SWAT, Oct 29: Hundreds of people left their homes for relatively peaceful places amid a tenuous ceasefire between security forces and militants in the troubled areas around Mingora on Monday.
Burqa-clad women, with their children in toe, were seen wading through the cold waters of the Swat river which is serving as a divide between the security forces holding positions on elevated grounds and the equally entrenched militants on the other side.
A spokesman for the militants acknowledged that almost 60 per cent residents of Imam Dehri, the headquarters of Maulana Fazlullah, had left their homes for safe areas.
“Only men are staying behind to look after their belongings,” Muslim Khan told Dawn by phone from Imam Dehri. “What assurance could we have possibly given to the people against bombing and shelling,” he said.
There were also reports of people fleeing the embattled Matta and Kabal areas.
A district administration official said he had no idea how many people had been displaced due to violence and fear of another round of fighting in the once tourist hotspot of the country.
Both the district coordination officer and district police officer are finding themselves in the thick of things only days after they were posted in the area.
To make the matters worse, the administration is further handicapped by the absence of land revenue staff to help identify suitable places to shelter the displaced people.
“All that we can do is to look at the map. The land revenue staff are absent and we don’t know where to house the displaced people,” the official said. He also did not know if the district administration had enough tents for the displaced people.
“We don’t know if the ceasefire would hold. We hear that talks are going on between the militants and the government, but officially we have not been told anything”, the official said.
He said he had heard that the soft-spoken caretaker minister, Mohammad Ali Shah Bacha Lala was leading the government side in the talks.
Bacha Lala, who is from Swat, was not available for comments. An attendant at his home in Swat said he had left for some important meeting.
The militants’ spokesman said it was up to the government to decide whether to continue with the ceasefire and resolve the issues through talks.
He said the militants had retrieved the bodies of their two comrades killed in two days of violence and buried them. The government has claimed that the security forces killed 50 to 60 militants.
He said the militants wanted to hand over the bodies of over 20 security personnel to the government as part of the ceasefire agreement. But, he alleged, the security forces on the pretext of collecting the bodies of their men had sent in 16 truckloads of soldiers. “They wanted to take away the bodies by force and that’s something we will not allow. We are willing to hand over the bodies of their men, even carry them across the river.”
Reporters who visited the embattled zone spoke of between 20 and 25 bodies of security personnel lying around. Eight of the security personnel had been slaughtered.
Tension mounted and fears of another round of fighting arose with the failure of the talks over the handing over of the bodies. The militants said they would hand over the bodies of the security personnel killed last week after their 11 comrades captured by the authorities were handed over to them.
Local people said that security forces had made announcements on loudspeakers asking the people of Kot, Maglawar and Charbagh to vacate their homes and move to safe places, resulting in a large number of women and children scurrying through fields and orchards.
The population of the three villages is said to be between 20,000 and 25,000 but how many of them have left the areas remains unknown, although some media reports spoke of mass migration.
Meanwhile, Maulana Mohammad Alam of the defunct Tehrik Nifaz-i-Shariat Muhammadi (TNSM) convened his own ‘peace jirga’ at Bagh Dheri in Matta and warned the government of suicide bombings if the military was not pulled out of the area and Sharia was not enforced.
Militants’ spokesman Muslim Khan also demanded enforcement of the 1991 Sharia Regulation and release of defunct TNSM leader Maulana Sufi Mohammad.
Sufi Mohammad, who had led thousands of followers for ‘jihad’ in Afghanistan against the US invasion, has been behind bars since November 2001 and his son-in-law, Maulana Fazlullah, known for his preaching on self-operated FM radio, leads the organisation in Swat.
