Okara tenants will organise ‘decisive’ march after harvest

Tenants advised to choose their leaders from among themselves.

OKARA:

Tenants of military farms across the Punjab will march towards the chief minister’s house after they are done with harvest of wheat crop and will not return until the government has granted them ownership rights to the lands their families had been tilling, Anjuman Mazareen Punjab general secretary Mehr Sattar said on Wednesday.

Sattar was speaking at an All Punjab tenants’ convention held in memory of three tenants killed in 2009 allegedly by men hired by a retired military official, who had a plot of land allotted in his name in Kulyana Estate in 28/2R village in Okara.

Sattar and other speakers including AMP Okara president Baba Khushi Muhamad, Labour Party Pakistan president Farooq Tariq condemned a group within the AMP for organising marches ‘without any preparation or consultation with the parent body’.

They said such actions could undermine the 10 year old struggle of the tenants all over the province. Referring to the police crackdown on the recent protest march by tenants in Khanewal, they said this was bound to happen if the tenants started taking out rallies in such small numbers.

AMP and LPP would also field joint candidates in the next general election from every constituency that had millitary farms, said Farooq Tariq. He urged the tenants to end all contacts with the Pakistan Peoples Party and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz. “You have established your own organisation with its base in the villages of Okara. You no longer need to depend upon the ruling parties. Elect your representatives from within your own people,” he suggested.

Earlier, AMP’s Probinabad chapter president Shabbir Sajid said the PPP and PML-N leaders were the biggest obstacles the tenants faced in getting ownership rights to the land they tilled. He said PPP’s Manzoor Wattoo in a recent meeting at his residence had assured that he would solve the issue in two weeks. He said Wattoo had also promised to arrange a meeting between the AMP and President Zardari. He added that Wattoo had since that day not contacted him again.

Amir Ali, Baba Abdul Rehman and Abbas Ali had been shot dead in Satgarha village on April 6,2009.

Nazar Muhammad, Amir Ali’s brother, told The Express Tribune that the three were leading a group of around 40 tenants going to Satgarha to negotiate the release of fellow villager, Muhammad Ashraf. He said Ashraf had been kidnapped by Roshan Shah and Haji Barkat and their accomplices. Shah and Barkat, Muhammad said, had a poor reputation and were allegedly hired by an allottee of a plot in Kulyana Estate to harass Ashraf, the tenant cultivating the said plot, and make him vacate it. Muhammad said the case was still pending before a sessions court. Shah and Barkat, however, were in Satgarha police’s custody after they were denied bail.

“We lost three of our bravest men but the April 6, 2009 incident has sent a clear message to the allottees,” he said. He said the tenants would not surrender their right to the land at any cost. Ashraf was released after the incident and had been cultivating the same plot of land.

Military farms in Okara are spread over 17,013 acres. Of these, 5,000 acres are cultivated by the military officials. Besides Kulayna and Probinabad estates where land has been allotted to retired officers, the rest of these farms are possessed by the military and cultivated by locals.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, April 8^th, 2011.