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Forced For Veil

By Aftab Alexander Mughal

23 October, 2007
Countercurrents.org

On Sept 8, a two-page Urdu circular was issued to a Catholic-run Public High School, Sangota in Swat, part of Pakistan’s north-west area where Taliban’s are active, by the Janisaran-i-Islam (JI, sacrifices of Islam), accusing the school administration of involving students in adultery, forcibly converting students. The school’s strength is 950 student, 99 per cent of them are Muslims. Moreover, the circular warned to replace the Christian staff with Muslims within seven days, or else face suicide attacks. It was also demanded by the pro-Taliban group that all girl students should wear burqa (veil). It is also accusing its administration of encouraging un-Islamic behavior. Shehar Bano Khan reported in daily Dawn, “The persecution of 1,000 Christians, a part of the 1.5 million population of the Swat Valley, forcing them to proselytize or face death.”
Ironically, the District Education Officer (DEO) accepted the demand of the militants and issued a notice requiring female students in Swat district to wear burqa. This notice also published in the local newspapers on Sept. 25. The Christian girls’ school in Swat, 250 kilometers north of Islamabad, closed on Sept. 10, after the letter warned catholic women religious congregation, who runs the school, to close the "factory of Christians" or face suicide attacks. The letter was sent to Swat Press Club, and local newspapers published it on Sept. 9. The letter further demanded to fire all Christian and male teachers by Sept. 17. The NCJP, a minority rights organization, reported that the extremists also told parents to withdraw their girls and place them in Islamic schools.
Due to the terror, all other girls’ schools in the area were also closed down at least for a week. The Christian school, started in 1962, was reopened on Sept. 17 after the local administration assured the school authorities for protection. Several policemen were deployed for the safety of the school but only half of the students turned up. While other did not show-up due to panic. The situation of a Christian family, who is running a summer camp in Swat, shows the intensity of the pressure by the militants in the area. The militants approached to the camp guard, who is a Muslim, and asked him to quit his job because he should not work for Christians. Due to dread, the Christians living in Swat area are unable to move freely and run their shops or businesses.
It is not only the Christian school in Swat faced a hostile situation but other Christian schools in North Frontier Province (NWFP), along with Afghanistan border, also feeling the same threat because the militants are very active in many parts of the province. “Christians of NWFP say that extremists from the Taliban movement, which ruled most of Afghanistan from 1995 to 2001, have targeted them in recent months,” Compass Direct reported.
Extremists in Swat and other parts of the province have been conducting a campaign to Islamize the province and northern areas and attacking everything which they feel is un-Islamic. According to a report, in another incident St. John Bosco Model School, a Christian elementary school in Bannu, west of Peshawar, capital of NWFP, was bombed on Sept. 15. The blast destroyed the small church’s windows and furniture, leaving a hole in the side of a classroom wall. ”The so-called ‘banned outfits,’ which the Musharraf government should have gotten rid of but not, have started a new campaign of threats through letters to Christians in Charsadda in the NWFP and Shantinagar near Multan in Punjab. The campaign is now three months old and has the Christians panicking without any hope of the government coming to their help,” Daily Time says in an editorial on Sept. 28, 2007. The government seemed unable to control the militant groups, who have been controlling the different areas in the province and making people’s lives miserable. They are attacking on CD, video shops, barber shops, girls’ schools, offices of the non-governmental organization (NGOs) and killing innocent citizens to terrorize people to accept their authority. On Sept 26, in Islamabad leading civil society organizations threatened to halt their operations throughout the country if the government failed to stem the increasing number of attacks on NGOs by extremists in the NWFP.
Buildings of two adjacent girls' schools were damaged by a powerful blast in the Swat district Sept. 30 night. More than 100 girls' schools were closed down in northwest Pakistan following the murder of a female teacher by suspected pro-Taliban militants in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. Female teachers responded by closing down all the girls' schools in the in agency. A female teacher was shot dead on Sept. 30 in the Mohmand Agency in what appeared to be the fulfillment of threats of reprisals by Islamic extremists if teachers did not start wearing head-to-toe veils, the Dawn news channel reported.

Janisaran-i-Islam is part of the banned pro-Taliban Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Mohammadi (TSNM, movement for the enforcement of Islamic law), headed by Maulana Fazlullah, 28, who openly acknowledges Mulla Omar, the Taliban leader, as his ‘amir’. The Taliban believe in a strict interpretation of Islamic law. Executions in public, women fully cover and not permit education. Men should have beard, and light entertainment, like music, television and film, must be stopped.

The valley of Swat once used to be called Pakistan's Switzerland and would draw a large number of tourists, especially from within the country, but that has all changed. It has fallen to the extremists and large swathes of it seem as if they are in the control of Taliban sympathizers.

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