A fraught return

Fata Disaster Management Authority is reporting over 70 per cent of those displaced have now returned to their homes

The people that live in the agencies that make up Fata have had a difficult time in recent years. Almost half a million families have been uprooted by military action associated with Operation Zarb-e-Azb, and decanted into miserable, poorly resourced camps in and around Peshawar. They lost their flocks in many instances, their homes in many others and the towns they had as their social and economic hubs have been reduced to rubble. And then the rubble was bombed for good measure. As the military operation to rid the area of terrorists and extremists proceeded and was completed, families began to be repatriated, a process that is now far advanced, though more so in some areas than others.

The Fata Disaster Management Authority is reporting that over 70 per cent of those displaced have now returned to their homes. Repatriation in Bajaur and Mohmand Agencies is complete. All families that have been repatriated have had their identities verified by NADRA and received the paltry sum of Rs25,000, which is hardly a financial foundation to rebuild lives and livelihoods. Less than 50 per cent of families from North and South Waziristan have made it back home and ‘combing’ operations are ongoing — and here lies the rub. Welcome as these figures are they tell us nothing about how those who were internally displaced are themselves to be deradicalised, there being considerable anger within those populations that they were uprooted in the first place. It must be remembered that it was these same displaced populations within which extremist and terrorist groups and individuals had their homes — and considerable support beyond the purely coercive. There does not appear to have been any countervailing narrative created that might have persuaded these people otherwise in their time as displaced persons. There is a very real possibility that extremism will again take hold in a generation of young people who are unlikely to have been impressed by Zarb-e-Azb. By all means push to repatriate after Eid, but not into a vacuum because that is, as the saying goes — just asking for trouble.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 25^th, 2016.

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