After merger: Cops with FATA domicile to return ‘home’

Senior officials, cops fear move since they have spent decades in settled areas

PESHAWAR: As the government inches closer to merging the tribal areas with the settled areas, there is one more reason for cops from the tribal belt to smile: they will be able to go back home and make it a better place.

The Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) police have prepared a list of its employees who hail from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata). All of the department’s employees, who have a Fata domicile, will be transferred to their respective agencies in the tribal areas to police it once the merger is complete.

Reliable sources have told The Express Tribune that the entire exercise has been completed in secrecy because senior officials fear unrest among employees.



The primary reason for this was that most of the officers from Fata have settled in K-P for decades away from their ancestral villages. For them, senior officials believe, it would be hard to uproot their lives from the settled areas and move to the tribal belt.

“The basic aim of deploying such people in their respective tribal areas is to depute those policemen who are accustomed to local traditions and language, because most of the locals do not even speak Urdu while their Pashto dialect is totally different from that spoken in the remainder of K-P,” said a police official, adding that the department was aware that such a deployment will not be easy.

“Fata is not a developed place. We fear that it would not be easy for officers to live there in the absence of proper buildings, offices and residential areas,” he said while outlining the challenges the department expected officers to face.



He added an administrative network has never ever existed over such a scale in Fata and that the process of constructing the required support infrastructure such as police stations and other buildings would be a painfully slow process.

“But let us hope that the transfer of the locals would make it easier to bring these areas into the mainstream,” he added, adding that their transfer will not hurt policing efforts in K-P since the number of police employees with a Fata domicile was not large.

Meanwhile, a cop who hails from the troubled Tirah Valley, on the confluence of three major agencies of Fata including Khyber, Kurram and Orakzai, said that his family was as familiar with the tribal areas as any of their non-Fata-native neighbours.

“Going to Tirah is like going on a picnic in the summers after the construction of a road in recent years,” the officer said, adding that his family had been settled in Peshawar for at least two generations and he too rarely goes to Tirah.

He added that the environment in the tribal areas was not conducive to return with no power there and that every time they visited, his children and family wanted to return to their ‘home’ in Peshawar after spending a few days.

Yet, he believed that natives of the area should work in the police force.

“I think that every policeman should be bound to spend time in Fata because Fata is a large mountainous area and the number of tribesmen in the police force is quite low,” he argued.

“Did you know that during the search for tribesmen in Fata it was discovered that in one district, there were just nine tribesmen from South Waziristan – insufficient to even man a police station these days what to speak of controlling an entire agency where people have easy access to guns and they are not used to abiding by the law like the rest of the country,” the cop said.

“There are reports that a policy would be implemented for all government departments which means that all those government servants, who have a Fata domicile in any department, would be posted in Fata after the merger. They will form the initial set up until a permanent solution is found and new recruitments are made,” claimed the police official.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 24^th, 2018.