Call for resolving conflicts through mediation

Karachi
With a focus on inculcating - in the society at large - peaceful ideas to resolve conflicts, the Sustainable Peace and Development Organisation (SPADO) in collaboration with the National Centre for Dispute Resolution (NCRD) on Tuesday organised a workshop for community elders, religious leaders, political activists and police residing in the city’s troubled neighbourhoods.
The workshop, tiled ‘Strengthening Alternative Dispute Resolution Mechanism in Karachi’, was aimed at making people aware of various tactics of mediation in order to decrease the number of and the severity of disputes in the areas; residents of Hazrat Bilal Colony, Gulzar Colony and Sharafi Goth also participated in the workshop.
Referring to the country’s growing intolerance, NCRD’s chief operating officer Ebrahim Saifuddin said, “Cases of domestic violence, property and monetary issues have been on the rise in lower-income neighbourhoods of the metropolis.” With a lack of awareness about arbitration among the residents, the situations usually tend to get unmanageable, the officer added.
He opined that people needed to resolve such issues on a community level rather than getting FIRs registered against each other.
Aazia Rafiq, SPADO programme manager said the organisation had so far trained at least 75 people in three phases. “They can now play an effective role in decreasing conflicts and disputes at the grass-roots level,” she said.
Workshops had also been carried out in Sultanabad, Hijrat Colony and Pak Jamhoriya Colony.
A participant of the workshop and a prayer leader of a local mosque in Bilal Colony, Maulana Faizur Rehman Abid, said most of the disputes in his locality, which comprised of Pashtun, Hazara, Punjabi, Sindhi, Bengali and Baloch communities, were mostly about family matters such as marriages, disputes over land and small businesses.
“Only people belonging to tribal areas prefer resolving their problems, financial or family issues, through the Jirga system since they don’t prefer going to police stations and courts,” he said.