Walking the tightrope

By: Rahimullah Yusufzai

ANP has been trying to bring peace to NWFP by talking to Swati militants, though not without criticism

There was a time when the secular and nationalist Awami National Party loathed the Taliban, both Afghan and Pakistani, and termed them a creation of Pakistan's military establishment. But that was when the party was in the opposition.

As any pragmatic ruling party would do, the ANP has been trying to adjust its policies in line with ground realities upon coming to power in the NWFP after the Feb 18 elections. The ANP-led coalition government wasted no time to set up a six-member ministerial committee to organise a peace jirga and hold talks with the militants in Swat. After the first round of negotiations held at the delightfully named Fishing Hut government guesthouse by the scenic banks of river Swat at Chakdarra , the two sides agreed to a ceasefire.

The next round of talks in Peshawar, this time held at the royally named Shahi Mehmankhana, brought the militants and the ANP-led coalition government close to a proper peace accord. The mood was upbeat as the negotiators came out of the meeting room with the Swati militants led by Muslim Khan hiding their faces from cameras in keeping with their belief that picture-taking was un-Islamic and the ANP and PPP leaders keen to tell waiting print and television reporters that a breakthrough had been made in the negotiations. While the government side was discreet about the points of agreement during the talks, the militants' representatives highlighted the seven demands that they had made and claimed 70 per cent progress in the negotiations. Both sides hoped their next round of talks would prove decisive and bring them closer to an agreement.

Despite the claims of breakthrough in the peace talks and the heightened hopes among common people for return of normalcy in restive Swat, it would be naive to believe that a durable solution to the dispute could be found easily. The Pakistan Army would have to decide how far it can go to accommodate the militants' demand for withdrawal of all its troops from Swat. More than 20,000 soldiers have been operating in Swat since Nov 4 last year when the military started taking action against the militants led by rebel cleric Maulana Fazlullah after the failure of the paramilitary Frontier Corps to check the growing violence. A statement by Major General Nasser Janjua, commander of the troops in Swat, before the start of the NWFP government's peace initiative was meaningful. He said that Maulana Fazlullah would have to lay down arms and face trial in a court when asked about amnesty to the maverick cleric and his followers. It remains to be seen if the military would now change its stance and allow the provincial government to announce a general amnesty or insist on excluding some from the list of militants who could be forgiven as part of the reconciliation process. It is possible that the military would let the ruling political parties shoulder the responsibility of tackling the problem and restoring peace in the conflict-hit tribal and settled areas of NWFP.

The ANP-led provincial government has already given in to the demand by the militants for enforcement of an amendment form of the Nizam-i-Adl Regulation 1999 in Swat and elsewhere in the erstwhile Malakand division. This law was itself an amended form of the Shariah Ordiance promulgated in 1994 to appease the followers of the Tanzim Nifaz Shariat-i-Mohammadi (TNSM) founder Maulana Sufi Mohammad following their uprising against the state in Swat in particular and in other parts of Malakand region in general. Subsequently, Sufi Mohammad expressed dissatisfaction with the Shariah laws put into practice and accused the then PPP-led government of shortchanging by merely renaming the courts as Qazi Courts and the judges as Qazis! While Sufi Mohammad was in jail after his arrest in Dec 2001 for taking several thousand ill-equipped and poorly trained of his followers on his Afghanistan misadventure to fight on the side of the Afghan Taliban against the US-led coalition forces, his son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah took over leadership of the TNSM in Swat and started campaigning aggressively for enforcement of proper Shariah. Though the NWFP government recently freed Sufi Mohammad and signed an agreement with him in the hope of using his influence to pacify the militants, it soon realised that he doesn't have much influence in Swat. Therefore, it began talking to 32-year old Fazlullah's followers and the talks are now on course leading to a decisive phase.

Matters have been compounded by the fact that Fazlullah's faction of TNSM is now part of the Baitullah Mahsud-led Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and it would have to seek guidance from the South Waziristan-based Taliban commander while finalising a deal with the NWFP government. On his part, Baitullah Mahsud is also negotiating with the PPP-headed federal government and the army and the two sides on May 14 started a prisoners' swap as part of confidence-building measures prior to a new peace agreement. Security checkpoints on roads in the area have also been dismantled or are no longer manned by regular soldiers. In the next stage, the army would withdraw troops from the Mahsud tribal territory in South Waziristan. He is also demanding pullout of troops from Swat and Darra Adamkhel, payment of compensation to tribal families that suffered human and material losses in military operations. Any deal with Swati militants would have to be blessed by Baitullah Mahsud and the TTP as he came to the help of Fazlullah's men when they were fighting the military in Swat.

Apart from enforcement of Shariah, other Swat-specific demands of the militants are an end to roadside military checkpoints, release of all those arrested as a result of the army's operations and compensation to families that suffered human and material losses during the fighting. The militants also want the government not to ban Fazlullah's FM radio channel, which he used to spread his religious and political messages and is even now able to occasionally use to communicate with his men and the people of Swat. Another demand is return of Fazlullah's headquarters comprising a mosque and madrassa in his village, Mamdheray, near Mingora in Swat so that he could resume his activities there.

Though the NWFP government is mum about the extent of its willingness to accept these demands, the negotiating team sent by Fazlullah was claiming that the ANP and PPP leaders who talked to them were willing to accede to their terms. However, the militants' leader Muslim Khan said the government had to show independence and come out of the control of the US and President General (r) Pervez Musharraf if it wanted to conclude a durable peace accord with them. In fact, the militants during their Peshawar talks distributed copies of a long TTP statement which bitterly criticised the US and Musharraf and held them responsible for the suffering of Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It accused President Bush's administration of occupying Islamic countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq and killing innocent Muslims. It blamed Musharraf for facilitating the US invasion of Afghanistan to topple the Taliban regime and allowing the Americans to bomb Pakistani villages in FATA. The statement even pledged to put Musharraf on trial for committing excesses against the people.

The hardline stance of the Swati militants could land the ANP-PPP coalition government in trouble. The latter would have to accept most demands of the militants in a bid to pacify them and bring peace and stability to Swat. The ANP in particular is hard pressed to make Swat peaceful after having won seven out of the eight NWFP Assembly seats from Swat. It also won one of the two National Assembly seats from the Swat, the other going to the PPP. Ironically, the ANP is being criticised from all sides, ranging from the religious parties JUI-F and JI to Pakhtun nationalists in Mahmud Khan Achakzai's PMAP, which accused it of appeasing Taliban militants despite the fact that they had beheaded opponents and forcibly tried to enforce Shariah in their areas. Criticism also came from the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, which expressed concern over the ANP-led provincial government's policy of giving concessions to militants engaged in terrorising civilians, bombing girls' schools, NGOs offices and businesses and warned that this would encourage others to raise arms against the state and manage a bargaining position. Ironically, the leading ANP negotiator in the talks with militants was Afrasiyab Khattak, who is a former chairman of the HRCP.