05 September 2004	Sunday	19 Rajab 1425

KARACHI, Sept 4: The government's military operation in the tribal areas came under scrutiny in the fifth international workshop on "Human Security: Global and Regional Perspectives", organized by Department of International Relations, University of Karachi.

The moot concluded here on Saturday after deliberating on militancy and terrorism, possibility of water becoming the source of conflict, sectarianism, and increasing threat to the media.

Ms Huma Naz discussed the ideological tug-of-war on ways of organizing the Pakistani polity that had adversely impacted on human security.

The state, she said, had become more interventionist and established its primacy over civil society both under military dictatorship and civilian highhandedness.

In the context of national versus human security, Saleem Shah of the SDPI, Islamabad, deliberated upon the impact of a separate legal system for Fata which empowered the authorities to detain innocent members of any suspected tribe, or lay siege to an entire village.

Under this law, the government had the sole right to demolish houses, arrest, detain and imprison people without any rhyme or reason.

He also discussed the March 16 deployment of more than 30,000 Pakistani military and paramilitary personnel in South Waziristan, to capture, kill or flush out Al Qaida and Taliban remnants from the area.

At present, "close to 70,000 regular and paramilitary personnel have been mobilised by Islamabad along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border". This strength was four times the number of invading US troops in the bordering Afghanistan. His contention was that hundreds of civilians had been killed since then and hundreds of houses demolished or raised to ground during aerial bombardments.

Consequently more than 30,000 residents of Wana and Shakai areas had been displaced and a large number of people were missing.

In addition, the entire area "remains under crippling economic blockade" imposed by the state on its own citizen since June 12, he said.

His contention was that the already fragile human security situation in the tribal belt had been further weakened and marginalized to secure national security and achieve foreign policy's objective.

Zehra Afaq Siddiqui deliberated on the negative impact of feudalism on human security, and development and evolution of democratic dispensation. In this context, she also referred to the various land reforms in the country.

She was of the view that rights to life, liberty, and security of person have remained vulnerable in Pakistan, at the hands of both the state and non-state parties despite constitutional guarantees.

The curse of sectarianism was the subject of Dr Mahtab Ali Shah's paper in which he argued that it was a phenomenon that was closely connected with parochialism, extremism and militarism.

Its emergence and proliferation "poses deadly threats to the safety and security of the individual(s) within a state and destabilizes it."

Nizamuddin Siddiqui deliberated on the problems faced by the media and presented details of trends in violence against Pakistani journalists.

He also discussed the treatment given to various news items by Pakistan's leading newspapers, especially those concerning crime and terrorism.

The insecurity caused by ethnicity in the country's provinces was the subject matter of Munizeh Zuberi's paper in which the frequent outbreak of federal, provincial and inter-provincial crises such as the one-unit act, the Pakhtun-Baloch struggle for maximum autonomy and the Urdu controversy in Sindh "continue to disturb the federal equilibrium."

She observed that in Pakistan, where the dominant ethnic group controlled the highly centralized garrison state structure, the rise of provincial power centres was not allowed at all. Nor was the dominant ethnic group prepared for any meaningful power-sharing arrangement with the regional majorities.

Miran Gichki discussed federalism and why there was a need for a federal system of governance in a state like Pakistan.