Issuance of official documents: Students from North Waziristan demand withdrawal of ban

Threaten to hold protests in educational institutes nationwide a week from now.

PESHAWAR:

Students from the North Waziristan Agency (NWA) will hold countrywide protests if the bans on the issuance of Computerised National Identity Cards (CNICs) and domicile certificates are not lifted.

In a press conference at the Peshawar Press Club on Tuesday, the University of Peshawar Pakhtun Students’ Federation for North Waziristan also demanded that the government employees in the agency be paid their salaries.

Sohail Khan, a student, said the government should not make the people suffer for the Wazir and Dawar tribes’ ban on the entry of polio teams in the agency.

“Last month, polio workers were killed in Karachi, Charsadda and Peshawar but the government did not impose any such restrictions in those areas. We should be given the same facilities as the citizens of the rest of the country,” Khan said.

He urged the government to form a judiciary committee to probe into the shelling incident in Mir Ali that killed seven persons four days ago. He also asked that the bereaved families be compensated. The students said that if the government failed to solve their problems in a week, they would go on strike in all educational institutions across the country. They also condemned the killing of 18 tribesmen in Bara Khyber Agency and demanded the reopening of the Bara Bazaar.

On December 18 last year, the authorities had withdrawn services such as issuance of passports, CNICs, employment opportunities and development projects to Wazir and Dawar tribes in the agency as they had not allowed their children to be immunised against polio.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 23^rd, 2013.