Girls in a hostel in a school in Peshawar, sent there by parents defying Taliban threats to education. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Sep 13 2013 (IPS)

“I miss my mother and cry every night,” eight-year-old Afaq Ali tells IPS. He is a Class 5 student at the University Public School in Peshawar, capital of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the administrative centre for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) to its west.

Ali’s parents shifted him in 2010 from their village Pranghar in FATA’s Mohmand Agency to a school in Peshawar, 157 km away. The Taliban militants have since 2005 systematically destroyed 120 schools in this Pakistan district, one of the seven agencies that make up FATA on Afghanistan’s southeastern border.“It’s a massive sacrifice that I have allowed my 10-year-old daughter to stay in a hostel.” -- Gul Fam, a housewife from Aka Khel village in the FATA district

“I feel extremely bored and lonely because most of my classmates are from around here and stay at home with their parents,” adds Ali, his frame pencil-thin. “Because of this, I cannot study.”

Like Ali, there are many other homesick children in Peshawar’s schools whose families in FATA’s militancy-afflicted districts have had no alternative but to send them out to study.

Zareen Gul from the Dande Darpa Khel village in North Waziristan is unhappy about having to send his eight-year-old daughter Spogmay to a Peshawar school. A cobbler by profession, he travels 200 km to the city every month to see her.

“It was a very hard decision for us to send Spogmay to Peshawar because we miss her very much,” her mother Reshma tells IPS.

“The Taliban militants are responsible for our woes. We want education for our children, but they just don’t allow it,” says Gul. So, even though it wrenches his heart, he is determined to send his daughter to school.

Studying in Class 3 at the Umar Farooq Public School in Peshawar, Spogmay herself says she has loving teachers and good friends at school and in the hostel but they cannot replace her parents. “I love my father, mother and sisters,” she tells IPS. “Living away from them is difficult. But I will study because that’s what my parents want.”

Peshawar has a total of 5,000 schools, 2,000 of them in the private sector. These are already overburdened with local students. “The hostels are finding it hard to house more students,” says Saleem Khan, warden of the Turangzai hostel at the Islamia Collegiate School in Peshawar.

Rooms meant for two people are being allotted to four students, he says. “The situation is becoming increasingly difficult as more students arrive from FATA every year.”

Muhammad Fakhr Alam, a Peshawar-based education officer, says they had registered about 20,000 students from FATA for admission to schools in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2012. “About 90 percent of the students from FATA live in hostels,” he tells IPS.

There are, however, about 10 percent children from FATA whose parents have taken up rented accommodation in Peshawar for the sake of their wards’ education, Alam adds.

The Taliban militants, says Akhtar Rasool, deputy director of the education department in FATA, have destroyed 766 schools in the region till date. This has deprived almost 80,000 children, mostly girls, of education.

“Those who can afford it send their children to Peshawar and other adjacent districts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa,” Rasool tells IPS. The bulk of the children stay back, without a school to go to.

Any initial sympathy the Taliban might have attracted when they were hounded out of Afghanistan in 2001 and forced to cross the 2,400-km porous border into Pakistan has long turned into anger.

“We are repentant over the hospitality we extended to Taliban and their Al-Qaeda friends when they came to seek refuge here,” says Salamat Gul, 50, a cloth merchant in the Ghareebabad village of Bajaur Agency, the smallest of FATA’s districts, located in the north.

The Taliban have destroyed 115 schools here. “They are hell-bent on depriving our children of education,” says Salamat Gul.

Twelve children from his family, including his two sons and daughter as well as nine nephews and nieces, are in Peshawar schools, he tells IPS.

Salamat Gul has travelled 120 km to Peshawar to get two of his nephews examined by doctors. They were both running a fever, and their families were extremely anxious on this account, he says. “There’s no one to take care of them at the hostel,” he tells IPS, as he waits outside the Peshawar Model School for his nephews to come out.

The Pakistan government, with financial assistance from the United States Agency for International Development, started building 130 schools in FATA in 2010 to ensure that students get back to school. “We have also contacted other donor agencies to rebuild the Taliban-damaged schools as soon as possible,” says Rasool.

Meanwhile those who are sending their children away think of it as a necessary sacrifice for their children to get educated. “It’s a massive sacrifice that I have allowed my 10-year-old daughter to stay in a hostel,” says Gul Fam, a housewife from Aka Khel village in Khyber Agency, the FATA district west of Peshawar and said to be its most literate.

Fam’s daughter Javeria Bibi is a Class 2 student at the University Model School in Peshawar and lives in a boarding house nearby. “She is very good in studies,” the proud mother tells IPS. “And not just that, she also takes part in sports and extracurricular activities.”

Fam has made a 150-km journey to Peshawar to attend the annual day function at her daughter’s school where she too was participating.

Fam now hopes that their sacrifices will bear fruit and her daughter will grow up to be an educationist who can help spread education back home. “Without education, the people of FATA cannot progress,” she says. That realisation is a battle half-won.

Rio de Janeiro march in defence of religious freedom. Credit: Media Gospel

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 19 2012 (IPS)

The Brazilian Commission for Combating Religious Intolerance (CCIR) condemned the film “Innocence of Muslims” as “disrespectful” of the prophet Mohammed, and organised a mass protest demanding respect for freedom of religion in this country.

The organisation “repudiates any manifestation of scorn for beliefs or lack of respect for what is sacred to religions,” says a communiqué issued by the CCIR, an ecumenical group whose members include the Israelite Federation of Rio de Janeiro, the Espírita Umbandista congregation, Protestant and Catholic churches, and Muslim, Candomblé, Buddhist, Roma or gypsy, and indigenous groups.

“The CCIR also stresses that it does not support violent stances, and that as a result of coexistence with the followers of Islam, it affirms the seriousness and respect that Muslims have for the preaching of love, religiosity and the values that help build a better world,” it adds.

The film, produced in the United States by groups that have not yet been clearly identified, has also been repudiated by the U.S. government. It has triggered both peaceful and violent protests outside U.S. embassies in different countries around the world.

Segments of the film posted on the internet portray Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, as a violent, corrupt, homosexual, philandering child abuser.

“It is a highly offensive film that gratuitously offends Mohammed, depicts Muslims as barbarians and incites hatred,” Sami Isbelle, a member of the Muslim Beneficent Society of Rio de Janeiro, told IPS.

The Society, which forms part of the CCIR, also condemned the “un-Islamic” reactions to the film.

According to Isbelle, the reaction should have been expressed “through peaceful, legal channels,” for example, with media campaigns “showing who the prophet Mohammed was and explaining his legacy to humanity.”

That route is being taken by the CCIR, which emerged in 2008 with the initial aim of defending religions of African origin from attacks, mainly by groups linked to neo-Pentecostal churches.

On Sunday Sept. 16, an estimated 200,000 people from 25 different religious groups gathered on Rio’s Copacabana beach in a march in defence of religious freedom, organised by the CCIR.

The demonstrators called for an end to prejudice and violence against followers of other faiths, and called on the candidates running for mayor in the October elections to express a commitment to religious diversity.

They also expressed their solidarity with the followers of Islam, in the face of the backlash against the movie.

“No religion should be disrespected,” Maria Isabel Carvalho, who practices Candomblé, one of the religions of African origin in Brazil, told IPS.

“Any offensive expression against a religion must be fought,” Catholic priest
Leonardo Holtz told IPS.

He mentioned a case in Brazil that he said was similar to the situation surrounding “Innocence of Muslims”.

That case involved “The Second Son of God”, a film planned by comedian Antônio Renato Aragão, which he decided not to make given the reaction from Catholic and evangelical groups.

In the planned film, the comedian was to play a supposed second son of God who would come to the world to complete Jesus’s failed mission.

In this country of 192 million people, which has the largest number of Catholics in the world, that religion has gradually lost followers in the face of the growth of the neo-Pentecostal churches and the number of agnostics and atheists.

The census shows the proportion of Catholics fell from 93 percent of the population in 1960 to 65 percent in 2010.

Evangelicals, on the other hand, grew from four percent of the population in 1960 to 22 percent in 2010. Most of them belong to neo-Pentecostal faiths, like the Assembly of God or the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.

The proportion of people without any religion expanded from 0.6 to eight percent between 1960 and 2010.

And in 2010, two percent of the population declared themselves “spiritists” and 0.31 percent said they were followers of Umbanda and Candomblé, although those who practice these faiths say they are under-represented in the census.

Although religions with African roots are recognised in Brazil as an important component of the national identity, those who practice Umbanda and Candomblé are still the victims of prejudice and attacks.

CCIR spokesman Ricardo Rubim told IPS that the organisation has received 118 complains of religious intolerance, some of which have involved attacks on Umbanda and Candomblé places of worship.

To raise awareness about such prejudices, in 2007 the left-wing government of Luiz
Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) established a National Day of the Fight against Religious Intolerance, on Jan. 21.

Since then, different Afro-Brazilian groups have been pushing for approval of a national plan to fight intolerance, the enforcement of laws that promote respect for their faiths, and political guarantees and reparations for these groups, to ensure freedom of worship as established by the constitution.

The government’s Special Secretariat on Policies for the Promotion of Racial Equality is in charge of working for such measures, and of registering all of the country’s Umbanda and Candomblé centres of worships and groups.

At the launch of a helpline for women in Peshawar. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan , Sep 7 2012 (IPS)

Samina Afridi, a lecturer at the University of Peshawar, regrets that down history the leaders of the Pashtun (also Pakhtun) tribes have conspired to keep them away from education and literacy. The Taliban are only the latest example.

“Education was a soft target through 19th and 20th centuries. The only thing that has changed in more recent times is the modus operandi used to scare people away from schools,” Afridi, a gender specialist, tells IPS.

Pashtun tribes straddle the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and number about 40 million. Their traditional homelands extend from Oxus river in Afghanistan to the Indus river to include Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

Afridi says Pashtun tribesmen have been made to believe that sending children to schools is a sure way to invite the wrath of Allah. “Systematic campaigns against education have deeply impressed the gullible tribal population,” she said.

Pashtun leaders often get clerics to urge their congregations to stay clear of modern education as proof being true Muslims.

A proverb in the Pashto language, designed to create revulsion for literacy, goes thus:  Sabaq Da Madrase waye, Dapara Da Paise Waye Jannat Ke Be Zai Na We, Dozah Ke Ba Ghoopoay Wye  (Those who study in schools are for money. They will not find a place in paradise, but will sink in hell).

Former KP lawmaker Nasreen Khattak says that even in times of peace – rare in the Pashtun homeland – no serious effort has ever been made to promote education. The people of the FATA were neglected even during the relatively benign British rule over the territory.

“The Taliban militants have the worst record as enemies of education because their systematic efforts to dismantle education by blowing up schools with explosives have proved a real setback to education,” said Khattak.

In a campaign against education that began in 2005, Taliban militants have destroyed about 700 schools in KP and the FATA. The Tehreek Taliban Pakistan and other jihadist groups operating in the tribal areas proudly claim responsibility for destroying schools and disrupting education.

“The anti-literacy campaign launched by Taliban militants has deprived more than 20,000 students of a chance get educated and kept the literacy rate in these territories at about 22 percent against the national literacy rate of 54 percent,” Khattak said.

Girls have been the worst victims and in areas under Taliban influence there is no concept of female education, Khattak said. “Taliban militants, according to their own interpretation of Islam, regard educating women as un-Islamic.”

The provincial governments of KP and the FATA have been doing a fire-fighting job by setting up tents as makeshift classrooms.

“We feel let down at the government’s apathy towards the declining educational infrastructure, but realise its helplessness,” says Shahabuddin Khan, a businessman from the Safi area of the FATA’s Mohmand Agency where not a single school building has been left standing.

Now living in Peshawar, capital of KP province, Khan says he and his family members, including three daughters and two sons, feel homesick but cannot go back for fear of having to deprive their children of formal education.

But, very few FATA families can afford to move to Peshawar just to educate their kids. Unsettled conditions spilling over the border with Afghanistan, over the last 25 years, have all but destroyed the economic base of the Pashtuns – agriculture, forests and livestock.

“The Pashtuns have sunk into poverty and many cannot afford to educate their children even if they wanted to,” Sitara Ayaz, KP women development minister, told IPS.

One answer to the problem would be to mainstream women into national politics, she says. “If we invest in educating women in the FATA we can reap dividends.”

But, that is easier said than done. “There is not a single woman leader or politician in the whole of the FATA, while half of the territory’s 10 million people are women,” Ayaz argues.

The federal government is aware of the problems in FATA but lacks resources to find solution. “We have been urging the international community to help rebuild Taliban-damaged girls schools in FATA,” Ayaz said.

Shagufta Malik, another female lawmaker from the KP, says that women in FATA were, in living memory, modern and liberal. “Things changed dramatically when the Taliban appeared on the scene.”

“We remember that the women of the FATA would shake hands with their male guests and cover their heads only with a simple chadar (shawl),” Malik said. “Now they cannot be seen in public unless they are in burqa (completely enveloping outer garment).”

Afridi at Peshawar University says that except in FATA, women in four provincial assemblies, one Lower (National Assembly) and Upper House of Parliament (Senate), have 33 percent representation. “There is not a single woman among the 16 parliamentarians from the FATA.”

Even in KP province, the literacy rate for women is only 30 percent, Afridi says. Over the years, discrimination against women has increased and they lag far behind men in education and have little chance of finding decent employment.

Akhunzada Muhammad Chittan, a lawmaker from FATA, says the government has launched several programmes aimed at encouraging women to take vocational training as a route to economic empowerment.

“More than six billion Pakistani rupees (63 million dollars) have been allocated for social welfare and women’s development in FATA,” Chittan told IPS.

Chittan says the government is aware of the problems faced by women in the FATA and firmly believes that the empowerment of women through basic education and literacy is the best route to a permanent, gender-friendly solution in the troubled territory.

Funeral in the Hazara graveyard in Quetta for victims of gunmen. Credit: Altaf Safdari/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Pakistan, Sep 6 2012 (IPS)

It will be no less than a miracle if Nadir Ali makes it to Australia, where he planned to seek asylum. But with each passing day, since his boat went missing over two months ago, hopes are dimming.

Ali, a 45-year-old Shia Hazara daily wage earner from Quetta in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, had reached Indonesia and boarded the boat from Jakarta on May 22, along with 24 others, most of them from the same community. But the boat lost contact soon after it hit the high seas, and has been missing for over two months.

“We were told that the sea was rough and the boat was too small,” said Qadir Nayel, Ali’s younger brother speaking to IPS over the phone from Quetta. “But because there is no news of them having drowned, we are hoping against hope.” Nayel said his brother paid over 10,000 dollars for the passage.

But why are Hazaras fleeing the country?

In what looks like a rerun of history, the Hazara Shias, with a population of around 956,000 (nearly 600,000 of whom live in Quetta alone), are being persecuted again in Pakistan because of their ethnicity and their history of conflict with Sunni Muslims.

Most of the world’s eight to 10 million Hazara people, easily recognisable by their Mongol-like features, live in Afghanistan. But some 120 years ago, many fled that country, where they were being persecuted by the dominant Sunni Pashtun tribes. In Pakistan they were well received, and some rose to important positions in the government.

Shias of all ethnicities account for about 20 percent of Pakistan’s Sunni-majority population of 180 million.

Hussain (name changed on request) lost five members of his family, including a maternal uncle, a widowed sister-in-law and her three children, when the boat they were travelling in was shipwrecked in high waters in the Indian Ocean in 2009.

“The last time my uncle spoke to me was before boarding the ship from Jakarta,” Hussain said. “He sounded very disturbed with the arrangement. He said if he’d known, he would never have ventured out in the first place. By morning we got the news that their ship had gone under and all of them had perished.”

In recent years, scores of Hazara Shias have fled Balochistan in southwest Pakistan. There are significant communities of Hazara in Europe, Turkey and Australia.

While official statistics are hard to come by and people are afraid to give information, the exodus has been fuelled by the rise in target killings of members of this community.

According to Abdul Khaliq, chairman of the Hazara Democratic Party, over 25,000 Hazaras have left Pakistan in the last decade, the vast majority of them in the last three years. “I’d say over 1,000 people have perished while making the perilous journey,” he told IPS over the phone from Quetta.

He was referring to the most common route followed by the fleeing Hazara, who go to Indonesia legally and then try to sneak into Australia illegally.

Ali Dayan Hasan, Pakistan director of Human Rights Watch, told IPS that the Hazara have been reduced to a “ghetto existence in Quetta.”

“They can only go about their daily business at the risk of their lives. It is hardly surprising that members of the Hazara community are seeking political asylum in large numbers, and it would be a very cruel host state indeed that would deny them the same,” he added.

For his part, Hussain said “Nobody wants to leave their country willingly; who would want to leave family and friends and take on a journey we all know is fraught with danger, but we have been pushed to the wall.”

Since the beginning of the year, 47 Shia Hazaras have been killed in 21 separate incidents of violence, according to the South Asia Terrorist Portal (SATP). In 2011, 203 Shias were killed, including 27 Hazaras.

Lately, they have been identified, forced out of buses and vans, and killed. Ambreen Agha, a researcher with the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi, which manages the SATP, terms the killing of Hazaras a “sectarian issue.”

“Their Shia identity has posed a threat to their existence in a society that is marred by religious intolerance, the existence of extremist formations, and subsequent impunity that sectarian ‘murderers’ enjoy within the legal and political framework of Pakistan,” she told IPS by email. “Sectarianism adds to the chaotic spirit of Islamabad.”

This was corroborated by HRW’s Hasan. “Hazaras are being targeted as part of a broader exercise in targeting all Pakistani Shias, but it is equally true that the Hazara suffer from double jeopardy – being ethnically distinct in addition to being Shia.”

HRW’s research indicates that the banned Sunni militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) is behind the killings. “It claims responsibility for these attacks,” said Hasan.

In June 2011, LeJ warned the Hazaras: “…now jihad against the Shia Hazara has become our duty. We will rest only after hoisting the flag of true Islam on the land of the pure – Pakistan.”

To Agha it means a “total failure or collusion” of the state machinery with these militant organisations.

Hasan said “The state may or may not be complicit in the LeJ’s murderous actions, but independent observers believe that law enforcement and intelligence agencies are, at the very least, turning a blind eye.”

Agha, who has been researching Hazara issues since 2010, complained that the Pakistani state has never “mounted any effective resistance” or carried out a “sustained effort to dismantle the hard-core sectarian militant outfits” that have linkages with both the religious parties and the Pakistani establishment.

“Unless Islamabad abandons its policy of tolerance towards the sectarian religious parties and their militant counterparts, there is little hope that Hazara Shias will continue to live in peace within the poisoned territorial boundaries of Pakistan,” she maintained.

Meanwhile, thousands of asylum-seekers from Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, many of whom belong to the Hazara community, have been trying to reach Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean – Australia’s closest point to Indonesia – in rickety, overcrowded vessels. Since late 2009, more than 600 people have died in the attempt to make it to the island.

In August, the Australian parliament tried to make changes in its immigration policy to deter asylum-seekers by deporting them to offshore detention centres. The move met with strong criticism from rights groups.

“It’s a big ocean; it’s a dangerous ocean,” said Prime Minister Julia Gillard. “We’ve seen too many people lose their lives trying to make the journey to Australia.” She had proposed sending asylum-seekers to Malaysia for processing, but the plan was rejected by Australia’s highest court.