IDPs’ protest

The IDPs deserve not only to be heard but also relieved of the burden of injustice that the state has heaped upon them

If there is one group of people who are entirely justified in protesting about anything they might choose to protest about, it is the internally displaced persons (IDPs) from North Waziristan Agency. There is no universally agreed figure as to how many there are, but about a million would not seem to be far off the mark — and this is also the figure given by the government. For many they have, quite literally, lost everything. Their homes, their livestock and their crops that were standing when they left, in many cases all gone. Pictures of the shops and market places in the centre of towns in the Agency show wholesale devastation. Once thriving communities blasted to rubble. They have lost their dignity as well, going from self-reliance to beggary in a matter of days as they were forced to move out by the ongoing Zarb-e-Azb operation. Hundreds of thousands live in makeshift camps in and around Bannu, and on September 18 their frustrations came to a head in the form of a confrontation with the police on the Bannu-DI Khan road.

The complaints of the protesters were many but boiled down to a sense of having been abandoned and ignored by both the provincial and federal governments, despite the obvious and undeniable sacrifices they had made in the service of the state. They were also protesting against the prolonged power cuts in Bannu that is adding to their misery, and claimed that Wapda officials were deaf to their pleas. Some of the demonstrators agreed with the claims by the army that large areas of the Agency had been cleared of militants but there appeared to be no move to get the IDPs repatriated. The threat they made was to take their protest to the Parliament House in Islamabad and there stage a sit-in, presumably jockeying for space with the several thousand already camped there. There was brawling between the police and demonstrators and live rounds were fired into the air. The North Waziristan IDPs have much to justifiably complain about, and they deserve not only to be heard but also relieved of the burden of injustice that the state has heaped upon them.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 22^nd, 2014.

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