Govt asked to restore old status of merged districts

BARA: A jirga here on Friday asked the government to restore the previous status of the tribal districts.

Talking to The News after holding the jirga, its head Malik Mohammad Hussain Afridi said the government merged the ex-Fata with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa without the consent of the tribal population.

He said that the tribespeople were not taken into confidence before merging the tribal areas with KP.

The tribespeople, he said, were facing a host of issues after the Fata-KP merger.

He recalled that Father of the Nation, Quaid-e-Azam, had promised the tribesmen that no law would be imposed on them, adding that the merger was illegal and unlawful.

Malik Hussain said that targeted killings and lawlessness were on the rise in the tribal belt.

Another elder and former federal minister Malik Waris Khan Afridi maintained that the people of ex-Fata had already suffered due to militancy.

He said that the tribal people were displaced, their homes destroyed during militancy, but they were not compensated for the losses. Malik Waris maintained they had moved the Supreme Court against the merger of ex-Fata with KP. He also expressed resentment over the non-release of the promised funds to execute uplift projects in the merged districts.