October 09, 2008	Thursday	Shawwal 9, 1429

KARACHI, Oct 8: The land of the Makli necropolis will be resurveyed and its boundaries will be properly marked to keep encroachers at bay, an official told Dawn on Tuesday.

Archaeology Department Director-General Dr Fazaldad Kakar, who on Monday visited the Makli necropolis, one of the largest graveyards of the world, declared by Unesco as the World Heritage Site, said he was not satisfied with an earlier survey conducted by the revenue department and other officials.

Dr Kakar had come from Islamabad following a controversy over the Makli graveyard, where an adjoining landlord, Ghulam Qadir Palijo, who is a former member of the Sindh Assembly and also the father of Sindh Culture Minister Sassui Palijo, had dug up a trench and raised an embankment to stop rainwater coming from the Makli necropolis, situated on a hill, to his agricultural lands. The work had been stopped by the district administration on the directives of the archaeology department as it believed that the work was being carried out in the protected area.

The Palijos, however, maintained that they were carrying out work on their lands and had not damaged any protected monument.

The official said through the earlier survey, revenue department officials had demarked the boundaries of dehs — a deh is an area comprising many acres — and according to them the protected graveyard was in Deh Makli while Mr Palijo’s lands were in Deh Narija.

He said he had directed the revenue officials that he was not concerned with the demarcation of deh boundaries, but he wanted that the protected land of the necropolis that was 912 acres — regardless of the fact where or in which deh it was located — be demarcated. He said Makli was a world heritage site and all the relevant maps etc were available with the archaeology department and would be compared after the demarcation was done.

He said he had directed that under the new survey — to be conducted jointly by officials of the revenue department, settlement department and archaeology department — these 912 protected areas be demarcated and the buffer area be determined and then it would be checked if the work carried out by Mr Palijo was in the protected area or outside it. He said under the relevant law not only such work could not be carried out in the protected area, but such activities were also restricted in the buffer zone that surrounded the protected area. He said that this entire exercise of survey would most probably be completed in a couple of weeks.

He said that during his visit to the necropolis he also saws at least four encroachments as some people using concrete had built boundary walls and some other structures within the protected area around the graves of their family members, which was in violation of the law. He said the Makli Hill Monuments curator, Nawab Kazim Ali, had been directed to get these encroachments removed through the district administration within 10 days.

He said the presence of more than half a million tombs and graves spread over an area of six square miles made Makli one of the greatest Muslim necropolises and it had a history of over 400 years when Sammas (from 1340 AD to 1520 AD), the Arghuns (1520 to 1555), the Turkhans (1555 to 1592) and then the Mughals (1592 to 1739) ruled the region.

Hyderabad monuments

Responding to a question on continued forced burials by influential people in the protected monuments in Hyderabad, Dr Kakar said history and heritage were not given their due priority and as his department did not have its force, it could not stop people from violating the law and departmental officials wrote to the local police and district administration when they saw the violation, but the violators being influential people were rarely caught and punished. So the culprits in the absence of accountability became more daring, he added.

He said after the forced burial over a couple of years back in Hyderabad monuments, the department was assured by the Sindh government that such violations would not be allowed in the future, but a few months back another illegal burial had taken place in the Hyderabad monuments — popularly known as Miren ja Quba (the Mirs’ tombs).

He said he would once again take up the matter with the Sindh government and hopefully the culprits of the recent burials as well as the previous ones would be dealt with sternly according to the law. “Only stern punishments can deter the culprits,” he added.