January 22, 2006	Sunday	Zilhaj 21, 1426

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ISLAMABAD, Jan 21: An organization which objects to the name of the Bhasha Dam has demanded that the royalty of the dam should be paid to Northern Areas and not to NWFP because the water reservoir to be created by the dam would lie entirely in Diamer District of Gilgit-Baltistan.

Talking to Dawn here on Friday the chairman of the Bhasha Dam Naam Namanzoor Committee, Haji Ghandal Shah, alleged that the government named the dam after Bhasha, which lies in NWFP, to contrive a justification for paying the royalty to the Frontier province.

The proper name would have been Diamer Dam after the region where the project would submerge more than 30 villages and displace over 40,000 people, he said, alleging that “the conspiracy of usurping the rights of Northern Areas” went back to the time when Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao was the minister for water and power and Kashmir Affairs and Northern Areas.

Mr Shah claimed that in the original design the power house of the dam was located in Northern Areas territory. But Mr Sherpao moved the power plant’s site to NWFP by tampering the original design in order to stake the claim of NWFP on the royalty, he alleged.

“Why should the government name the dam after Bhasha when it is to be constructed in Northern Areas? I don’t know why the government went for denying the rights of NAs and favour another province at its cost,” he said.

Mr Shah warned that the people of Gilgit-Baltistan were united against “this heinous conspiracy”.

They would never accept such blatant and gross violations of their rights by any province, he said appealing to the people of NWFP to back the people of Northern Areas in their struggle to secure their due share in the mega project.

The people of NAs had no objection to the construction of the dam at the proposed site, but it should be named Diamer dam, not Bhasha dam, he said.

He accused the government of resorting to ‘white lies’ in providing the data about the dam. It was wrong for the government to claim that the dam’s 37,000-acre reservoir would submerge just 1,600 acres of agricultural land. The submerge area would stretch from the dam site up to Raikot Bridge in the Northern Areas.

People of the area had long rejected the government rule, called Nautor Rule, which declared that all the land lying fallow in the dam area be considered as government land, he said. As the government had been preparing the feasibility of the so-called Bhasha dam since 1984, he said, it implemented the rule to appropriate the lands in the area.

Nevertheless the land belonged to the people of NAs who knew how to defend their land against encroachment “in case they were not compensated according to the market price”, he warned.

The dam, he claimed, would “totally eliminate thousands of years old archaeological sites in Chilas besides residential and commercial areas”.

Sindh Chief Minister Dr Arbab Ghulam Rahim had threatened the government with resignation over the Kalabagh Dam issue, he said wondering “why the members of the Northern Areas Legislative Council are sitting dumb and deaf”.

He criticized the Deputy Chief Executive of Northern Areas Legislative Council, Mir Ghazanfar, for welcoming the government decision in haste rather then voicing for the rights of the region.

Mr Shah asked the deputy chief executive to resign his post if he was not able and ready to defend the rights of the people of Gilgit and Baltistan.

In reply to a question, Mr Shah said, NAs was not a part of Pakistan but an autonomous region.

Poverty was rampant in Gilgit-Baltistan because of the oppressive policies of the government of Pakistan, he said, asserting that the people of NAs were not against the Pakistan but government policies which were “pushing them against the wall”.