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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