that relations with the United States and Afghanistan in the context of NATO’s withdrawal in 2014, peace talks with the Taliban, relations with India, increasing foreign investment and solving unemployment will be the new government’s priorities.

“The victory in elections may be a milestone,” he said, but the party has a long way to go before reaching its desired destination.

Tanvir Shahzad, a Lahore-based journalist, stressed that the PML-N must not fail to deliver its promises on incorporating youth into the country’s development, reducing poverty and ending load shedding.

*Irfan Ahmed contributed to this report from Lahore, Zofeen Ebrahim from Karachi and Ashfaq Yusufzai from Peshawar.

Twenty-five-year-old Syed Hasan, a doctor practicing in a private hospital in Lahore, plans to spend most of May 11, Pakistan’s long-awaited Election Day, in bed.

Members of the minority Ahmadi community in Pakistan say they have been disenfranchised by the country’s election laws. Credit: Adil Siddiqi/IPS

A member of the Ahmadiyya faith, Hasan has promised to boycott the impending elections on the grounds that his community of roughly four million has been disenfranchised.

Ever since the constitution branded them non-Muslims, Ahmadis — who believe that the 19^th century cleric Mirza Ghulam Ahmad is the messiah promised by God – have been amongst the most persistently persecuted minorities in Pakistan.

This discrimination is felt deeply at the ballot box, where Ahmadis are compelled to register their votes under a separate category from other residents and thus accept the status of non-Muslim, in violation of their religious identity, Amjad M. Khan, president of the U.S.-based Ahmadiyya Muslim Lawyers Association, told IPS in an email.

According to Hasan, “If we want to vote as Pakistani Muslims, which we consider ourselves to be, we have to denounce the Ahmadi community and our spiritual leader, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, as a false prophet,” a move he is not prepared to make.

He told IPS his faith is more important to him than casting a vote.

Though the choice is a clear one for many Ahmadis, civil society leaders and even conscientious political parties worry about what the boycott means for democracy in this country of 170 million, where hopes for a “free and fair election” have been running high ahead of the May 11 polls.

For Adnan Rehmat, chief of the influential Islamabad-based media development organisation ‘Intermedia’, “If 200,000 adult Ahmadis cannot vote because the…laws disenfranchise them…it means the elections are technically neither free nor fair” and indicates that something is “seriously amiss” at the core of the state’s functioning.

“Ahmadis…are discriminated against at a level that’s unprecedented, even in our own chequered history,” Pakistani novelist and journalist Mohammad Hanif told IPS, adding that forcing Ahmadis to mislabel themselves at the ballot box is “much worse than disenfranchising people – it’s more like taking their humanity away”.

Decades of discrimination

From its inception in 1947 until Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq took over as military dictator in 1985, Pakistan has had a joint electorate system that allowed all citizens equal right to elect political candidates of their choice, irrespective of religious leanings.

In a bid to “Islamise” Pakistan, Zia-ul-Haq ordered a separate system for what he called non-Muslims who could only vote for five percent of the parliament seats allocated to them.

The system has effectively robbed the community of political representation, preventing Ahmadis from rising to prominent posts within the government or even finding employment in state institutions like the police force.

In 2002, attempting to appease hard-line Islamists, former President Pervez Musharraf issued Executive Order No. 15, which mandated that Ahmadis be registered on a “supplementary voter roll”, a move Khan says is “anathema to Islamic justice”.

Since then, he said, successive governments have been wilfully blind to Pakistan’s “voter apartheid”, violating Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to which Pakistan has been a signatory since 2008.

Although some see this discrimination as a purely political issue, for Ahmadis it is a matter of life or death. Legal loopholes allow religious extremists to lash out at the minority community, while the country’s controversial anti-blasphemy laws pave the way for further intolerance.

Last month, the Jamaat-i-Ahmadiyya (Ahmadi Movement) issued its annual report for 2012, stating that 19 members of the community were killed last year; in total an estimated 226 Ahmadis have been killed in sectarian violence since 1984.

Almost three years ago, on May 28, 2010, 94 members of this community were massacred in their mosques during the Friday congregation in the eastern city of Lahore. Not a single perpetrator has yet been brought to justice.

This year, the opposition Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), led by former cricket star Imran Khan, has taken up the cudgels on behalf of the persecuted minority. PTI Spokesperson Zohair Ashir told IPS his party considered all Pakistani citizens equal under the law.

“It’s a shame that past governments did not rectify the many injustices and inequalities in the system,” he said, adding that, if it comes to power, PTI will “address all such issues in an expeditious manner”.

He stopped short of specifying what concrete steps would be taken to ensure Ahmadi participation in the political sphere, admitting, “It is hypothetical at this stage to determine what legislative measures need to be taken and when. Fixing the economy and energy crisis and fighting terrorism are areas of immediate and high priority for us.”

Few believe the upcoming election will bring any changes.

Speaking to IPS over the phone from Chenab Nagar, a city in the Punjab province where 95 percent of the 70,0000 residents are Ahmadis, a 37-year-old Ahmadi journalist named Aamir Mehmood said he “cannot think of any politician or party that has the courage to initiate a debate and scrap these discriminatory laws in our country which are used against the minorities”.

As Election Day draws near, groups and individuals acting to protect the “sanctity of Prophet Muhammad” have been vocal about their approval of discriminatory election laws and their disdain for the scheduled boycott.

“If they (Ahmadis) want to reverse this decision (the 2002 executive order), they must take the route of the courts and the parliament,” Qasim Farooqi, spokesperson of the proscribed sectarian outfit Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat (ASWJ) told IPS.

“Boycotting is not the answer,” said Farooqi. “Voting is important, the Ahmadis must play their role — by not participating in the elections, they are only making the country weak,” he stressed.

The simmering tension bodes badly for Ahmadis, who sooner or later will be forced to bear the brunt of Islamists’ wrath. Last month, seven Ahmadis were booked on various charges including “defiling the Holy Quran” and “calling themselves Muslims”. They were also accused of printing and distributing “blasphemous” literature in the form of the community’s newspaper, ‘Al-Fazal’.

Community leaders said that the paper, one of the oldest in Pakistan, was only distributed within their community.