By ZoneAsia-PkResidents of North Waziristan were made to leave their lives behind as they fled from aircrafts bombing their hometown. Almost half a million locals look forward to makeshift arrangements and little more than the infamous web of false promises that the government often lays out to camouflage its incompetency and mismanagement.
It comes as no surprise that the government has as yet failed to accommodate and provide for a majority of the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). There is a clear shortage of food and water. Aid distribution centers are overcrowded. Many of the IDPs currently reside in nearly torn down schools and damaged buildings if they’re lucky, otherwise, there is little choice but to occupy charpoys out in the open at a time when temperatures are exceeding 40 degrees C.
Extremist and religious organizations, however, are cashing in on the government’s vulnerabilities; they have been given a chance to brainwash the IDP population and consequently incorporate fresh recruits.
Extremist religious organizations like the Jamaatud Dawa (JuD) are operating freely. The JuD alone has over 200 volunteers across Banu working to aid the IDPs. They have distributed more than 112,000 food packets and provided medical help for over 10,000 patients. This is certainly a golden opportunity to sway opinion in their favor and extremist organizations are not holding back. The Jamaatud Dawa is notorious as the front face of the world’s largest and most powerful terrorist groups. However, the government seems to have taken little notice of this issue. While it’s busy wiping out certain terrorists it is also allowing for more to grow. This might be due to a failure on the government’s part to recognize this issue as a growing threat or it could be sheer carelessness. If eliminating terrorism is number one on the government’s agenda and the sole purpose of conducting Zarb-e-Azb then the government should be taking action against it on all fronts. Abandoning the IDPs and letting them get influenced by terrorist ideals now is perhaps even worse than letting them be in North Waziristan surrounded by the same ideals.
The minority Christians and Hindus IDPs perhaps have it even worse. About 500 individuals among this minority claim that they were living quite peacefully in North Waziristan alongside the Taliban and never felt any more threatened by the Taliban than by their Muslim neighbors. However, as IDPs they feel victim to a strong and obvious prejudice. There is a lack of available government aid for such minority communities with reports of facing trouble in even accessing the available food aid. While aid distribution camps are available minority communities complain of being outnumbered.
As IDPs struggle to get access to the basic necessities of life, the Punjab government is caught up in plans of its own. It comes as a severe shock that given the current situation, the federal government has recently announced that it will provide laptops to these IDPs. An astonishing number of 10,000 laptops will be provided to talented students and an additional 25,000 to deserving ones as per the Prime Minister’s Youth Program. Certainly, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s Central Information Secretary, Shireen Mazari spoke for the majority when she called this idea “ridiculous”. Even if we disregard the most basic objection regarding the impact of this misallocation of already limited resources on the government’s budget and the IDPs’s unmet ‘needs’, how the Punjab government expects these laptops to function without electricity is worth considering. The majority of IDPs do not have access to electricity. For the minority IDPs that have access to electricity provision is limited to only certain hours of the day. Nonetheless, what the current events demand is not a focus on the ‘wants’ of the IDPs but the ‘needs’. Unless these laptops are made to quench the thirst or satisfy the hunger of the starving IDPs the urgency with which such an initiative is being looked into by the government right now is almost incomprehensible.
These IDPs comprise the most vulnerable section of our population. They have left the comfort of their homes in the hope of a better future. It is the government’s duty to offer sanctuary to them and provide for their ‘needs’ indiscriminately. Allowing them to fall prey to the agenda of the Taliban is not something that the country can afford.
