ANP rallies in favour of Fata-KP merger

Karachi
The Awami National Party gathered outside the Karachi Press Club on Monday to express solidarity with the participants of a rally from Peshawar to Islamabad organised by the Fata Siasi Ittehad - an alliance of key political parties demanding the merger of the country’s tribal areas with the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
Many activists of the ANP and its sister organisations, the National Youth Organisation (NYO) and the Pakhtun Students Federation (PkSF), gathered outside the press club carrying placards and banners inscribed with the slogans “Abolish the black law of the as Frontier Crimes Regulations”, “We support the 22nd Constitutional Amendment” and “Merge FATA with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa”.
The participants of the Fata Siasi Ittehad rally started from Peshawar and culminated outside the Parliament House in Islamabad on Monday.
The alliance comprises key political parties including the ANP, the Pakistan People’s Party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Qaumi Watan Party.
However, two political parties, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl and the Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party are not part of the alliance.
Noor Islam Safi, the NYO Sindh organiser from Mohmand Agency, said the government should merge the tribal region with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
“Practically, the tribal people are already dependent on the urban areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa for their health, education, commerce, transportation and other concerns,” Safi told The News.
Sher Afridi, a PkSF leader from Khyber Agency, said the misuse of the Frontier Crimes Regulations had made lives miserable for the people living in the tribal areas.
“The government must scrap the draconian FCR law once and for all so that peace can be restored in Fata,” he added.
He praised Fata parliamentarians for moving a constitutional bill for the merger the tribal areas with the province.
ANP leader Gul Afridi said the residents of Fata had honoured all the agreements they had signed with Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah and always remained loyal to the State.
However, he added, the successive governments had ignored Fata, resulting in the tribal areas remaining underdeveloped. He demanded that the 22nd Constitutional Amendment submitted by Fata parliamentarians must be passed immediately to give equal rights to the residents of the tribal areas.
‘No interest’
Thousands of people from Fata’s seven tribal agencies and six frontier regions are living in different Pashtun-populated neighbourhoods of the city. Most of them shifted in the 1970s as economic migrants.
However, in 2009, a large number of internally displaced persons of the Mehsud tribe migrated from South Waziristan to Karachi because of the military operation in their native areas.
Many residents of Karachi of Fata origin told The News that they were unaware of the protest in Islamabad for the merger of the tribal areas with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
They said most of them had severed their ties to their hometowns after migrating to the city four or five decades ago.
“My father had migrated to Karachi in 1960s and I was born here,” said Shakeel Mehsud, a student at the University of Karachi. “I am not interested in what’s happening in Fata.”
He said the residents of Karachi of Fata origin had their own issues to worry about and political parties should try to address them.
“The Pashtun parties based in Peshawar and Quetta have always used Karachi’s Pashtuns for their own interests but never raised their voice to address their issues,” he added.
Manan Baacha, a Karachi-based Pashtun intellectual, said Pashtuns in the city, whether they belonged to Fata or Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, were facing many issues but no political party had expressed its interest to alleviate their woes.
“Non-issuance of national identity cards; lack of basic civic facilities including safe drinking water, sewerage system, schools, dispensaries and playgrounds; and harassment at the hands of the law enforcement agencies are some of the key problems being faced by the residents of Fata origin in the city,” Baacha told The News. He noted that there was a rising trend among Karachi’s Pashtuns to participate in the city’s politics.
‘Imperialist forces’
ANP leader Shahi Syed told The News that boundaries drawn by imperialist forces to divide the Pashtuns needed to be removed.
“The status of Fata needs to be changed in accordance with the will of the people living there and their tribal leaders,” he added.
“It’s not in our interest to keep Fata in isolation. It’s for the people of Fata to decide as to whether they want the tribal areas to become a separate province or merged with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.”