The uprooted ask: Is shelter a human right too?

Allah Rakha wonders whether he violated human rights by providing shelter to his family on unutilised land.

RAWALPINDI: As the world observes Human Rights Day, Allah Rakha wonders whether he violated any principles of humanity by providing shelter to his family on a small, unutilised piece of land.

A homeless man, Allah Rakha was hardly a teenager when his family along with dozens of others were dislocated from Lahore. That was 36 years ago. Now a middle-aged man, he is shelterless once again.

The Rawalpindi Auqaf authorities evicted his family along with 400 other households from the tents and mud houses of the Katchi Abadi that had been their home for years.

Unaware of the basic human right to shelter, seven-year-old Akram, the elder son of Allah Rakha, was on the move with other children of the slum settlement after being evicted, but not before four minors succumbed to the December cold.

“We did not know we were illegal occupants of government land until November 28 when Member National Assembly (MNA) Hanif Abbasi came to inaugurate a water supply tank adjacent to our slums. The next morning, police and Auqaf officials came and pulled down our tents and mud dwellings,” said a group of men from the slum.

Waiting for the tractor trolley to shift his household to Khanna Pul, Allah Rakha’s was the last tent of the 400 families living there just a day before. The vacated 40 kanals land was quickly taken over by the Auqaf (Muslim) Department. “The slum people were illegally occupying the land where the government planned to build a hospital and a police station,” claimed MNA Hanif Abbasi talking to The Express Tribune.

Muhammad Aslam, a resident of the slum, wondered why the government did not touch the concrete houses built on the Auqaf land just opposite to the slum. “They were spared because a majority of them were from the Abbasi clan and were registered voters while the slum people were not,” alleged Yaseen Khan, himself a resident of the houses built on the Auqaf land. He said they had obtained registries (ownership rights) for the houses whereas Auqaf land could neither be sold out nor gifted or transferred. It could only be leased. How could the residents of these houses manage to get the registries to own houses on Auqaf land was a mystery. The MNA could only promise similar action against the pucca houses once the land had been demarcated and taken possession of.

It may be recalled that the Punjab government had ordered the demolition of some high-rise plazas built on government land but the orders were soon reversed on the plea that razing down revenue-earning plazas was not wise. So those properties were regularised. But when it came to regularising the slums, the city administration had a ready-made rationale: “The area where these gypsies were living was not recorded as a slum in our records, therefore it was encroachment,” said Commissioner Saeed, adding they needed the encroached land for development projects.

Both Abbasi and Saeed maintained that the operation to get the land vacated had failed and the ‘gypsies’ had voluntarily moved from the plot. But the slum dwellers claimed that they had been threatened their tents will be set on fire if they did not vacate.

Allah Rakha’s long trek to find a permanent home has begun once again. But he is not certain if he will ever get one in his own country.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 10^th, 2010.