Headquarters of Kolai-PalasJirga announces protest on April 9

MANSEHRA: A jirga of the various tribes of Kolai area have decreed to march on the Sair Ghaziabad area on April 9 if the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government doesn’t annual the notification of the district headquarters of the Kolai-Palas.

“The provincial government has declared Batara area as the district headquarters of Kolai-Palas when it bifurcated the Kohistan into three districts but Chief Minister Mahmood Khan annulled it and notified the Sair Ghazi Abad as its new headquarters, which is unacceptable to us,” former tehsil nazim Haji Amir Zada told the jirga in the Kolai area of Kolai-Palas district on Wednesday.

The jirga, which was attended by different tribes of the Kolai area, announced that they would not only march on Sair Ghazi Abad, the district headquarters of the Kolai-Palas district, nut would forcibly expel the deputy commissioners and heads of public sector departments.

“The former chief minister, Pervez Khattak, had declared the Batara area as the centre of the newly created district but Mehmood Khan annulled it and notified Sair Ghazi Abad as new headquarters in 2019 on the request of local MPA Mufti Obaidullah,” said Zada.

Another local elder, Haji Mohammad Iqbal, said that MPAs from Kohistan Didar Khan and Mufti Abdul Ghafar Shah refused to decide the fate of the district headquarters after the tribes of Palas didn’t accept them as mediators.

“ Chief Minister Mehmood Khan has recently constituted a committee of two local lawmakers to settle this issue amicably but they refused the mediation following Palas tribes didn’t accept them,” said Iqbal. He said that the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf governemmt was not taking serious measures to defuse the tension and address the issue in accordance with the wishes of people.