January 27, 2008	Sunday	Muharram 17, 1429

PESHAWAR, Jan 26: Speakers at a seminar here on Saturday opposed the use of force by the various governments, their surrogate outfits in the form of religious militias and tribal warlords operating in different parts of the South Asian states.

The one-day seminar on the growing militancy in the Frontier province was organised by the World Social Forum here at the Peshawar Press Club to denounce the war-like situation in Waziristan, Khyber, Bajaur agencies and Swat, where tribesmen had been caught in an inconclusive war between militants groups and security forces.

The speakers observed that the ongoing bloodshed in different tribal agencies and settled districts was a byproduct of the ten years long Afghan war. They said the so-called war on terrorism had inflicted more miseries on the peaceful tribesmen.

Speaking on the principles, scope and targets of the WSF, noted leftist politician and standing committee member of the forum, Syed Mukhtar Ali Bacha, said the forum was an open front, which had emerged as a global counter force to the imperialism.

He said that WSF was not an international political party, but it was a platform which had welcomed the political activists and radical groups, who were struggling for the rights of women, minorities, environments, media people and other marginalised groups across the globe. Mr Bacha said every state chapter of the WSF had been authorised to launch a peaceful struggle against the imperialism and its lackeys in their own particular objective conditions.

He said militancy and its abolition was the main target of the Pakhtunkhwa chapter of the forum. He said after the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and bi-polar world, the oppressed and downtrodden of the world were left with no choice, but to cave in to the naked exploitation of the world resources by the multinational corporations. In 2000, he said, some dissidents emerged on the horizon of the Latin America who challenged the exploitation of poor nations by the imperialism.

They founded the WSF and organised its three successive annual gatherings in Brazil and rejected the stance of World Economic Forum, a club of capitalist countries, he added. Dr Sarfaraz Ahmed, another member of WSF standing committee, said that the forum had provided a platform to the dissident voices across the world.

He said it had yet not become a movement in the organisational sense, but it was operating as an anti-imperialist force through out the world. He said war was the mother of all calamities.